Across Wisconsin on the Civic Media Radio Network.
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I'm Todd Albaugh, along with Aaron Zommers, our producer and engineer.
It is Thursday, the 3rd of April, 2025.
It is a great day to be a Wisconsinite and a great day to be a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee panther.
That is where you find us today, live on location here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
It's a beautiful campus.
We are sitting here, one of their beautiful buildings, going to spend the entire day bringing you this special
our ongoing series, What Makes Wisconsin Great Tour?
And Mr. Zommerers, I'm sorry you're back home with the World Headquarters at downtown Madison because I'm telling you Milwaukee is popping and lots going on here at the campus.
And I know I had toured the UW-Milwaukee campus before.
Really?
And, you know, it was my second choice for college.
I didn't end up going there.
But I also...
you know, because of the pandemic didn't end up finishing a degree.
So maybe I'll go back.
Very possible.
I see what you're talking about.
Returning students a little bit.
Yeah, how about that?
Well, I appreciate all your work back at the home station in Madison there.
But again, for those watching on the stream on Facebook and YouTube and Twitter, you can see the beautiful venue here, the beautiful sights behind us in the heart of the UW-Walkie campus here.
And we are joined at the desk to start off the show.
Lots of people we're going to get to today are going to be focusing on the profession of the health profession.
and Sciences Building, a big new project here talking about the state budget.
We're going to have the dean of that college here going to talk to a nursing student as well.
And in hour number two, not to downgrade my first guess, but in hour number two.
It is old home week here on the show.
My friend from high school, Carrie Anderson Pink, who knows all my secrets and she will not tell them today on the show, but she works here at the marketing and communication part of this university.
And yes, you've heard me talk about him several times on this program, my old broadcasting partner, Kevin O'Connor.
The old 91 FM sports team from WSUP in Platteville is going to be reunited in hour two.
Kevin is going to be a long talk, a little broadcasting, but also what he does here at the University of Milwaukee as well.
And then we're going to hear from yes.
pounce the panther, the mascot.
We cannot show you his face, but you will hear his voice.
What's it like to be pounced the panther here at Milwaukee?
And then we'll round out the show with some of the great students from the theater and music program here at this fine university.
But we bring on our first guest.
He is the chancellor here at UW Milwaukee, the second longest serving chancellor at this fine university.
Mark Monee, chancellor.
Thank you very much for allowing us to do this show here.
Todd, thank you.
It's a real honor to be here.
I'm just so, so thrilled with the lineup of guests that you've got today.
You're getting the worst first, you know, get me out of the way and then we bring on the stars.
So as you've mentioned, we've got some great talent that's coming and thank you so much for helping showcase what really does make Wisconsin great.
Yeah, I appreciate it and a big shout out and all sincerity to Carrie because she put this lineup together for us today and helped us do it and could not have done it without her.
Let's talk a little bit about your journey
first of all, second longest serving chancellor here at UW Milwaukee.
Your term is coming to an end.
You're going to have a new role, kind of getting back into the classroom a little bit.
And there's a new chancellor just announced.
We could talk about that later.
But I want to really focus on you because these 11 years of Aaron Zamer has mentioned it at the top of the show.
You've been here through the pandemic.
You've been here and done, in fact, one of your brand new buildings is in our background right now, the chemistry building.
What has that journey been like for you and what changes have you seen during your tenure at UW Milwaukee as Chancellor?
Well, it's been a real privilege to be Chancellor and you may not know that I was here 25 years before that as faculty member and a number of different administrative roles.
So I've really seen this campus grow, really seen it change significantly.
But to your question, the last 11 years have been quite an interesting ride.
And that's true of all in higher education today.
And I would characterize this as
many, many wonderful accomplishments.
We've become a research one university.
We've seen our standing in online programs, our College of Nursing, the development of a school of freshwater science, you know, the premier and only architecture program in the state, many, many only at UWM, the types of things that happen with military veterans at a scale larger than any other activity for military veterans and their families in a six state region.
So lots and lots of great things.
against some headwinds.
In those headwinds, you know, go back to 2015.
I was interim chancellor in 2014.
In January of 2015, the headlines across the top of the fold in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Milwaukee Bucks get 250 million.
Bottom of the fold, the big, equally big headline, the UW system budget.
cut 300 million, ultimately that became 250.
So welcome to the new job.
I'd been appointed officially the month before, so this is what we go into.
And there were a lot of challenges, the removal of tenure from state statute.
That was something that a lot of faculty understandably decried, but we are now like all other states, but it didn't feel that way at the time.
And of course,
You know, there was, you know, the challenges of pandemic that affected campuses across the world and continuing ongoing budget types of issues and demography, a lot of things like that that have been happening.
But against that.
You talked about, you know, the buildings that we're sitting today in the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center.
What a wonderful public-private partnership.
The key donors, the Lubar family, came forward and said, we'll support a program with an endowment that'll be a start.
And we said we would at least double that money we have, but they didn't want it.
support the building itself.
They said we'll support students and programs.
And so we were able to get the state, thank you, State of Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin System, to help support the building.
And today this is just a hub of activities.
You walk through, you see not only students but members of the community.
And you know, what is the future?
We're creating the future and that's what this campus does so well.
We graduate.
on average 5,300 students per year.
And that's been happening over 11 years.
You have not seen that taper despite some of the challenges, despite some of the issues.
So lots of wonderful things against a backdrop of challenges in higher education and every organization, every business, whether it's healthcare, religion.
Name name the business libraries.
It's tough and we just have our own particular flavor But we go forward we are panthers with grit and and I love that I recently at the award ceremony for our alumni was surprised with an honorary Panther degree, so I'm I'm thrilled that I'm a panther too.
I think that's fantastic and Took a tour Kerry gave me a tour last night of the campus.
I've been on campus before but not in some of the buildings certainly not your newer newer buildings It's a vibrant University.
It's it's
cool and that it's fairly compact.
It's not super spread out.
And talk to us a little bit about the significance of being only the second level one university for research.
other than u of u madison talk about the significance of that your two missions of being uh... uh... a number of division one where we want to call it level one research university and then also this mission of accessibility to the milwaukee greater milwaukee community
you're smart this is a great question uh... because
We're the only campus like that in the state of Wisconsin in terms of a public or private institution that has that top tier research aspirations written into our charter as a select mission of our school to be a research university, but also one that serves populations that historically had not had as much access to college.
So whatever, whatever definition, whether it's military veterans that didn't have that.
that transfer in women, students of color, individuals with underprivileged backgrounds, name the different student population.
A lot of non-traditional students, that's really important to UW-Milwaukee.
on the physical side, just to reflect back on something you said, we're very fortunate.
A lot of urban campuses do not have the wonderful access to the lake, wonderful neighborhoods that surround us, but we're an important part of the city because of our mission.
And let me give you an example that comes to mind that may crystallize it for our viewers and listeners.
I was Associate Dean for Executive Education many years ago in the Lubar College of Business, and we worked with a company, Johnson Controls, which said,
to us we're really valuing a lot of the things that you do and they had a partnership with us around research and that partnership it was on warranty and reliability analysis.
After three years it wound down and I went for the renewal and they said well you know this is back in the 90s.
They said we see you as a provider of talent we can do research with a lot of other universities.
Fast forward
to early in my Chancellor years when I was presenting both to Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation Board and the Joint Finance Committee on the importance of a research university, I had people from Johnson Controls, I had people from BadgerMeter, I had people
Smith, leading Fortune 100-500 companies that came and talked about
why you need to invest in the research university, why corporate headquarters want to stay here.
If we want to stay on that leading edge, and I don't care if you're talking about healthcare manufacturing in terms of data science or other areas, if we want to remain competitive in the state of Wisconsin, we have to be developing new products, transforming smart applications in every possible way.
If you look at strong economies, typically research universities are at the core of that.
So whether you're talking about Silicon Valley, Austin, Texas, go to Miami today and you've got universities that are creating a major tech sector.
We know that about Boston.
We know that.
And it's not just true in the United States.
So research universities play an important part.
But then when we think about Milwaukee and the state, we have students from 72 counties, the entire state of Wisconsin that are here.
Then we have students from other countries and other states.
Most of our students stay here and they contribute in meaningful ways, north of 80% of our students.
are staying here at least 10 years after graduation.
So we're the primary workforce provider at scale.
And it's also, as you walk across the campus, you'll see a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of students with lives that are enriched and great career opportunities, social mobility for them, but especially for employers, a great talent pipeline.
About two minutes left here before our first break, we're talking with Mark Mooney, the chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee here on campus.
My grandmother, Liz, serves this program, knows she was the first woman dean in the state of Wisconsin at UW Richland, who was just at
now closed, but her passion was the Wisconsin idea that the borders of our university, the borders of our state, and she fought valiantly because she said, I don't care.
She grew up in a, my great grandfather was a farmer with, you know, on a farm.
She goes, I don't care whether you live on a farm or not.
The way to success is education.
And it seems that that same attitude is alive and vibrant at UW Milwaukee because just like rural Wisconsin has challenges, urban areas like Milwaukee, our largest city also have challenges.
And it would seem that more people have skills and resources.
education that is a way up to independence.
We find when we work with different community partners that there's a threshold Todd and it's this 40,000 family income threshold that if you can't if you can't if you don't have a two or four year degree if you don't have the path to education you can't your family can't get beyond that $40,000 threshold and that is really a difficult situation for a lot of individuals so that's absolutely a huge driver for us and it really aligns well with why it's so important to have
a public, affordable education here in Milwaukee.
And I do know that it's not affordable for everyone.
And I know the challenges.
And back long ago, when I was an undergraduate, it didn't seem very affordable.
Certainly not cheaper today.
But we have a lot of scholarships that we've raised.
We've got a lot of pathways.
And that is entirely consistent.
Back to your point about the Wisconsin idea.
I really value your grandmother's work and thank her for that.
Thank you very much.
We're talking with Chancellor Mone.
Come on back and talk a little bit about the College of Health Professions and Sciences with the Dean of
College and a nursing student as well.
Don't go anywhere.
We're live in Milwaukee, WM on the Civic Media Radio
Network.
Welcome back to the Taliban show live on location here in beautiful Milwaukee, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.
The fight song here of the Panthers downtown Milwaukee.
Great place.
Go to a number of sporting events, extracurriculars to hear that fight song.
And later in hour two, the mascot of the Panthers pounce themselves is going to be here.
We can't show his face, but you'll hear his voice.
I'm very excited about this.
Very excited to be here in Milwaukee, UWM, talking with Chancellor Mark Mone here at the desk right now.
Of course, you could stream Yardus or Streamus on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter right now, as well as on the Civic Media app and Terrestrial Radio, as they say, on your radio stations all across the state of Wisconsin.
And download the Civic Media app because in hour two, it is our continuing text to win contest.
Coming up next hour, somebody's gonna win 100 bucks.
We'll give you the secret word you text in.
And then after tomorrow, somebody else is gonna win the grand prize of a Verlo mattress.
So very, very exciting.
You'll rest up with a Verlo mattress, then come to one of the great supporting events here at UWM.
Talking with Chancellor Mark Mone, and now joined at the desk is the Dean of the College of Health Professions and Sciences.
It is Kim Litwick.
And Kim Dean, thank you very much for being here.
We appreciate
it.
for the invitation.
Well, it's an absolute pleasure.
Chance, before we get to the dean, just talk a little bit about this college and there is a budget request.
I know going through the budget right now, it pertains to this.
So often in media, it gets down to the partisanship of, oh, people are just asking for things and explain the importance of this investment.
in our universities, and in this college in particular, and what it means.
Well, in a word, it's about our health.
It's about livelihood of a lot of our population.
And what I mean by that is that we can start with nurses, but we can talk about speech pathology, OT, or occupational therapy, PT.
We can talk about 19 different healthcare majors that are in great demand.
And we have the opportunity with this project, our Health Sciences Renovation Building.
we call it the Northwest Quad used to be Columbia St.
Mary's.
We purchased this hospital, grounds, the facilities, and we've been...
in the process of renovating this to enable us to have 300 more students, 3,000 in the next decade, to fill the talent pipeline where there's desperate need for all these healthcare professions.
If you look at the impact in terms of ultimately being able to keep our population healthy, whether it's the pediatric side, to the geriatric side, and all of us in between, we all need or will need healthcare.
And that's what this is about.
It's really, you couldn't have a more pragmatic approach to the importance of this.
And we think we're great stewards.
of resources here and this is a great investment for the state simply because we have so many health care partners that
benefit and ultimately the population of Wisconsin that needs more providers.
Dean Litwick, tell us a little bit about the facility you're in now and these needs.
I took a little tour yesterday and wow, from the large elevators to the hand, the geriatric handrails that I may soon have to be using in my retirement at some point.
You can tell this was a former hospital, but then like a little, like a little Petri dish, you have this beautiful brand new part of what
could be if this budget request is approved?
Absolutely.
We currently have health professions being trained in five different locations on this campus.
And that's not how you practice when you get out into the into the real world.
All these professions practice together.
So the ultimate goal is that this new space will allow practitioners to be educated together and then ultimately join the workforce knowing how to work together.
But you're right, we have a very old building.
The part that we're working to renovate still looks like a hospital.
It's not an educational space.
There are handrails there.
There are toilets and offices.
There are things that just don't make sense in an educational environment.
But then we have the Jim and Yvonne Ziemer Clinical Simulation Center, which I don't like the term Petri dish.
I'll take it.
I apologize.
We have our own little special
space.
It is a beautiful microcosm of modern health care.
There
are clinical laboratories in there.
There are simulation spaces to simulate.
the experience of a birth, we can have the experience of a death, we can have an ICU, and we have an apartment.
So students can learn what it is to take care of patients in essentially a real-life setting, which is a whole lot less scary than going into those settings as a student the first time.
How remarkable that is because as we have an aging population, you don't have to tell you, I'm preaching the choir, but
Do you know the numbers?
I mean, how many more healthcare people do we need just in Milwaukee County or in the state of Wisconsin?
I mean, I can't imagine the need right now from hospitals to clinics to nursing homes.
Well, just with nurses, it's an estimated 20,000 shortage per year for the state of Wisconsin.
We know that the population in health care and in general, not just nursing, but in health care is aging and they start to age out.
And over the last five to 10 years, we've had an increase in violence in the health care workforce.
So nurses and other health care providers are leaving.
So unless you start to replenish, you're going to have a shortage.
And we have a shortage in every county in the state that has provides health care.
I find this as again as I took the tour and I didn't mean in any way shape or form to mean the facilities you have.
You've done a remarkable job maintaining them and providing a nice environment.
I just saw what could be and you get this sense really quickly that, wow, look what we're doing with what we have, but we'll look how much more we could do, how prepared our graduates could be if we had these newer or upgraded facilities.
Oh, absolutely.
And I don't take offense.
I just didn't like the word Petri dish there.
The chancellor said, we are very good stewards with the resources that we have.
We use every inch of this campus.
And we have changed rooms that haven't been educational facilities into rooms that are educational facilities.
But we can do so much more and we turn away students every year because we don't have the space.
This will allow us to bring in and graduate 300 more students per year.
And as the chancellor mentioned, 85% plus of our students stay in the state of Wisconsin and they become our workforce.
The other part about this project that was impressive to me
You're not asking to break ground and build a brand new from scratch edifice here.
You're taking what you already have and being frugal and thoughtful and improving literally the foundation and the skeleton, Chancellor.
Well, absolutely.
And that's, again, back to the stewardship.
And we have been able to graduate.
and have the largest number of healthcare students across this campus already.
And I would add, in terms of US News and World Report rankings, just phenomenal results.
And I give our dean a lot of credit for that in terms of really having been a steward of the quality of the education that we provide.
And it's very rare to hear a dean or a chancellor say, we're turning students away.
Especially why this is important is if you think about the needs that we have, whether it's 20,000 nurses or if you go to the chambers of commerce.
that really track what do we need.
Healthcare continues to be the dominant employer need.
We're in a situation where...
in the state, critical care is having to be provided elsewhere.
In other words, if you're needing care, you may not be able, in your county, because of the workforce shortages that we have.
That's how acute things are, and it's going to get worse before it gets better if we can't really build these types of facilities out and take care of things.
Stay with us.
We are live on location at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, at the Lubar Entrepreneurial Center here on campus.
Going to talk with one of the students of the nursing program.
And more, don't go anywhere.
It's the Town Hall Ball Show live from Milwaukee on the Civic...
media or radio network.
truth wherever it may lead and having fun doing it.
Welcome back to the title ball show on the Civic Media Radio Network.
We are live at the Luba Entrepreneurship Center here on the campus.
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, home of the Panthers, an absolutely beautiful facility, a vibrant place here in the heart of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
I'm so glad to be here on location bringing you a very special program today.
Don't forget an hour number two if you don't like the
if you don't like me that's fine but you know stay around for the guests and stay around for yourself give it away a hundred bucks an hour number two in our text to win contest we'll give you the secret word after the top of the hour and if you want all the secrets revealed of your radio host stick around Carrie Anderson who I went to high school with who is part of the campus here at University of Milwaukee and my former broadcast partner Kevin O'Connor will be here in hour number two as well looking forward to that but right now we're talking to the
Chancellor of this great university, University of Milwaukee here, Mark Mone, also the Dean of College of College, the College, if Todd could talk, of Health Professions and Sciences, Kim Litwick and Veronica Burns now joins us at the desk, a nursing student and Chancellor, before we go to Veronica.
Again, just to reset the stage for people that might not have been listening during the commercial.
We're here in this beautiful entrepreneurship center.
We're looking out over your brand new chemistry building.
You've done some remarkable things.
I know not just you, but through your leadership and during your tenure here over the last 11 years to build resources.
And now we're focusing on a very vital part of our state health care and this need right now and request in the budget for a renovation, we'll call it.
Is that the proper term of the facilities to train our students in health care?
Well, I'm thrilled that we have a student here today.
She's a great exemplar of what we do and why we're here.
But the bigger, broader context is we want to put as many students into the workforce as possible because they're needed.
And that's what universities do.
They help provide that talent pipeline.
They also transform society in a lot of very important, meaningful ways, whether that's the arts, whether that's engineering, business, architecture, water, environment, all these different areas.
We've been very fortunate to develop a lot of collaborative partners, whether it's around data science with Marquette and Northwestern Mutual, whether it's around AI and the Co-Innovation Lab we've got with Microsoft and Rockwell, and things that we're doing in education.
We want to be, and we think we've been pretty successful as a force multiplier, but it doesn't happen without recognizing and continuing to focus on the main reason why we're here, which is the education of our students.
and health care today is growing and it's really neat to see the different fields in which we're able to really provide, whether it's the transformative effects of research on cancer, which is personally very important to me, or whether it's in terms of registered dieticians or speech and language therapy, all the different things that we do across all the 19 majors that we've got.
all of whom are doing great work in highly rigorous fields.
Surprisingly, when I think about our crown jewels on this campus, many of them are in the health care fields.
Pleasure to be joined now at the desk here by Veronica Burns.
She is a nursing student.
Veronica, welcome.
Thank you for welcoming me.
It's a pleasure.
How are you
today?
I am very good.
I mean, you know, have class after this.
All right.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I know you're probably studying hard.
I appreciate you taking time on your busy day to join us.
Of course.
So tell folks a little bit about yourself.
Where did you grow up and how did you come to choose the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee?
So I am from Jamesville, Wisconsin, which is a little small town in the south.
Portion of Wisconsin, South Central I'd say.
Yes.
Are you from Craig or
Parker?
Parker High School.
You know that.
Yes,
absolutely.
So what brought me to nursing is my entire family is like very health surrounded.
My dad is a psychologist.
My aunt is a social worker.
Grandma is a CNA and great-grandma Veronica who I'm named after was also a nurse.
So it just... How cool is that?
It just kind of was an eight.
It was kind
of... What did your grandmother influence you into choosing nursing?
I wouldn't even say so.
It's just kind of the thought of, oh, I grew up, my dad always has patients, and I couldn't hear about any of those patients, but he'd be like, oh, I have to go see this patient today.
And I'd be like, okay.
And then it's just growing up around just a caring environment that just I knew I had to pursue a career in caring.
How did you first hear about Milwaukee, W Milwaukee, and why did you choose it?
Well, at first I was looking at Whitewater, but then I knew that they didn't have like a nursing program there for four years.
And that was what I wanted.
I wanted to stay at one school for four years.
And then that's when I heard about Milwaukee, that it was the largest nursing school in the state.
They accept the largest amount of people in the state.
And that's what kind of brought me here, also the population of Milwaukee and how many people there are.
You can think of how many people's families need care, how many children need care.
That's what really brought me here.
Did you hear about it online?
Was it through word of mouth?
How did you kind of first, how were you aware of it?
Just research.
research on my own time.
You're just smart.
I mean, I would look up UW Milwaukee and the first thing that would come up is the research programs.
And then I'd be like, Oh, well, nursing and then it's first largest Wisconsin nursing program.
And I'm like, Oh, I have to
Yeah.
Uh, so I grew up in Southwest Wisconsin,
a
little town called Richland Center, 5,000 people.
Uh, my friend Carrie, who works here as well.
She is an alum.
She came here and we
were
talking last night as we were walking around campus and how did you, I don't really remember how did you come here?
And she said, well, uh, her piano teacher and, and, uh, whatever, whatever friends from church said, she had gone here
and
said, you should really, you know, we're old.
So there wasn't any internet back in that day.
So
you couldn't just go.
And so, and she came down here and visited and just kind of fell in love with it.
If you were to run into someone in high school right now who's thinking about not just nursing, but looking for a university experience, what would be your pitch?
What would you say to that person?
Well, I do actually have a few people that are like, hey, I'm considering going to UW-Milwaukee.
What would you say?
What would you think of me coming there?
I'd be like, it's a great community.
Not only is the population, the city, just it brings you into a whole.
culture of like, I'm in a city now, coming from a small town in Jamesville.
It's like, wow, it's bigger than Madison.
And then you also have just the culture of the clubs, the nursing student association.
There's so many student organizations on campus that you can join and just feel your support around you.
One of the things I like to do is kind of break down stereotypes and barriers.
So I'm
just going to
ask you a pointed question
if I
may.
There's a reputation that Milwaukee might not be safe here.
Oh my gosh right down to Milwaukee as a woman I never had a concern about being here.
You'd be walkie.
What would you say to someone who's a lot like if I want my daughter to go to Milwaukee or not?
You to be walkie is one of the safest areas I'd say around Milwaukee.
Um, I Live not too far off campus.
It's about a 10 minute walk for me here And I'd say I feel pretty safe walking home at night walking down to the gas station to go get a snack, you know, it's like
I don't know.
It's just the area you got to live in.
I
tell people they're places original center.
I wouldn't go after two o'clock in the morning.
I mean, I think it's like that way anywhere.
So I think it's
just good to hear from a young woman that you feel safe, this great experience.
Before I go back to the administrators of this campus, I want to ask you as a student, what has your experience been as a nursing student here in the facilities?
What would you say to people in Madison who are making some of these decisions?
Well, I don't know if we want to invest in Milwaukee.
Why should we?
Why should we invest in Milwaukee?
What would you say?
Well, I'd say invest in Milwaukee because it's like we have the largest amount of nursing students here.
We accept the most amount of nursing students.
the expansion of our facilities would mean that we're not working in overcrowded areas.
We are able to work with other people.
The list can go on for me.
I'm like, it's just so influential to our education and to what we'll be able to perform and for the health care of Wisconsin.
First Dean Litwick, I think she should go to a poster.
She's great.
I think she is
fantastic.
She is wonderful.
But your college is certainly proud of the nursing program, but it's so much more.
It is.
And you said that mouthful of our college being the College of Health Professions and Sciences, which we affectionately refer to as CHIPS.
It's easier to say.
I love that.
Isn't that cute?
That's really
good.
It makes great posters.
CHIPS and salsa, right?
Well, yeah, CHIPS and salsa.
I guess so.
That'll be the Friday happy hour.
OK.
So we consist of three schools.
We have the School of Nursing.
We have the School of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, which is where we educate our physical therapists, occupational therapists, rehab technologists.
We have speech and communication disorders and athletic training.
And then we have the School of Biomedical Sciences and Health Care Administration, where we're producing our health care administrators and our rad techs, our sonographers, and our medical lab sciences.
So we have the gambit.
We have the gambit and we want them to not be educated in isolation.
We want to bring them together and that's what this new building will allow.
I love this discussion because, again, growing up on the other side of the state, I think too often, and some of us are on fault, some of us just the media, but you don't always, you hear, oh, you know, Madison, Madison, you know, and they have a great look.
They have a great program there, but I did not know.
All of the things that you just said exist here at Milwaukee at a high level.
And I think that story needs to be told.
We need more programs like this, and we need to tell this story across Wisconsin.
Absolutely.
And I will tell it anywhere.
Anywhere when asked.
And we've been on the Eau Claire campus.
We've been at Richland Center.
We've done shows in Green Bay now on campus.
But this is the thing that sticks out to me.
In times where our politics divide us.
There are so many wonderful things in this state that we are investing in and you don't be able to walkie and this college seems to be one we should be doing more of
I think so
I would add to that Todd this This is nothing more than sheer pragmatics when you have a campus that has 210,000 alumni 80 to 85% of whom are from Wisconsin that stay in Wisconsin
I'll put that up against any other education provider and say, where do you get that type of return?
Where do you have a campus that's really of the people and for the communities that we serve?
And these students go across the state, 72 counties.
A lot of students will go back home.
We obviously.
love for students to stay around Milwaukee, but they do often go back, whether it's Brown County, out of Gamy County, back to Jamesville and other areas.
So that is the ultimate driver for us, and it's made a huge, huge difference in terms of when we go into, whether it's healthcare settings or any type of business, financial services, manufacturing, education.
The thing that we hear a lot is that UW-Milwaukee is our primary, it's our number one talent provider, but we need more.
yeah that's that's the point you need more need more nurses we need more speech pathologists and so forth and by the way when our dean uh... that waxes rad tech i just want you to know it's not radical radiologic so i just just have to clarify
thank you thank you i appreciate that uh... i i i can we do we do we do these shows you know we we don't do heavy partisan politics so
Let me just say this.
There are certain terms and words and acronyms that really set people off, certain people off these days, DEI being one of them.
So let's not use that for a minute.
I want to go back to something you said, Chancellor, a word you used, access.
And I can't imagine how anybody, I'm sure there are, hard for me to understand how anybody could be against equal access.
And Milwaukee is a most diverse city in the state of Wisconsin.
And it seems like, just like I've talked to educators, former of the late great state senator, Tim Cullen, Democrat of Janesville.
Ever hear of Tim Cullen?
I think so, yeah.
So he has a program for Alissa's Art Aware.
He set this foundation up.
It's still going to go on in his death.
He passed away in December, where he set up this foundation and he has full right scholarships to
a university to go to education in Wisconsin with the requirement you have to come back and teach in in Rock County.
I did hear about the scholarship
for up to five and what he has a number of of minority students who've come back and the thing that the kids say is it's so powerful.
to have a teacher who looks and has had my, it looks like me and had my experience.
Dean, do you find the same thing in patients that will we educate and have more students that look and have the same life experiences of the people they're caring for?
How much more powerful is that?
It makes a huge difference.
And the chancellor's comment at the beginning that we are a research institution of access.
What we're really trying to do is use research to guide that.
If you go into any place in the city or in the state, you will find people that look like you and you will find people that don't look like you.
And the more you are able to identify with your primary provider or your teacher in a classroom, you see yourself and you say, I could do that.
And as the chancellor mentioned, if we want to break that 40,000 income barrier, we need people to realize everyone can do anything.
And that's what we want to be.
You want to come in here in this university?
and your green and three foot two, we will get you to your career.
I think that's remarkable.
And again, Chancellor, as I walk around campus, we've got less than a minute here to go, I think, before the next break.
It is a diverse campus.
It is.
It feels like Wisconsin.
It does.
It does.
We very much mirror our population.
And that's what we're very proud of on this campus.
Well, you should be.
It's a great place.
There should be more Panthers.
And we're talking about the kind that go need to be walking, not necessarily those of proud as jungles.
But we'll come back and talk more about with our guests and more here live as we continue on at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
This is the title of our show on the Civic Media Radio Network.
you
Pursuing truth wherever it may lead and having fun doing it.
Welcome back to Town of All Show live on location at the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center here on the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee campus.
It is a beautiful day, a great day to be a panther here and stay tuned.
Our number two, we're actually going to talk kind of sort of.
to the Panther himself and find out what it's like to be a mascot here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
And yes, after 30 years, my former broadcast partner, Kevin O'Connor, and I are going to be reunited right here on the air.
And of course, talking to some of the theater students here in musical.
My friend, Carrie, who works here, we're going to talk to her a little bit as well.
And Chancellor Mone, she said she went to this performance with her husband, Bill, and she called me.
And that was kind of the impetus for this whole idea coming down here.
And she said, Todd, I just went to this musical, and it's like as good as anything you'd see.
These kids are incredible.
You should be talking about them.
And I said, OK, let's do it.
We're talking, obviously, about the more academics, or I know theater's academic as well, but I mean, the vibrancy of this campus and the round-endness is tremendous.
Well, it is remarkable.
There's so many different things that are happening when you talk about theater and the arts.
You know, Willem Dafoe studied here.
Really?
I didn't know
that.
Willem Dafoe, we brought him back for an honorary degree, and he did a special workshop with students, did a number of different things, and I was able to drive him around the neighborhoods he showed me where he used to live.
Wow.
He got his start here.
and that we still stay in touch.
Willem Dafoe, that's pretty remarkable.
Jim Riegel, three Academy Awards, has a special effects, The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
He did those, graduate of UWM.
But I can
also talk, and Dean Litwak can talk, about Maggie Wachowski, one of the first female admirals in the US Navy.
You should get our undergraduate masters in nursing here.
You know, Sacha Nadella, that little company called Microsoft out there, did his
first.
And I'm so glad we're able to showcase and focus on so many different parts of this incredible campus and every day is a great day to be a panther.
Love it.
Very important as Mike Lucas, a great columnist at the University of Madison says, timely, timely indeed, there's a joint finance committee hearing tomorrow on this new building project.
Again, times of divisiveness and partisanship, but it's hard to understand how anybody could make
healthcare partisan because you know what?
I'm getting closer to the age when it becomes more important.
I think it's important at any age, honestly, having been through a few health care challenges myself, and most all of us have, and our families certainly will.
So this is a really important part of the background, the fiber of our campus is the health care that we have.
So to be able to provide that and this building is going to enable us to do something that you rarely, rarely hear.
an administrator say, we're turning away students that employers need.
What could be more pragmatic?
What could be more nonpartisan?
It is a matter for many of life and death.
It's that serious, that significant.
So we're really thrilled about the possibilities, and we hope to see this all the way through.
It's been a long time coming.
And Todd, you've toured the facilities, and you know what it's like.
You cannot teach in a hospital.
room.
That's what we've taken over a hospital.
So we
need to renovate.
We need to turn that into classrooms.
We need to turn that into places where students can learn in an interdisciplinary fashion all the different things and wonderful to hear our student and Dean of Nursing.
Dean Litwick, talk a little bit more about about this diversity in the college, but also the needs of this program and your final kind of pitch to people that might be listening that have concerns about this.
We want our graduates to be workforce ready.
which means they need to be educated in facilities that mirror the workforce, and they need to learn how to work together with individuals that they will work for and with in the workforce.
And that's what we wanna do.
Incredible.
Veronica, our nursing student here at about a minute, minute and a half here.
Again, kind of your final pitch for people that might be making decisions about this project, but also those that might be considering being students in the healthcare field, not just nursing.
It's the community.
It's the community of UW-Mawaki that is very wholesome and it brings you together with all your support systems and all the friends that you make, all the connections you make with teachers and your preceptors, you have your simulation technicians that will help you out and then some of your friends might be these speech pathologists, occupational therapists and physical therapists that will be working with you in the future.
It's like you're making connections already.
I want you trained well when I come to the hospital.
Dean, having these facilities, practical hands-on facilities seems to make all the difference in the world.
It does.
It really boosts our students' confidence when they can try these skills out on high fidelity or low fidelity mannequins.
And then when they go into the hospital, they can say, I've done this before.
And they feel good about what they're doing.
Chancellor Mone, a couple of minutes left here.
I can't thank you for your hospitality and allowing us to do this show.
Very, very important show to bring a little slice of Unibay Milwaukee across the state of Wisconsin.
Your final thoughts.
What do you want Wisconsinites across the state to know about your university?
We have $1.5 billion plus impact.
on the state of Wisconsin.
We not only provide that through where our talent goes, but really the types of engagements that we have across this community.
We are a university that is not defined by the parameters, the physical parameters.
We are in the community.
Our students are learning nursing.
Our student teachers are in the community.
So many different things that we're doing and have that impact, but we're not doing it alone.
It is about collaboration.
It is making things happen.
But having some fun while doing it, too.
And I think you hear that from the students.
I think you would hear that from our faculty and staff.
So we're really proud of everything that we do, and we look forward to contributing in many more ways with the state's great support.
Veronica Burns, our nursing student here.
Thank you very much for being here.
Dean of the College of Health Professions and Sciences, Kim Letwick.
I appreciate you being here as well.
And Chancellor Mone, I just want to say a personal note as someone who's watched you from afar and never had the pleasure of meeting you.
Extraordinarily impressed and thank you for your leadership.
You're a man not only of vision, but of compassion and humanity and You have had stupid open about your your health struggles.
You've you've fought cancer and one you've Fought a lot of things in Madison and made UW Madison or UW Milwaukee a better place
you're part of what makes wisconsin great and that should not go unnoticed so thank you sir for what you've done
i'm honored and humbled thank you i i didn't see that coming that really means a lot to me
thank you really appreciate your leadership we're better off your leadership and look forward to the chancellor ahead as well and look forward to our number two give away a hundred bucks kary anderson my high school friend kevin o'connor my college friend god what you might know in the next second hour and pounce the panther is here and musical students were put on the show stay with