0 UW-Madison Students Weigh in on Chancellor Candidates

Two letters from students are circulating on campus this morning. Here they are.

0 Kim Wilcox: Candidate for UW-Madison Chancellor

PREFACE:

There are four candidates for UW-Madison Chancellor. This week I will profile each of them, contributing information gleaned from "off list" discussions and sleuthing. As I noted in my last couple of blogs, unfortunately that sort of due diligence was not undertaken by the search firm.

I'm doing this in the spirit of sifting and winnowing, with an eye towards helping us identify the candidate who best suits UW-Madison with its many strong traditions-- foremost among them our tradition of shared governance. I hope you will join me in that spirit, refraining from engaging in name-calling or sheer speculation, while sharing any useful information you may have, using the comments function on this blog.

Until December 2012, Kim Wilcox was the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Michigan State University, where he also served as a professor in the Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders, a member of the MSU Foundation board of directors, and on the board of directors of the Spectrum Health – MSU Alliance Corporation. 

Earlier in his career, Wilcox was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and vice provost for general education coordination at the University of Kansas. He was born in Michigan, and received his bachelor’s degree in audiology and speech sciences from Michigan State University, and his master’s and doctorate from Purdue University, both in speech and hearing science.

This is not Wilcox's first attempt at a chancellor position. Last year, he was up for the position at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and according to some sources earlier he was considered for a similar job in Minnesota, in a search he pulled out from. It seems he's been looking to leave his current job for awhile.

While also a public university, Michigan State is a very different academic environment from UW-Madison, most critically with regard to its top-down style of governing. The president and provost hold a great deal of power, and make nearly all campus decisions with the deans--and without consultation with the faculty. This sort of background is not an asset when it comes to preparing for the chancellorship of UW-Madison. 

Some colleagues find Wilcox to be the ultimate technocrat, citing his love of metrics and accountability, and noting that under his leadership faculty governance is an "empty enterprise." Others who are more fond of him seem to generally be students and faculty who've known no other approach to decision-making, and are pretty happy to be "allowed a voice" in decisions.

One of the key issues on which people speak most vehemently about Wilcox is in regards to his efforts to restructure academic departments. Here is a video of Wilcox -- around the 6 minute mark, he announces his suggestion for consolidation of some departments within a college, “reducing the number from 13 to 6.”  These efforts mainly focused on the liberal arts, the Classics in particular-- which he apparently proposed eliminating--but I'm also told he would have eliminated Geology if a big donor hasn't intervened.  Commentary on discussion boards tend to center on these issues-- for example see this message board and this reaction to the Classics decision.

When it comes to student enrollment, it has been said that “under Wilcox's direction, MSU has grown its enrollment to more than 49,000 students while raising the academic credentials of the entering class, increasing the percentage of students from underrepresented groups, decreasing the average time to degree, increasing the graduation rate for undergraduates and decreasing the percentage of students graduating with any accumulated debt” However, while an examination of MSU's data digest (h/t to that helpful grad student, you know who are you!) supports most of these claims, it's also worth noting that during Wilcox's tenure, the racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates widened by 40%. The reliance on adjuncts at the university also increased, as did the concentration of racial/ethnic minorities in that group of faculty. Overall, I find little evidence that Wilcox has systematically worked to address issues of achievement gaps at MSU, a major issue on that campus and ours.

To conclude: while I have little doubt that the search and screen committee found much value in Wilcox's portfolio of materials, I have serious concerns about his ability to adapt and thrive in our campus governance system. I am also quite unsure that he will treat the issues of diversity that we face on this campus with the seriousness of purpose that they deserve. For this reason, at this point he is not my choice for chancellor.

Postscript: Wilcox was up for the position of chancellor at the University of Wyoming and did not get it.

Postscript:

Just received this email about Wilcox from MSU colleagues-- seems important enough to share:

There are quite a few serious "negatives" here that anyone who might be in a position to have influence should know about. One point, for example, is the statement Wilcox made to the NYT Education Life section that appeared on Dec. 29, 2009: "Kim Wilcox, the provost and vice president for academic affairs at Michigan State, notes that universities, his included, used to offer majors in elocution and animal husbandry. In a major re-examination of its curriculum, Michigan State has added a dozen or so new programs, including degrees in global studies and, in response to a growing industry in the state, film studies. At the same time, it is abandoning underperformers like classical studies: in the last four years, only 13 students have declared it their major." As if his condescension weren't bad enough, the statement he made here was simply false. We graduated five to six majors per year with an average of 25-26 majors on the books each of the four years he cites. This, with three regular faculty members. The stated reason for cutting programs, especially in our case, was the budget, but, again, the numbers simply weren't there. There were also serious violations of governance and procedures when Classics was eliminated.

         

0 Due Diligence: When it Comes to Madison's Next Chancellor Now Is the Time

There's hardly ever been a more difficult and auspicious time to lead a public flagship university. Yet at the same time, I believe it's among the greatest opportunities, and anyone would be beyond lucky to have the job.

The last chancellor of UW-Madison nearly undid our relationship with our state. In my opinion, then and now, she was nothing short of disastrous.  And, we have learned since her departure that her employment could have been avoided if only the search had involved a genuine due diligence process before she was brought in for interviews. For example, had due diligence occurred, we would have known-- before she came to woo the campus with her charisma-- that as long as Biddy's around, no one needs to have good ideas, for she has them all. In a setting like ours, where shared governance prevails, and we know that good ideas come from all sorts of places, she clearly wouldn't have fit.

Due diligence is a must when hiring any leader. And it's incredibly important that it happen before people come for in-person interviews on campuses and in communities-- since at that point there's no going back. In fact, in processes like ours, the naming of candidates for interviews is really the end of the "search and screen" process- the faculty, staff, and students have done their jobs.  In this case, the search and screen was asked to proffer 5 candidates-- and it offered 4.  Clearly, its members have been working hard. But now their jobs are essentially done, and the decision is up to UW System President Kevin Reilly and a team of Regents: Charles Pruitt, Regina Millner, Brent Smith, David Walsh, and Student Regent Katherine Pointer.

Since I was curious, I asked Search Chair David McDonald about the process for vetting candidates, and learned that until this point the four candidates have only been vetted using print and online sources, and their "on-list" references (e.g. the people they said to call).  Apparently, no additional investigation into their backgrounds has occurred. This is very disappointing.  We just saw the effects of similar mistakes with the search for a new superintendent of Madison public schools-- and here we are again.

So given this state of affairs, I urge people across Wisconsin, and our alumni, to go out and help us learn all we can about the candidates order to help ensure we get a chancellor that will lead this great institution forward in ways that respect our history, our context, our mission, and all of the families of Wisconsin.

Of course, I've been doing my homework as well, and in the coming days I will begin to blog about my assessments of each candidate. I am doing this publicly, and independently, as a concerned citizen and long-time employee of this university. My opinions are just that-- mine.  I will not pretend that sharing them matters at all, especially to the Regents. But this time around, I think it's best that all cards are on the table-- even if we don't get the chancellor we want, we need to know whom we're really dealing with.

The comment box is open, and my email is srab@education.wisc.edu .  Tell us, what do you know about Michael Schill of the University of Chicago, Kim Wilcox of Michigan State University, Nick Jones of Johns Hopkins, and Rebecca Blank of Commerce?