SPARC’s Open Forum on Point Forward

Last Friday the Stevens Point Academic Representation Council (SPARC) held a public forum to discuss the Point Forward proposal, which seeks to address the university’s budget crisis through disputed means.

The forum hosted four speakers. Each speaker attended to the Program and/or Unit Discontinuance Consultative Committee (PUDCC) that was created in late Spring 2018, as well as the newly-created Academic and Budget Advisory Work Group (ABAWG). These speakers were professor Mark Tolstedt, SGA President Brailey Kerber, and committee co-chairs Jacob Prater and Mick Veum. The forum was mediated by CPS Chair Kym Buchanan.

The council held this forum from 4:30 to 6 p.m. in room 230 of the CPS.  The room’s seats had been filled to near-capacity by students and faculty from every department.

The first 45 minutes of the forum featured a PowerPoint presentation by Tolstedt, and the speakers’ responses to a series of prompt-questions from SPARC.

Tolstedt’s presentation briefly outlined the events surrounding Point Forward’s release.

On February 28 this year, UW-Stevens Point received an “unsatisfactory” rating in the UW-System audit.  On March 5, Chancellor Bernie Patterson publicly emailed the UWSP campus a document titled Point Forward to all students, which “discusses Academic Affairs’ path forward for addressing our fiscal challenges while advancing our mission and purpose.”

This discussion entailed the removal of 13 majors, the expansion of six minors to majors, the creation of five new majors and the creation of one new minor.

“We had wished there was more governance consultation,” said Kerber at the forum, “student government is a part of governance, and it often gets overlooked.”

Students and faculty contributed to a protest and sit-in on March 21, addressing Point Forward’s cuts to be targeted particularly towards the humanities.

The proposal also faced criticism for the cut’s imposition on academic tenure. “The only other way to eliminate tenure faculty . . . is to declare a financial emergency,” said Veum at the forum.

The PUDCC held its first public meeting May 18 and had since been responsible with finding an alternative to Point Forward over the course of the summer.  The deadline for these propositions was August 2018.

The committee’s solutions focused on the restructuring and consolidation of departments, cuts to administration, the clustering of interdisciplinary studies with existing programs, and an emphasis on furthering administration’s transparency and communication.

The committee has run into problems, though.  It lacked the financial information used in the justification of Point Forward, but still needed to find a proper approach to UWSP’s budget crisis.

“What’s driving this is budget,” said Veum at the forum, “except there’s no target for the number of majors UWSP should offer.”

The committee had little assistance from administration over the summer. “The Chancellor never came to our meetings,” said Veum.  Greg Summers, University Provost and Vice Chancellor had only attended one PUDCC meeting.

“I felt like, over the summer, they [the administration] didn’t work with the PUDCC as much as I envisioned,” said Andy Felt, SPARC President in an interview.

Another problem of the committee’s: the forum mentioned there is no available evidence that removing the 13 majors in Point Forward will save enough money – estimating to only save $1-2 million.  UWSP will inherit an additional $3.1 million deficit from its merging with UW-Marathon County and UW-Marshfield/Wood County. UWSP also projects enrollment to continue to decline as years progress.

“We came up with some ideas to pass to the Provost and the Chancellor,” said Prater in an interview, “but the reality of the budget cut, that needs to be made, is that most of it is to Academic Affairs and it may be tied to curriculum. As a result, myself, my co-chair Mick Veum, the whole committee, thought that a more faculty-heavy committee should make the recommendations to the Provost about making the cuts because they would curricularly related.”

This led to the committee’s creation of another committee: the Academic and Budget Advisory Work Group.  This group is tasked with finding a curricular alternative to Point Forward, but will feature an active collaboration between faculty, Patterson and Summers.  The group’s deadline is October 12.

The second half of the forum featured a public Q&A, and requested participants to bring ideas for alternatives to Point Forward.

Some ideas that attending faculty brought forward were the beginning of a hiring freeze for faculty and the implementation of exit-interviews for dropout students.  A hiring freeze would insure no more tenured faculty than necessary would be fired, and exit-interviews would assist in student retention.

“I wonder about the students that are already transferred out,” said Felt, “Their voices are gone.”

When asked what students can best do to assist in this process, Felt said “Keep communicating with Brailey and Dyllan.  They’re good communicators: they show up to meetings and they speak up.”

SPARC will be hosting a public picnic this Friday September 14.

 

SGA President Brailey Kerber can be contacted via email at SGA.president@uwsp.edu

SGA Vice-President Dyllan Griepentrog can be contacted at SGA.vice.president@uwsp.edu

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