Chapter Fourteen: 1981—1982

By the beginning of the 1981-82 year it was obvious that the trend of declining enrollment had been reversed.

What began as a modest recovery in undergraduate head count two years earlier had improved to a 24 percent increase over a four-year period. In fall 1981 each class showed substantial gains, with the largest increases tallied at the head of the “pipeline,” in freshmen and sophomores. Most encouraging of all, the FTE count, after six years of stagnation, had surpassed the previous high of 1974-75.

Fall enrollment stood at 4,536, not counting Extended Degree students. The student body was also the most diverse in UW-Green Bay history, drawn from 65 of the state's 72 counties and 30 other states, Maine to California. An international student community of 125 from 28 countries included 42 collegians from Malaysia. But the good news of enrollment brought its own down side: Two hundred students had to be turned away because of closed sections in courses they wanted or a lack of campus housing. In the first year of University ownership and operation, the University Village Apartments were filled to capacity.

The University's strategies were showing results. But athletic success, the opening of campus housing, and favorable press were only a few of the forces at work.

By 1981, with an alumni count over 4,700, the word was getting out about the availability at UW-Green Bay of career-oriented majors as well as liberal arts programs. About opportunities for research, internships, work and foreign travel as well as classroom study. About supportive faculty and staff. About graduates who were finding good jobs despite a depressed economy.

The completion of major highway projects, in the works for years, made the campus newly accessible to all of Northeastern Wisconsin. Weidner himself was master of ceremonies at the opening of the Tower Drive bridge in October 1980. Five years in the planning, the 120-foot-high span provided a time-saving link to the city's west side as well as to the Fox River valley via US Highway 41. A year later Associate Chancellor Harden cut the ribbon on the final stretch of Interstate 43 south. Now the campus was also connected by an express route to Milwaukee and communities along the Lake Michigan shore.

Within the University, meanwhile, staff members were charting new routes of accessibility to learning.

The Extended Degree program, with authority and funding to double its enrollment, recruited a record 195 students. The admissions office opened a new counseling service specifically for adults who were not recent high school graduates. When the outreach staff organized a “first step seminar,” 65 prospective students showed up to share their hopes and anxieties about starting college with other adults already on the way to a degree. Seminar participants ranged in age from the early 20s to over 60.

Students from eight public high schools came to the campus to match wits in the first University-sponsored academic competition. Questions in the categories of mathematics, science, social studies and language arts were fashioned by UW-Green Bay faculty members, who also served as judges. The winning teams carried home trophies provided by the Founders Association. Growth was recorded, too, at the Elderhostel end of the age spectrum. The popular summer program for the 60-plus crowd expanded to two one-week sessions offering, among other courses, studies labeled Sex and Society and Science and Controversy.

Equally energetic efforts moved teaching and learning off the campus and into the community.

In an outreach “learn and shop” program, faculty members met students in classrooms at the Port Plaza Mall downtown. Three-credit, freshman-level courses—like Introduction to Sociology, Women and the Law, and You and Your Food—were staples of the curriculum. The University also expanded its geographical reach to UW centers in the region. Upper-level courses in marketing and labor legislation opened for evening enrollment in Manitowoc. Marinette-area teachers could sign up for an education course worth two graduate credits from UW-Green Bay or from the co-sponsoring institution, Northern Michigan University. Classes were held at the UW Center in Marinette. While classroom-based students sampled university fare “live,” stay-at-homes could learn about masters and masterpieces of music in 30 lessons taped for radio broadcast by Professor Arthur Cohrs.

Sometimes the lecture hall was a restaurant and the course a one-hour talk on alternative energy, Middle East politics, or climate change, as faculty members shared information and insights at luncheon meetings of service clubs. Churches, public schools, nursing homes, and corporate conference rooms provided other settings for faculty participants in the outreach speakers bureau. Presentations were as varied as groups requesting them: from Richard Jansen's human relations session for bank trainees to Kumar Kangayappan's introduction to India, prepared for sixth graders at Bayview Middle School. Before the academic year ended, volunteers from the University community would fill 90 speaking engagements before members of 60 different organizations.