University Committee Meeting Minutes 2025-11-24

Minutes for November 24, 2025

UC members present: Bernard-Donals, Chui, de Leon, Jones, Kendall, Mathieu

Others present: Michelle Felber, Lesley Fisher, John Horn, Becky Jacobs, Genevieve Lambert, Julie Scharm

Chair Jones called the meeting to order at 1:00 pm.

Rob Cramer, Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration, indicated that it is important there is continuing progress on improving Workday. This includes reporting and also expense report approvals. There are now 3,000 waiting approval with an average approval time of 12 calendar days. Relatedly the open enrollment process, which closed at the end of October, went well except that it was difficult for people to understand when things were completed.

The Budget Committee will be looking at the shadow data with Natalie Feggestad, the Director of the Madison Budget Office soon.

LinkUW had a soft launch update on November 3 and have completed 84% of 331 service request tickets.

Eric Hoyt, chair of the Information Technology Committee, presented the committee’s annual report. The most interesting meetings the committee held were about student needs (they want more plugs) and the libraries, which had a discussion on digital accessibility standards and AI.

John Zumbrunnen, Interim Provost, presented two annual reports for the Campus Planning Committee and University Academic Planning Council (UAPC). The work of the UAPC continues as usual. In regards to planning, the capital planning process has moved up so decisions are made in December rather than April. The committee will also be engaged in the 10 year campus strategic planning process. Recently, the Campus Planning Committee did the Native Nations Cultural Landscape tour.

Interim Provost Zumbrunnen reported that there are ways to inject the idea of the future school as a hub for campus as the school is being built. This would start with the PVL for the dean and also include joint hires and joint appointments.

For Act 15, the Board of Regents passed both policies for general education requirements and for instructional workload. The general education policy will be presented to the Joint Committee on Employment Relations (JCOER) and the instructional workload policy needs to be approved by JCOER by the end of January. Now that Regent policies have been approved there will be work on system policies and a UW-Madison campus policy for general education requirements. Work on workload policies will commence once JCOER has approved the policy. There are remaining questions regarding how dual enrollment or AP course credits will count as general education credits and how credits taken at other UW schools while students are enrolled at UW-Madison as degree seeking students.

Bil Karpus, Dean of the Graduate School, indicated a guidance document regarding planning for Fall 2026 enrollment has been distributed to all graduate programs. It advises programs to make sure they have the financial ability to support incoming students and asks programs to plan even further ahead. He predicts that this will be a cautious admissions cycle.

He also indicated that there have been discussions regarding the Graduate School’s breadth requirement. There are about 80 graduate programs that follow this requirement with another 30 programs who have been exempted. GFEC was strongly in favor of keeping the requirement as was the University Committee.

Chui motioned, and it was seconded and approved, to convene in closed session pursuant to Wis. Stats. 19.85(1)(c) and (f) to discuss waivers at 2:50 pm. One dual-role request was approved.

Bernard-Donals motioned, and it was seconded and approved, to reconvene in open session at 3:19 pm.

The minutes from the November 17, 2025, meeting were approved with one correction.

Nancy Kendall provided an update on the General Education ad hoc committee. They looked at 3 options: two options that kept 10 required courses and another that required 12 classes. The committee was in favor of 10 required courses and considering whether to add a debate/deliberation OR world language requirements in communications.

The University Committee discussed the UW System draft policy on general education requirements with Taylor Odle, who is serving as the faculty representative to UW System. The University Committee had two main concerns: the requirement of a lab science and the requirement that courses only fall into one bucket as opposed to the current system where some courses has been identified as fulfilling more than one area of general education requirements. Secretary Daniels and Professor Odle will write an informal response to the draft.

Jones adjourned the meeting at 4:04 pm.

Minutes submitted by Heather Daniels, secretary of the faculty.