UWM Chancellor Mone Plans to Resign

UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone announced today that, “after careful thought and discussion with my family and close colleagues, I have decided to step down from my role as chancellor.” He plans to quit a year from now, on July 1, 2025.

He will by then have served 11 years, “twice the average tenure of college presidents today and longer than any of UWM’s chancellors, with the exception of our founding chancellor, J. Martin Klotsche,” Mone’s statement noted. Upon stepping down, he plans to return to his former position as a professor with the Lubar College of Business. He has been a member of the UW-Milwaukee faculty since 1989.

Mone said that now is “the right time” and that he will leave as its leader with the university in a much stronger position. Notably, in 2016 UW-Milwaukee won a Carnegie classification as an R1 (Research 1) university, meaning it became one of the nation’s top research universities — numbering among 137 such institutions out of 3,298 colleges and universities nationwide.

Under Mone the university also saw construction of several new buildings. “We have achieved remarkable capital and operational successes with the opening of the Lubar Entrepreneurship Center, Kenwood Interdisciplinary Research Complex, Orthopaedic Hospital of Wisconsin Center, and the nearly completed Chemistry building. Many other facilities have seen significant renovations, including the UWM Student Union and the College of Engineering and Applied Science,” Mone noted.

Under Mone UWM also grew its long anemic endowment, which was just $61 million as of 2006, to $262 million, part of an effort that aimed to eventually grow it to $500 million. UWM’s fundraising a year ago gained the largest gift in its history, $20 million from the Zilber Family Foundation, as Urban Milwaukee reported.

“We also have withstood a global pandemic and managed ongoing budget cuts and enrollment challenges, all while creating vital and novel partnerships in data science, connected systems, health care, water and more,” Mone noted. His tenure overlapped a period where the Republican-controlled Legislature decreased state support for the Universities of Wisconsin system.

In May Mone faced controversy with both criticism and praise for how he handled pro-Palestinian student protests. Unlike at other universities there was no crackdown on the protests or arrests by police. But the agreement Money signed with the protestors was criticized by Jewish groups and Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman, who called the handling of the protests “disappointing” and said he would need to “assess the decision-making process that led to this result.”

A few days later Mone issued an apology, stating that “It is clear to me that UWM should not have weighed in on deeply complex geopolitical and historical issues. And for that, I apologize.” But UWM officials added that the agreement with the students still stood.

Mone has also had medical issues. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2020 and was later also diagnosed with thyroid cancer. His statement today didn’t mention his health.

One thing Mone wasn’t able to do much about was the fact that UWM has always ranked low in state support, compared to UW-Madison. As of 2019 one report found that state support was $9,108 per pupil for UW-Madison and $5,351 for UWM. A 2021 report by the Wisconsin Policy Forum found that UWM ranks second to last in state funding among a group of 14 peer institutions across the United States. Mone has pushed the idea that growing the endowment will make UWM less dependent on state funding.

His resignation statement indirectly addressed the issue of state funding. “Thanks to the steadfast work of my predecessors, administrators and our dedicated faculty, staff and students,” he noted, “we have achieved far more than what the dwindling state support could enable.”