UWM Virtual Town Hall Meeting

Chancellor Mark Mone, Provost Johannes Britz, and Vice Chancellor of Finance and Administration Affairs Robin Van Harpen held a virtual town hall meeting in response to COVID-19, discussing the process of developing furloughs for the facility and employees of UWM.

Photo by Taylor Wietzke. Vice Chancellor of Finance and Administration Affairs Robin Van Harpen (top left), Chancellor Mark Mone (top right), and Provost Johannes Britz. (bottom) speak on UWM’s future plans regarding the financial side of the institution.UWM held a virtual town hall meeting Friday morning that discussed a UW System draft policy that will be put into place in the next coming days.

The UW system has been in the process developing a new tool for furloughs, that would allow institutions to avoid or delay taking the more serious action of layoffs.

“Furloughs are designed to be temporary, allowing institutions to temporarily reduce workforce and salary expenses,” said Robin Van Harpen. “Thursday afternoon, the Board of Regents gave approval for the UW System to develop and finalize this policy.”

Furloughs are an unpaid required leave of absence that is intended to be temporary so, therefore, under the UW System, there are 3 main types of furloughs but only 2 of which UWM will be putting into policy.

The first type of furlough is across-the-board furloughs. Across-the-board furloughs is where “an institution can elect to require employees to take a prescribed number of unpaid days off throughout the year” stated by Robin Van Harpen. The results of this type include salary savings for UWM in exchange for time off for employees.

Across-the-board furloughs will most likely be put into policy around July 1st, 2020.

The second type is position-specific furloughs. This furlough is based on employees who haven’t returned to work and aren’t critical, but who anticipate to return when operations are back to normal. Position-specific furloughs do not apply to facility. The benefits of this type of furlough is employees who are placed on furlough would be entitled to continued health insurance for at least the first couple months.

“We are working on draft guidelines that will outline how UWM would propose to implement the system wide furloughs, as well as FAQs that would better explain that,” said Harpen. “We also are planning that we will need to have informational sessions for employees to help explain the impact of furloughs on them as soon as we’re able to offer that.”

During the meeting, it was stated by Mark Mone that UWM is looking into everything they can do to reduce expenses beyond the workforce. This includes looking into capital projects that UWM is funding.

In regards to federal and state funding for UWM, the CARES Act granted $8.5 million in federal stimulus funding, in addition to $8.5 million in student aid. UWM also started the 2019 school year with carry-forward balances that they had been saving from the previous years. Pre-COVID-19, “these balances only equated to about 60-68 days of operating income” (Provost Johannes Britz).

“Those reserves will not carry us unless we act as fast as we can with respect to every available other tool,” said Britz.”Our end goal is to not mechanically reduce expenses but rather to take action that will allow us to emerge from this crisis as strong and best prepared for the new normal as we can.”

Provost Johannes Britz made a statement on the future of UWM in regards to the academic situation. UWM has decided to put all summer schooling courses online.

“I want to express my thanks to all of you for everything you’ve done to adapt to the COVID-19 and what we’re in,” said Chancellor Mone. “You’ve been absolutely remarkable and there is no question of the things that we’ve done and the incredible magnitude from seamlessly moving our course content online. That includes over 7,300 of 6000 courses to our virtual, tele-advising and counseling.”