Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 29. Sunrise is 7:05 AM and sunset 4:22 PM for 9h 16m 28s of daytime. The moon is in its first quarter with 50.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1941, the SS-Einsatzgruppen round up 11,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto and kill them in the Rumbula massacre.
The UW System has announced the five candidates to be UW-Whitewater’s next chancellor. See UW-Whitewater chancellor finalists named (UW System announcement), Five finalists announced for UW-Whitewater chancellor position (Fort Atkinson Online), and the explanatorily-titled After years of upheaval, UW-Whitewater announces 5 chancellor finalists (Wisconsin State Journal).
There are two directions from which diligent review of expectations and conditions are required. The first is the obvious perspective of the candidates: they owe it to themselves to understand the environment into which they would be stepping. Interview committees may paint a brighter picture than the real view once one is here for a bit. There’s less bright royal purple in Whitewater than on the UW-Whitewater homepage.
There’s a second direction from which diligence is required. This community, all 14,889 within it, should think about what the campus needs. Among that large number of residents, the number of bankers, landlords, and public relations men is small. UW-Whitewater, if the school is to prosper academically, must be more than a landlord’s income stream. The campus is thousands, the city is thousands, the market between them is thousands, and so the choice must involve and benefit thousands.
A candidate whose greatest ambition is to become chancellor, and will go along and get along with a few to secure that position, is unworthy of the role.
World’s largest active volcano erupts in Hawaii:
Short, to the point, and 100% true.
No idea what comes next but we have probably been more misdirected than any System campus. And yes, a few people who see the campus as an income stream first, second, and third. For us, that has meant drives for enrollment first, second, and third. No understanding of how to maintain good programs beyond the small number of attention-getting ones to push up numbers fast.
Many of us are concerned that we won’t get a better direction.