On May 4, Michael R. Lovell was confirmed as the new chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. One of the things he is doing in that position is talking up the extensive plans being implemented for expanding the facilities and offerings on Wisconsin’s second largest public university campus. He discussed these plans with an audience of about 90 gathered at the Rubenstein Pavilion of the Jewish Home and Care Center for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Economic Forum on June 14.
When some members of the local Jewish community think about UWM, however, they recall that the campus has been a location of some anti-Israel-pro-Palestinian activities, one of which resulted in a violent incident on April 29, 2010. (See the June 2010 Chronicle.)
Right after his talk to the Economic Forum, Lovell had a five-minute conversation about some of those issues with Chronicle editor Leon Cohen. Edited excerpts of that conversation follow:
In all the projects and changes that you’re making on the campus, are you going to be doing any changes to make sure that students feel safe on campus, particularly Jewish students?
We’re just getting done with the master plan for campus. In two weeks we’re going to start the strategic plan for the campus. There are three pillars to the strategic plan. One is campus growth, the other is access, which I talked about today.
What I didn’t talk about was the third component, [which addresses] the campus climate. And so, we’re in the process of hiring a chief diversity officer, we’re actually negotiating that position right now with someone. All the studies we’ve done have show that climate is an issue on the campus, in terms of people feeling discriminated against, people not feeling accepted. So it’s something we have to address. And so what I’m going to do through our strategic plan is set metrics [ways of measuring] for attainment. Because I think before, we’ve talked about doing things, but I’m not sure we’ve actually followed through, followed up [or] have been accountable for the things we’ve talked about.
We want UWM to be a campus where everyone feels accepted no matter what their background. To feel it’s a great place to work, a great place to go to school, and to give them an infrastructure of opportunities to do things, where that they feel comfortable with.
Apart from that overall, anything in particular vis a vis the Jewish community?
When I was interim chancellor, and actually when I was chancellor, I held about 20 brown bag lunches on our campus. One of them was at the Hillel Milwaukee…
I always say I can’t solve a problem that I don’t know about. So it’s important for me to be out, meeting with students from different groups, with people from the Hillel, to find out what their challenges are, what their worries are, and things I can do to help address to make sure that they’re getting the experience we all want them to have on the campus.
What about the bringing of controversial speakers to campus — and I don’t even mean necessarily just about the Middle East — but just in general?
I think one of the challenges we have is [that] we have student organizations that represent the diversity of our campus, and each student organization is allowed to bring one major and one minor speaker in per year… And so we can’t have [very] much oversight over whom they’ll bring on campus. Obviously we can give them guidance over who may or may not be a good idea, but ultimately [it] is the students’ decision …
We will take care of the security aspects. That’s something the campus will provide.
Have you heard about any possible efforts that are disturbing the Jewish community on other campuses, such as [the Israel-attacking] Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement? I have covered some pro-Palestinian events at UWM. There’s a supposed movement to try to change the name of the university library from [Milwaukee-raised Israeli prime minister] Golda Meir…
I will say that’s more of small, radical group on the campus. It’s just a couple of students. I hear the same things, but I don’t really see that that group has any traction. As a matter of fact, I hear that several people in that organization are not even students on the campus. They’re people that are in the community.
Those are the types of things that we won’t accept on our campus. It is unacceptable. We want to create a climate on our campus where that is just not tolerated for any reason.
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