A few weeks ago, I was catching up with Arthur Ranney; we were talking about his impending retirement, when he’s going to come visit us in San Francisco, and my children. As a fleeting thought, I asked him how the search for his replacement was going, and he said, “It’s not.” He then said I should read his column that Thursday.
I was devastated.
I was a student at UW-Platteville from 1999-2005, and was one of Ranney’s students. I worked on the Exponent for far too many hours a week at the expense of several of my courses, but most professors cut me some slack. I’ve been going through the stages of grief in a way, because a little piece of UW-P will die when this decision to decimate the Media Studies department takes affect.
I was shocked. I knew things were bad, but this is unacceptable.
When I was a student, there were approximately 5,600 full-time students. Classes were small; I think I had a class that had seven in it. Student to faculty ratio was 19 to one.
I truly got to know my professors. Many I am still in contact with. Then the budget cuts started coming, and tuition started to rise. I remember paying my first year’s bill, about $5,000. I was mad, because my brother graduated from UW-Oshkosh seven years earlier, and his cost was $800 a year.
According to the UW-P admissions website, it costs about $17,000 to live on campus, and be a full-time student.
What happened?
Wisconsin decided education is not important.
Chancellors decided to build monuments to themselves; pet projects pissed money away.
It started when I was there: the Ullsvik Center had a bowling alley, the ‘Vous was awesome for eating pizza, meeting friends and watching the Simpsons — and then Ullsvik was replaced with a convention center.
The great savior was supposed to be the Tri-States Initiative: Where did all that money go?
The focus was always on engineering and teaching. Sometimes some other areas would get attention, but I always felt the other majors were treated as second-class majors. I was a Communications Technologies major (now called Media Studies).
I had a lot of fun working at the Exponent. The Exponent won many awards, and was a staple of campus life. What will happen to it now? It has been around for 126 years, and I’m sure it will survive in some form or another, but honestly without a full-time, tenured professor to advise it, the quality will surely wane.
I was one of those “other” students, the students that were less important to the administration. Because of my time at UW-P, I diversified my knowledge, I learned a lot from a couple of guys in IT, and because of that I took a slightly different career path than journalism; I ended up as a research and development engineer in Silicon Valley. I stand toe-to-toe with Stanford and Berkeley grads because of my time at UW-P. But with the turn the university has taken — honestly, given all the changes to not only UW-P but all of the UW System schools — and as an alumnus, I am not sure I would send my children to UW-P.
Just because these other majors aren’t the university’s main focus, it doesn’t mean you have to destroy them all. Remember UW-P is supposed to be a comprehensive university.

Brian West
Former Exponenteer, Executive editor 2003.
Communication Technologies –
Journalism 2005