A Chancellor's Final Words

an exit interview with UWEC Chancellor Brian Levin-Stankevich

Jeremy Gragert, photos by Andrea Paulseth |

Leaving the Chancellor Pad. After nearly six years at UW-Eau Claire, Chancellor Brian Levin-Stankevich will be moving on to become president of Westminster College in Utah in May.
Leaving the Chancellor Pad. After nearly
six years at UW-Eau Claire, Chancellor
Brian Levin-Stankevich will be moving on
to become president of Westminster
College in Utah in May.

At the helm of UW-Eau Claire for nearly six years, Chancellor Brian Levin-Stankevich is moving on next month to become president of Westminster College, a private liberal arts institution in Salt Lake City, Utah. He came from Eastern Washington University and began in June 2006 after Chancellor Don Mash left for a leadership position with the UW System in 2005, and after retired professor and administrator Vicki Lord-Larson filled in for a year as interim chancellor. Levin-Stankevich is known for presiding over the most significant building projects on campus since the 70s, a major strategic plan and master plan for the campus, the unprecedented Blugold Commitment, and the usual assortment of campus controversies that he says have made the campus stronger.

After living in the Eau Claire area for six years, what are some of the strengths of the community?

I think the strengths are typically around the quality of life issues. It’s a safe community, there’s great transportation. ... I’m surprised more businesses don’t realize the crossroads we have here. I think you’ve got good community leadership, both in the business sector and the public sector. University leadership and school leadership tend to turn over every few years, but by and large there is a longstanding cadre of people in the business community that have been here a long time who provide leadership and who care about the community a great deal. I think the investment that RCU made in downtown is critical. Other people like John Mogensen and Lisa Aspenson with the restaurants, has been following up on that along with some other developers, and that’s going to be a key to the future of the region because if you spread things out too far I think you don’t have much identity to the community. But having Phoenix Park there, and hopefully continued future development there (residential, commercial) is going to be great for the community. Just using the riverfront differently now, there’s a different awareness of how to use the waterfront.

What about converging strengths of economic development and culture?

The strength of our music program and what that brings to the community – everything from the Jazz Festival to summer concerts, to spin-off blues, rock and folk, and all kinds of other bands and performances. If I were going to put a bet anywhere, I’d say that Eau Claire really can become a strong center for music and the arts in Western Wisconsin.

What do you think are some of the challenges facing the community?

I think we need more better-paying jobs in the region. That’s probably a key to maintaining some of the strengths we have, and keeping people here. We go to so many events on campus, everything from concerts to athletics – so many people though that don’t take advantage of that even though they are as good as you’re going to find in any city this size, even at a professional level.


Can you give some perspective on the direction that the university is going with shared facilities, as well as how you envision the campus in five years when the current construction projects are done?

I guess my overall vision for the campus is a kind of small city urban university. So we’re not urban in the sense that there are streets running through our campus, but we have a small community here, and our students are out throughout the community doing their service-learning, internships, they play athletics all across the community, from Bollinger Fields, to Carson Park, to Hobbs Arena. And I think that we can extend that principle to teaching and learning as well. It gives us greater visibility; it makes the community and the campus, in a sense, contiguous – the Wisconsin Idea, where the boundaries of the state are the boundaries of the university. I think that there is a lot of opportunity for the university to partner with the city as we have done it on athletic facilities. There is no reason we can’t do it on other kinds of things.

Talk about this whole new foray into acquiring properties around the region, with the Leary Family natural area up north as well as the St. Bede’s Priory on the south edge of the city.

With the Leary property, it’s not something that is going to get broad-based use by the community because of the distance and the desire to preserve the natural habitat there for use by our environmental science faculty and students. St. Bede’s is a different story. We will have a child care center there immediately. We will almost certainly look at some kind of student residential use for that facility like living learning communities, or perhaps short-term residential educational programs. You could have a language emersion program out there, for example. So there are all kinds of opportunities in the future. You have 112 beautiful acres, and right now the challenge is finding purposes that generate revenue to pay the cost of acquiring and renovating the property. I think there are opportunities to really experiment with some energy efficiency out there, and hopefully over time be able to invest in looking at that being a model campus with buildings that are as energy independent as possible. 

Are you happy with the way the Blugold Commitment was approved and implemented over the last two years?

Ideally what we wanted was something a little more experimental, a different model for financing higher education. But there are so many state statutes, as well as concerns on the part of other system institutions, that it wasn’t possible. The only allowable route for us at the time was through differential tuition. We put that to our students, they put a tremendous amount of work into it, and they came up with a pretty radical program in terms of student empowerment and student control over where their tuition dollars are spent. I have yet to see anything that comes close to that in terms of student involvement and shared governance anywhere in the country. We can do this because we have a strong tradition of shared governance on campus, with very talented and serious-minded students. After student-faculty committees have worked through all of the details of the proposals, I would be hard-pressed to find a different way to spend the money than its being spent. I think it has funded an expansion of the things we’re good at, which is emersion experiences, undergraduate research, and multicultural programming. But it has also begun to fund interdisciplinary faculty positions on campus, and the Watershed Institute for Collaborative Environmental Studies is a good example of that.


What are you most proud of accomplishing at UW-Eau Claire?

We have a unique culture being driven by a commitment to quality above everything else, and a collaborative and very collegial campus climate and campus culture. We’ve tested that, because we’ve said, ‘Okay, how collegial and inclusive can we be?’ We have focused a lot on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and at times that has engendered a response. And I think of the Eau Queer Film Festival as an example, and many times issues of free speech came up, around articles in The Flip Side, and the programming we’ve done in support of the various ethnic history months, and awareness kinds of issues. The extent to which I think we have become a lot more inclusive in terms of LGBTQ populations, it’s tested that culture and yet that culture has prevailed. I went to the opening night of the second Eau Queer Film Festival and there was no police, there was no publicity, there were no protesters. It was just a normal thing on campus. So is that change? Yeah, that’s change.

Do you feel that these controversies ultimately made the campus stronger?

Yes. You know, the Council Oak controversy reaffirmed a commitment on the part of the campus. I sure hope no student goes through here ever in the future and doesn’t know what the Council Oak is, or what it symbolizes, in terms of this place and its significance. Here we have this symbolism of this place on the river, being a place of peace among warring tribes. I can’t think of a better metaphor for modern day America. We are surrounded by warring tribes, left and right these days – it’s not ethnic it’s political – and the campus should be a place for civil dialogue to confront issues that are uncomfortable for society at large to confront.

With the state budget cuts to higher education, and the curtailing of employee rights and benefits, was that a major factor in you deciding to seek out another position in another state?

Westminster College is a place that I have watched for many years. I’ve held them up as an aspirational institution for Eau Claire and other universities I’ve worked at. Certainly we enjoyed our time in Spokane, we have a house in Albuquerque, and the intermountain west is a part of the country we really grew very fond of. We like the mountains and the deserts, and the quality institution and reputation of the institution, the opportunity to work in the private sector after many years and four different states of public higher education. … I’ve decided that at this point in my life my personality and motivations require a much more flexible environment.

What advice do you have for the next chancellor, or to the community?

Well, I think there is strength in numbers and I’d advise someone to collaborate and to keep an eye on the world outside the university. I think an isolationist campus doesn’t work anymore. I hope the community understands what a real gem this institution is, and how unique it is. I often hear, especially from lifelong residents, sort of treating this institution as if it’s just their local school, but we draw students from all across the state. Like having Mayo and Sacred Heart and Marshfield – these are top level performers in their field – well we’re a top level performer in our field. My advice to the community is to interact with the university, and to the university: interact with your community. Don’t just stay around between Water Street and State Street and think everything will just be the same forever. It won’t be. You’ve got to keep moving forward and you’ve got to keep leveraging the resources we have into the future.