Frederica Freyberg:

Members of the community are also speaking out on the decision to close UW-Platteville Richland to in-person classes including the chair of the Education Committee on the Richland County Board of Supervisors, Linda Gentes. She’s a long-time administrator and lecturer on the campus. She joins us now. Thanks very much for being here.

Linda Gentes:

Thank you very much for inviting me.

Frederica Freyberg:

When you learned that UW-Richland will close to in-person classes after the spring semester, what was your reaction?

Linda Gentes:

Well, I was surprised since they told us a couple weeks ahead that everything was going to go as normal and we had been asking for a lot of changes, and there was no indication that they were planning to not have in-person classes at the campus. And then about ten minutes before the announcement came out, a call came to the chair of our county board and he called me immediately and I guess we were both just — found it unbelievable at that moment.

Frederica Freyberg:

Because how important is the college to the community there?

Linda Gentes:

Well, this campus is extremely important to the campus. It — as part of the colleges, we were collectively the third largest — the UW Colleges, we were the third largest in the system and our mission was affordability and accessibility. And of particular importance at Richland is we had the lowest cost per student index of any campus in there. Now that changed over the years, but our community has honored the contract for many years. We have 134 acres. We have seven buildings. We have — the campus is probably worth at least $38 million. The financial impact back to our county, we had two impact studies and one in 2018 and — 2019 and 1 in 2005-2006. It may not be big numbers for some of the people in different areas, it would be around $7 million and $6 million back into our county. For every dollar that our county puts into the campus we receive $205 back. Now, in addition, just recently I just quickly made a list of all the professionals in town who had started their education here and came up with over 200 names without even trying to ask anybody. And our teachers, our lawyers, we have physicians, attorneys, nurses, they’ve all been able to start their education here in the community and then go on and then be able to come back and it was affordable for them to be able to do that. So we feel this is a great loss. It is our future; we’re losing our future for our community and our future for our students.

Frederica Freyberg:

Some of those students spoke to the straight line that they saw from loss of staff to loss of enrollment. What happened to UW-Richland once the system started its cost-saving measures and then restructuring to make it a satellite of Platteville?

Linda Gentes:

Okay. Many things happened here. A brief explanation — I’ll give you a brief explanation of that. Seven years ago, we had a million dollars in revenue for the campus. We had 500 students. We had 50 international students here. We were a thriving, inclusive educational environment. When regionalization and then when UW-Platteville happened, we lost 55% of our financial support from the UW system and then through Platteville, we lost the dean’s position, a recruiter, 11 out of 18 faculty members, student services staff, an international coordinator and a continuing education director. And in addition, there was no marketing plan nor any strategic plan and youth options and academic alliance programs were ended. The campus was actually told it was no longer a separate entity and that we were — we didn’t have our own campus culture. We tried to explain to them how it worked in that way with our community. And our active governance was lost and recruiting was stopped even though our foundation offered to hire a recruiter. And we had students wishing to apply from around the state and all our international students wishing to apply and they were deflected from applying at the admissions office at UW-Platteville. So there was no autonomy at Richland and that’s really what has caused the demise of our wonderful campus.

Frederica Freyberg:

I’m sorry to hear that from you, someone who is so involved as a supervisor on your county board there in Richland County. We know that the UW system president has asked the Platteville chancellor to come up with a plan as to a way forward without in-person classes there by mid-January. But Linda Gentes, we need to leave it there. Thank you very much and good luck.

Linda Gentes:

Thank you very much.