Minutes for October 28, 2019

Approved as amended November 4, 2019

UC members present: Campagnola, Halverson, Sandgren, Ventura, Warfield (chair), Wolf

Also present: Bill Tishler, Jack O’Meara, Michelle Felber, Jake Smith, Heather Daniels, Amol came a little later, Greg Bump a little later, Matt Mayrl and those mentioned below:

Chair Warfield called the meeting to order at 1:10. There were several announcements and PROFS O’Meara gave a legislative update. The minutes for October 21, 2019 were approved as corrected.

Athletic Board chair Pete Miller, fresh from attending the Big 10 Conference, gave an update on college sports news which revolved around the California bill—and similar ones in other states--that will allow college athletes to be compensated for their image and likeness. Support for it is solid, but there are many details to work out, legal and otherwise, including the Big 10 participants’ desire to have federal uniformity on the rules, not develop them piecemeal. Miller’s presentation at the conference was on youth sports research and he shared his eye-opening handout; many points underline how socio-economic status can affect sports participation even at a very young age. He encouraged the UC to attend his topical seminars at Union South; see sportandthegrowinggood.com.

Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, Steve Ackerman, spoke about the closing of Biotron, which is a controlled environment for doing research on plants and mice. It’s aging and use is declining. The URC will review the end timeline (12-18 months), and others are at work reassigning the 8 staff members and finding an alternate space to do research on plants and animals. There was ample discussion.

Provost Karl Scholz talked about the news of the day: the newspaper story about a 2016 student suicide; the development of online degrees; a project to improve support for international students and faculty (internationalresources.wisc.edu/https://internationalresources.wisc.edu/); and that exams were unfortunately scheduled on Yom Kippur. Vice Provost Steve Cramer is leading a “gap year committee” for students who’ve accepted an offer here but don’t want to start right away for whatever reason, like travel, service, etc. Integrating Extension with UW is aided by periodic partner meetings to encourage collaboration on specific topics like water, child and human development, agriculture. Lively discussions ensued on all these topics.

Chancellor Rebecca Blank talked about System President Cross’ retirement; a promising discussion at an AAU meeting about business, academia, and improved federal research funding. The annual educational outcomes were delivered last month with many statistics on graduation rate. There was ample discussion on these statistics and how to improve the outcomes. The Student Inclusion Coalition (SIC) protest was well organized and behaved; they had a set of demands that are still being reviewed. The Hamel music center officially opened; the All Ways Forward campaign is doing very well.

Sandgren moved to go into closed session which was seconded at 2:57. The UC approved a clock extension, a dual role waiver, and reviewed candidates for several search and screen committees.

The committee reconvened in open session at 3:33 when Warfield adjourned the meeting.