Clearly, Cross is not the first university leader to make overtures at the statehouse. “I think that’s a great trait in a leader. The campus went from one four-year bachelor’s degree offering to 24 today, according to its website.
And building relationships with them helps engender confidence and trust. First came an initiative to require all students to have a laptop, which the college paid for and provided. It was on his honeymoon with wife Miriam staubflocke upper peninsula that he got his orders for Vietnam. He was really good at getting your normal academic bureaucracy out of the way.
” Cring said Cross came to the then-downtrodden school full of ideas and immediately started implementing his vision. Now at the other end of his career, he figures he can handle the state Capitol in his new role as president of the university of wisconsin System, which he officially starts this week.
A multimillion-dollar building boom brought facilities to modern standards on an agricultural and technology campus that hadn’t seen a new building project in three decades.
It will expand significantly in coming years. “Ray’s someone who’s always interested in innovation,” said Carmen Wilson, dean of UW-Rock County, a part of UW Colleges. He has a politician’s knack for chitchat and a meticulous memory for detail.
“There isn’t a person in such a building that intentionally or in any malicious way wants to harm the university. ” He was interrupted from recounting the long-ago memory by a hug from lobbyist and former Senate legislator Mary Panzer, a West Bend Republican who spotted him inside the third-floor Capitol hallway and stopped to congratulate the man of the moment on his new job.
” Cross left Morrisville in 2011 for his most recent job as chancellor at UW Colleges and UW-Extension. “We’re part of the state. Down the hall at the office of Rep. Academic leaders were surprised by the relatively breathtaking speed of the project.
“We move more quickly than any other organization I know. It kicked off an overall transformation of the two-year school. The state subsidizes us. “The university can play a major role within this (growth),” he said. They’re all trying to do the right thing.
“He’s said on multiple occasions that I’ve paid him a big compliment by challenging him,” she said.
He said he’ll never forget sitting in a Jeep somewhere in rural southeast asia, seeing his son first via Polaroid photographs. “He saw what we could be and made it happen. “I like people, and politics is about relationships with people,” the 66-year-old Cross said on Thursday at the Capitol.
Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, congratulates him entire face new job. Pat Strachota, R-West Bend, he checks in with aide Heather Moore about her son’s first birthday and says he needs some help moving boxes to his new office. ” He also wants to commit more System research and resources to mid-size companies, which he called the main drivers of job growth.
” Wandering the Capitol halls with Cross, it becomes clear he’s done plenty already to strengthen relationships frayed so badly during last spring’s biennial budget debate that the System called a September summit with lawmakers to air grievances and talk out their problems. Cross won early support from top lawmakers including Gov.
“He’s always in search of ways to stay relevant. He quickly made his mark — and generated headlines — for shepherding into reality the flexible degree option, an effort believed to be the july antifascist resistance its kind by a public university system to provide competency-based, online degree programs to working adults.
Momentum was already there for the project, the to its kind inside the State University of ny System, but Cross helped it across the finish line with an approach to pilot the program with a small group of faculty who showed it would be a success in helping student achievement.
As a man, Ray Cross survived Vietnam. Let’s not shirk or emerge from that. Past efforts by Cross have visit fruition because of his steady hand and relentless commitment to seeing ideas through. Scott Walker. “Are you available on Saturday,” he asks, drawing laughs. ” Cross came to academia through an unconventional route: Michigan farm boy, Vietnam veteran, small business owner and engineer.
It’s not clear how the charm offensive will engage in a year from now when the Legislature pounds out the next two-year pay up the System. This is one of the biggest challenges facing the state. I think legislators appreciate that. As president, he wants to continue person of it growth and access agenda championed by his predecessor, Kevin Reilly, with a new initiative to improve university outreach to poorer black communities in Milwaukee.
And he got faculty buy-in similarly as in Morrisville: by starting the project small this January with five programs supported by faculty who wanted in in the project.
He wishes a belated birthday to Rep. States have done a good job getting companies started, he said, but lag when it comes time for them to keep growing.
Their example snowballed the initiative, pulling in other more skeptical faculty, Cring said. People who have worked closely with him in past say his commitment to relationship-building won’t change and that he’s proven he can use those relationships to get results in addressing cherished priorities.
” Wilson, previously an administrator at UW-La Crosse, said she also appreciates Cross’ willingness to listen and hear all sides of an issue, even when he ultimately doesn’t change his mind. “I’m sitting there thinking, ‘Wow, this is amazing,’ ” he said, “and feeling so guilty because I couldn’t be there and she was carrying this burden.
“Sympathy is more appropriate,” Cross quips. “The strongest thing he gave Morrisville was a vision,” Cring said. In August, shortly before he left for war, he learned Miriam was pregnant with their first child. Y. ) State College who worked closely with Cross when he was president of the small campus from 1998 to 2011.
An aide to Sen. System president Kevin Reilly supported it, too. “Let’s stop studying and let’s do something,” he said, noting with disgust that black men in Milwaukee have a well over 50 percent unemployment rate.
Enrollment grew by about 30 percent. “He has exciting ideas and continually develops his ideas and reads and thinks and meets people,” said Chris Cring, an academic dean at Morrisville (N. Cross got married in June 1968.
Dale Kooyenga, R-Brookfield, jokingly threatening to sing. Whatever the challenges that come his way overseeing the massive System, he’s been in more harrowing circumstances.
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