The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Campus Center for Equity and Diversity building is on the market to be sold as of late Jan. following budget issues at UW-Oshkosh and in the UW System, as well as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, cracking down on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
The Center for Student Success and Belonging staff are set to move to the Reeve Memorial Union, which is closer to central campus and would bring more students in based on location, according to UW-Oshkosh Chief of Staff Alex Hummel.
Originally constructed in 1968 as the Newman Center by the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay, the UW-Oshkosh Foundation purchased the building in 2004, and the university purchased it two years later. Most recently, the building housed the Campus Center for Equity and Diversity.
The move accompanies UW-Oshkosh’s recent financial restructuring.
“There's been a pretty significant budget urgency for the last few years, so we have been downsizing our footprint and trying to focus on more properties closer to the river, kind of the central area of campus,” UW-Oshkosh public administration professor Michael Ford told The Daily Cardinal.
The rebrand of the program also reflects the 2023 Wisconsin Legislature’s decision to restructure DEI in the UW System, which encouraged universities to cut back on DEI positions. However, according to Ford, the Center for Student Success and Belonging is more than just a rebranding.
The UW System Board of Regents also made a deal with the Legislature in which UW-Madison agreed to restructure and freeze hiring on DEI positions in exchange for money for employee pay raises and a new engineering building in December 2023.
The UW System has seen declining enrollment over the past few years, and, in combination with the undergraduate tuition freeze in effect since 2013, UW-Oshkosh has had to make strategic financial decisions. This has coincided with a rise in admissions selectivity, which can often crowd out low-income students without access to resources that make them appealing to admissions officers.
“I do think we're just in a difficult transition period where we have a university infrastructure that's built to serve a model that might have worked 20 or 30 years ago but doesn't seem to be the direction we're going,” Ford added.
The Board of Regents is focusing new efforts with the awareness that the UW System is a major proponent of Wisconsin’s economy. They created several new majors at multiple universities, including an AI major at UW-Eau Claire and a dual-university program between UW-Lacrosse and UW-Platteville which will allow students to receive degrees in physics and engineering.
These decisions are in effort to respond to Wisconsin’s workforce needs and to give UW System students a competitive advantage.
Several regents referenced the UW System’s “current [financial] situation” at a meeting Feb. 6 in regard to making sure the Education Committee is working to limit costs in order to preserve the “financial viability” of the UW System.
The university’s financial reorganization also allowed space for the Center for Student Success and Belonging to move into its new location in the Union, according to Byron Adams, executive director of the Center for Student Success and Belonging and university diversity officer.
“The space inside the Student Union opened up based on some reorganization that we've done more broadly across the university, and we saw that as an opportunity to literally and figuratively centralize these services,” Adams said.
The old building, located at 717 West Irving Ave., is far from the university’s campus center. The move to the Union was designed to bring more students into the Center for Student Success and Belonging, Hummel said.
“[The old location] was not a part of student traffic patterns, and just generally speaking, had a sense and feeling that it was a little bit off to the side,” Hummel said. “That made it harder for our teams and our staff to engage with the students that they were serving to ensure their success.”
As a part of the student union, Adams hopes the new location will bring more students in.
“It's really location, location, location,” Adams said. “Having space in that facility specifically allows us to just do a wide variety of activities and events and outreach efforts that we weren't able to do prior to being in the Student Union.”
The property listing states that UW-Oshkosh is focusing future investments more toward the river, at the center of campus, and the building “does not meet the needs of the university.”
The Center’s new location has already seen an increase in student traffic, Hummel said, and with it “a better opportunity to do outreach efforts for our students.”
The sale of the building coinciding with recent federal decisions surrounding DEI is purely coincidental, Hummel and Adams said.
“Prior to some of the things that are happening nationally, we were already having these conversations about how we can really put at the center our services around populations that we know are maybe at risk or underserved, and at the same time, we serve the entire campus community,” Adams said.
The relocation process for the Center for Student Success and Belonging began in 2023, when the university started restructuring its student services division based on the legislative decision.
“[The changes] are focused on making sure that UW-Oshkosh is being inclusive to demographic and viewpoint diversity and making sure that we have programming that targets that — as opposed to initiatives that are specifically called and branded DEI,” Ford said.
Hummel reassured that other than the relocation of the physical space, staffing and student programming have not been disturbed.
“I just think we have a lot of work to do to make sure that we understand exactly what we're trying to accomplish, which, for me, is making sure that our universities are a place where everybody feels comfortable learning and we're creating critical thinkers,” Ford said.
Ella Gorodetzky is the news manager of The Daily Cardinal.
