As staff and students at the
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha begin to sort out what their next steps might be following the announcement of the institution’s pending closure, the future of the 86-acre campus on the city of Waukesha’s northwest side will ultimately be up to its landlord: Waukesha County.
At a Monday press conference,
Waukesha County Executive Paul Farrow said the county will likely establish a task force that will determine what to do with the land, which is slated to cease being used as a college campus at the close of the spring 2025 semester in mid-June of that year.
“There's a lot of decisions that are going to be made over the next year. We're already putting together a task force that's going to look at the property and how we can utilize it best for the people in Waukesha County,” Farrow told a room full of reporters at UWM’s Lubar Entrepreneurship Center on its Milwaukee campus. “But we're excited to be part of this conversation. We'll continue good, strong efforts to keep higher education in Waukesha County, (and) keep it accessible for the people that are there.”
Lots of land
Waukesha County has owned the UWM-Waukesha campus since 1965 when it purchased the property from local landowners. The first four buildings on the campus were constructed starting in 1966. Others were added in 1969, 1978, and 1979.
The Fine Arts Center, with its 337-seat Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, which has hosted plays and visiting speakers, including Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward who spoke there in November, was constructed in 1987. In 1992, a computer center was added. Other building additions followed in 1996 and 2001.
Today the campus encompasses more than 81,000 square feet spreading across one large main campus building, and three smaller buildings.
Selling the buildings and the land should both make and save Waukesha County money. According to Farrow, the county has spent more than $10 million to maintain the campus since 2015, when he was first elected to office.
“That could have been monies that were used in another opportunity in the county,” he added. “I can say that as we were moving forward in 2027, we were looking to spend about $750,000 for mechanical upgrades that needed to be done, even for the 13 years that would've been left (in UWM’s lease). So those are temporarily put on hold until we see what we're doing with the property.”
Once a task force is created, Farrow said it will likely be charged with creating a master plan for the land, as has been the case with other properties the county has sold.
“What I'll be doing now is talking with our county board and the county chairman to start putting together that work group. We'll probably have some individuals from the community that we put (on the task force) and we’ll see what we can use the properties for,” he said. “It's all kind of up in the air. And that's why it's good that we have this year-plus, so that we can start working through those processes.”
[caption id="attachment_586470" align="aligncenter" width="1408"]
An aerial shot of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's Waukesha campus at 1500 N. University Drive in the city of Waukesha. (Photo courtesy of Google Maps)[/caption]
Closure announcement
The
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee announced Monday that it will be ceasing operations at its Waukesha campus at the close of the spring 2025 semester.
The news comes about five months after UWM announced the closure of its Washington County campus in West Bend – its other satellite location. In-person instruction at the West Bend campus is slated to cease on June 20 of this year. Just as with the closing of UWM’s West Bend campus, the pending closure of the Waukesha campus comes in response to a directive from the Universities of Wisconsin – the state arm that directs operations at Wisconsin’s public universities.
The closure will impact more than 100 UWM-Waukesha employees, including tenured faculty, and 672 students.
Formerly a standalone community college known as the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha County, the Waukesha campus became a satellite campus of the UWM in 2018, along with then University of Wisconsin-Washington County. Up until 2017, the system’s 13 two-year colleges at Richland Center, Washington County, Fond du Lac, and elsewhere, were known as the UW Colleges. In 2018 they were merged with nearby four-year UW System schools under an order by then UW System president Ray Cross.
Following that merger, enrollment at UWM at Washington County fell from 744 students, where it was in 2018, to 332 students in 2023 – a drop of 55%.
Although it appeared that the Waukesha campus, with its comparably stable enrollment – falling by 6 percent between fall 2023 and spring 2024 – might be spared the same fate as its sister campus to the north, declining enrollment, shifting demographics and budgetary constraints led UWM to re-evaluate the best pathway for delivering higher education in Waukesha County, university officials stated in a news release.
University Center at WCTC
As Waukesha County prepares to possibly divest itself of thousands of square feet in open space, buildings, and parking lots in the city of Waukesha,
Waukesha County Technical College in the city of Pewaukee may soon be looking at adding to its own square footage with the construction of the UWM University Center at WCTC.
To ease the pain of the Waukesha campus closure, UWM and WCTC jointly announced plans Monday to develop the UWM University Center at WCTC, which is being designed to ensure that students in Waukesha County can obtain an associate degree from WCTC and then continue to pursue a four-year degree with UWM in Milwaukee.
“At some point I'd say medium term, we will have a specific physical location for the UWM University Center at WCTC. We'll have space allocated for that and we'll ensure that the resources are there in order to carry that out,”
WCTC President Richard Barnhouse said Monday. “And there will probably be a sharing of staff in that area. I can imagine we'll have UWM faculty in multiple areas of campus like any college or university would. And I would imagine that UWM would be staffing that facility. But I also see that there would be some joint and collaborative spaces in that facility as well. I think what's novel about this is that we’re creating something new.”
As for how much the new center or its operations will cost, Farrow said Monday that it wasn’t yet clear, but that local leaders would likely ask the Legislature to support the effort with state funding in some way:
“I think there's going to be opportunity to talk to the legislative body to say, ‘guys, we've got a great experiment that we're working on here. Help us continue to make it grow.’
