This is part of a series profiling the leaders of the University of Wisconsin campus and the surrounding community.
University of Wisconsin Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Peter Spear, who has announced he will retire in December, said he has witnessed many changes at UW since joining the faculty nearly three decades ago. Among them, he says, is the changing diversity and climate.
Spear said one of the most important challenges his successor will face will be continuing to improve the diversity and climate on campus.
“We have a number of initiatives and programs to try to increase the diversity of the student body and the staff and the faculty and they’re starting to show results,” Spear said, but he added that “as a general statement, the climate here is better for white students than for minority students … and as long as that’s true, we have a lot of work to do.”
Spear said diversity and climate are different but “very much interlinked” because a successfully diverse campus is one with a climate in which minority students feel comfortable.
“It’s a combination of recruiting a more diverse student body and a more diverse faculty and then having an environment where those people succeed once they’re here,” Spear said.
He added that statistics such as diversity of the enrollments, retention rates and graduation rates are important indicators of climate.
“Also important is the experience that the students have here,” Spear said. “If our [minority] graduation rates go up but the students feel they had an awful experience while they were here, we would not have succeeded.”
Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity & Climate Bernice Durand said every three years UW administers a student satisfaction survey. According to Durand, these surveys are written very carefully to indicate whether changes have improved the campus climate.
“There is definitely less comfort and less of a feeling of fitting in amongst students of color,” Durand said.
Spear said his work to improve diversity and climate on campus is one of the most time-consuming responsibilities of his position.
“That’s one of the biggest issues that my successor will face, and frankly it’s one of the biggest issues that I’ve faced,” Spear said. “I probably spend as much time on those interconnected issues as on anything else.”
As the state of Wisconsin is currently experiencing a budget crisis, UW has seen decreasing state funding toward the university. The problem of dwindling state funding and, in turn, rising tuition will be another major issue for the future provost, Spear said.
In order for the university to maintain its quality of education, Spear said the university is forced to raise tuition to compensate for the “decreases in state support.”
“As tuition goes up, it impacts access and that, in turn, can impact diversity,” Spear said, which, he added, undermines efforts to improve campus diversity. “We’d like to think that qualified students can enroll at UW based on their abilities, not on their ability to pay.”
Spear was appointed Provost & Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs in 2001. With the exception of a five-year stretch from 1996-2001 as Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Spear has remained on UW faculty since 1976.
