Matt Caine sits near the end of a long table spanning the length of a theater room on the third floor of Reeve Memorial Union.
He’s wearing a dark blue suit jacket, a sky blue dress shirt and a dark tie, matching the formal attire of the 11 others at the table. Today, he’s fielding questions as a candidate for president of Oshkosh Student Government at UW Oshkosh.
Caine used to walk the halls of the UW Oshkosh-Fond du Lac campus. Now he’s a student at UWO, and not entirely by choice.
The Fond du Lac campus, where Caine began his college career, ended in-person classes in June 2024, boasting 30% of its fall 2010 enrollment when the announcement was made in October 2023. Students like him had to make the transition to UWO, adjusting their lifestyle and expectations to attend a new campus in a different, albeit nearby, city.
The UWO Fox Cities campus, too, will be closing its doors June 30, meaning those who attended the campus must decide whether to continue their college career and, if so, where.
Left to decide his academic future, Caine came to UWO. But he said the transition from Fond du Lac looked a lot different for other people, causing some to dramatically change their lives’ trajectories.
“The closing of the campus warranted several students to drop out of college entirely, because of the high cost of physically moving and risk involved in transitioning to another campus,” he said.
Caine remained in college, but he said that the transition to UWO was still far from easy. The environments between the two campuses felt different.
“I was the Student Government Association president and student activity coordinator [at Fond du Lac], and I really enjoyed the experiences, whether it be having a gathering or running our meetings,” he said. “I felt at home, and like I had made it to a college that was right for me. This is the same narrative that I hear from so many other students of the former campus, they loved the small and personal environment.”
Since enrolling at UWO, Caine has assimilated to the change by working in the university’s bookstore and running for president of OSG. He said he’s learned to look at the changes in his life differently since the transition.
“As I transitioned to the Oshkosh campus, it was immediately apparent that things were different, but not worse,” he said. “My classes were farther apart, and I must walk everywhere, but I shortly realized that these weren’t problems, just differences.”
He said some of these changes include being a bit farther from home and having less room in his Oshkosh residence, but that his experience at UWO is still unshaken.
“That’s okay though, it’s been a wonderful experience, and though I miss the UW Fond du Lac campus, it’s been okay to be here at UWO.”
Students and faculty at the UW Fox Cities campus will soon have to adapt the way Caine did, as the campus is set to close down this summer.
Evan Kreider, a philosophy professor who teaches at the Fox Cities campus, said the transition to UWO hasn’t really changed his classes or focus. One of the biggest changes for him was simply the longer commute.
“There was a lot of paperwork early, much of which was fairly trivial (e.g., changing course numbers on syllabi),” he said. “Otherwise, I’m largely doing the same work I was before.”
This semester, Kreider teaches classes online, at the Fox Cities campus and in-person at the UWO campus. But with the incoming closure of the Fox Cities campus this summer, he will be teaching only online and in-person at UWO in the fall.
Kreider said he’s gone beyond the classroom in getting more assimilated to being entirely at UWO.
“I also made it a point to get involved with UWO shared governance more broadly from the get-go and was able to integrate with the larger UWO faculty, staff and administration through various service opportunities,” he said. “When Fox was part of the [UW system], I was already a member of a multi-campus institution, so in some ways the reorganization made things simpler.”
Despite the relatively easy transition though, Kreider said there are some downsides in how things are changing, even just within the Fox Cities campus.
“I will miss the specific community of faculty, staff and students that we had here [at the Fox Cities campus], especially in the early years when enrollments were higher and the faculty and staff more numerous,” he said.
