Interview with Donald Miner, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Business Services, UW-Madison
Interviewed by Ayeshah Iftikhar
Transcribed by Ayeshah Iftikhar
Total time: 56:59
Date: September 1, 2010

So just for the record, could you could state your name?
Donald Miner, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Business Services for the UW-Madison. 
Thank you very much. And this is Ayeshah Iftikhar. This interview is taking place on September 1, 2010. So, Don could you tell me a little bit about your role with the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and how you became involved in the project?
I’m the Chief Business Officer for the University of Wisconsin so most things that happen have some financial and business implications, so I’ve been following from the beginning of the whole process of creating the Institute, what was happening, but not involved in any level of detail. So, for example, when the designs began to appear in the public, there was a whole series of public events, which were opened to people to come and see what this would be like, and I went to at least one of those to get a sense of what was happening, both physically with the building and then within the Institute. And that was my total involvement until about the middle of 2009. And so now the building was becoming a reality. And the University enters into a lot of arrangements with third parties to be partners in various events, contractual relationships or just partnership type of arrangements, and I sign many of those agreements or help design many of those agreements. And in this case, it was clearly a matter of needing to have an Operating and Services agreement as we were jointly going to operate a facility and people who were in it and the functions that were in it. An attorney in the administrative legal services of the University had been given the responsibility to draft that agreement principally under the leadership of the Provost, the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellor for Administration whom I report to. He and Ben Griffiths.
02:38
Sorry, could you spell that?
G-R-I-F-F-I-T-H-S.
 He was the attorney?
Yeah, he’s the University attorney. Ben and I had worked together for a long time and he recognized that what was needed here needed an attorney (laughs). Two organizations were trying to get an understanding between them. But on the University side he needed to really have a client even though he is part of the University, he needed to disjoin the writing of an agreement from those who might be involved philosophically in what we were creating, so his job was really to turn that philosophy into an agreement.
03:22
And Darrell Bazell my boss, the Vice Chancellor of Administration, was functioning as his client, I guess you could say
Could you say that name again?
B-A-Z-Z-E-L-L.
So if you get the University players in mind, there’s a Chancellor, there’s a Provost who is responsible for the academic side of things and much of the personnel functions, personnel relationships that are going to going on in this public private partnership where people might be numbers of both organizations in one way or another and so that’s a lot of things housed under the Provost as well as the research part so there’s major involvement there – what types of research would take place. And then there’s a Vice Chancellor for Administration, as I said, my boss, so all of the things like maintaining the physical plant, custodial activities, the fact that this building is being built across the street from a new Union that is being created. The Unions are funded by student fees and by student participation so there’s collateral relationships. Those are all responsibilities of the Administrative Vice Chancellor as opposed to the Academic Vice Chancellor. So Darrell was basically acting as the client. I watched for a while what was going on, and (one second pause), really volunteered by the middle of 2009 to say you’re not… There was frustration being expressed by Darrell, by Ben Griffiths, to some extent a little bit by the WARF. I guess there’s another piece in there and I would have to time it somewhere in mid to late last year. Darrell and Carl Gulbrandsen convened a meeting of 30, 40 people, I don’t remember, around a very large conference room on the 14th floor WARF and said all of you are going to be providing services or operating things that are in this building, so I want to introduce you to the concept that we’re going to create an Operating and Services agreement. At that point, Ben as our attorney, and I guess, Mike Falk who is an attorney for WARF were pointed to as the two people who would have to ultimately draft the agreement. So there was a co-sponsored meeting which I was invited to attend. It wasn’t clear what my roles might be in that other than, as I said in the beginning, whatever, this business has something to do with me in the end. Somebody’s going to want to pay somebody else for some service and vice versa. I’m going to run the accounting system and the processes to produce checks for the people working for me. So I do have to know what’s going on.
06:23
So really at that point, I felt I was just there to participate in whatever parts affected my areas of responsibility.  But by a few months later then, ultimately - I was just looking and so I looked in my computer at my earliest email on this, which is something like November 1, 2009 or maybe October 1, there was starting to be a feeling like this isn’t moving fast enough. The building is moving along fine. The construction people will finish the building in December 2010 no matter what. Would we be ready to move into it and understand what we’re doing there, and how people relate to each other personnel wise and who owes who money for what, and if a pipe breaks, whose going to call the plumber and whose plumber will that be? And those sorts of things are not written down (laughs), or not understood. So there was starting to be some panic probably going on as we were approaching a year away and not having this really worked out.
07:27
Could you tell me more about this? So you mean that there is…that the public side deals with certain things and…
Well, so if we back up a step. I just assumed you might have a little more background than what was happening there.  So you have a building being built in the middle of a public university on land that exchanged hands several times and WARF owns the land that the building is made on at this point and through several property exchanges with the University. Its public image is going to look an awful lot like a university building but a condominium agreement had been drawn up – this is before I entered into the discussion actually, that was the first document that was handed to me when I get to the role that I now started to play, that said this is a condominium and two-thirds ? Yeah, two-thirds of this building are a unit. One of the condominium and one-third is unit 2. I may have the numbers reversed, but the larger portion is WARF or subsidiaries of WARF created including Morgridge Institute for Research – it’s a legal subsidiary of WARF. And one-third of the building is a public building that the University of Wisconsin…but there is no physical boundary. If you look at the condominium agreement, you’ll see a dotted line drawn across the building at a place where there is really no wall, and it’s  more just for legalese that this boundary exists. So, as you start to move into the business aspects of a building built like that – so you slip on some water and you slide across the floor and break your neck, and you started out on the water on our side of the floor, and you ended up on the water on the other side of the floor. Who is going to go, sue both of us, I guess, for negligence of who left the water on the floor. But how are we going to resolve this? It would be nice to have that understood up front.
09:39
To your benefit, you don’t want to sue both of us while you probably want to if you’re looking for money. So those are the types of things that need to be understood in this Operating and Services agreement and on the liability sides of things, and on the practical sides of things, just whose staff is going to do what. Who is going to clean the waste basket, who is going to mop the floors, who is going to run the restaurants on the first floor? Who will be calling the shots on significant decisions that have to be made about issues with say, if the air conditioning of the building isn’t working? What will be the process?  So those are the practical, on-the-ground things about running the building. So does that answer the question?
Yes. And the reason why I’m asking you these basic things is because these transcripts are going to be part of the public archive and so a lot of people who will be accessing the archive will not have that background information so that’s why it’s helpful to know that.
Okay.
10:46
So just out of curiosity, what was the frustration…you said that there was some frustration in the beginning and that’s why this meeting was called?
Well, the meeting was called because everyone knew that there had to be an Operating and Services Agreement between a building where a portion of which was public and a portion of which was private, and they knew that all the people sitting at the table were in some ways players in arriving at that agreement. WARF had hired Darlene Gluck who’s a Facilities Manager, how were they going to relate to each other, and so they’re counterparts brought together and said okay you’re all going to a have to figure this out and these two attorneys are going to help you walk through it, and we have to accomplish this before we open the building which is going to be December of 2010. So that meeting wasn’t necessarily out of frustration, that was an attempt, really, to pull together an administrative structure to move forward on what had to be done through the Operating and Services agreement. It was a few months later then, after this didn’t seem to be igniting all by itself that the attorney on our side, I’m speaking a little bit more from the University’s side just because I’m closer to them, and I assume sort of happening on the WARF side saying we’re not making progress that we need to make on this. I actually raised my hand, good or bad, on the University’s side and said Darrell, I’m more or less on behalf of our attorney saying, it’s not fair to put this on an attorney to just go out and develop that, he has lots of other responsibilities. He needs to really have an active client who can do legwork for him, and see what would sell, and do negotiation and ultimately give him a map of what is acceptable to write or not write in the agreement. And I said I have experience at it. We built in 1998...we opened in 1998 the Kohl Center, a multipurpose athletic facility funded by a private donor, public-private donor, Herb Kohl, and Herb had some expectations, and the athletic department coaches had some expectations, and people who were arena consultants had some expectations and it was all going to be documented again in a legal way, and various ways and somebody was needed to facilitate this to make this sure everybody was saying the same words. So I spent a good two years of my life at that point getting the operating and services parts of the Kohl Center working, and holding off people who had very strong opinions to make sure they were listening to other people who had different and strong opinions. 
13:45
So, I said this is a relatively similar situation. We also did this earlier than that even in 1994 when the Board of Regents made a – well the State of Wisconsin made a decision to spin its hospital off, which was really a part of the University into a public authority, which required a statutory change and 4000 employees were about to suddenly become – no longer be state employees, but be employees of a public authority, and there were all sorts of details about how to do that without missing a paycheck or missing a benefit that they lost along the way. And again, who would be distributing mail in this building? This hospital is embedded in something called the Clinical Sciences Center on the West end of campus and occupies about – I don’t know the exact percentage – I will say a third of the building. The other two thirds are the University medical departments: Nursing School, Oncology and so forth. Who’s going to deliver the mail, who’s going to pay for delivering the mail, who’s going to sweep the floors? Again, we had to develop an Operating and Services agreement, which was actually the model that we were intending to use for this building.  So I had a major hand in facilitating all the groups that needed to get together to create that. 
15:05.
So in this, then, environment of somebody’s got to take a little charge here, I said I’ll do it if you want me to. My own Divisions involvement is relatively minimal. I move money around. I pay for this, but who establishes what we have to pay for is a different story. And so, the other leg I had was that I knew a lot of the players in other roles than the roles that they were playing here. So Carl Gulbrandsen and I go back a ways. I know him outside the University. He’s the Director of WARF. I had to do what at best would be described as really public disclosure of the fact that my daughter in law is WARF’s Personnel Director and some of these things are going to be about personnel matters where she’s been directing. And so I knew the University players probably better than that in lots of different settings and I am fairly well respected in terms of my neutrality that’s about getting this done. I don’t have any … many of these players have - and they’ll be the first ones to admit it – have ego involvements in this. They really want something for themselves. For me, it just has to work, so I have less of an ownership stake in it. If it doesn’t work, I will make lots of noise that that really isn’t going to work, and try to convince you otherwise, but I don’t have my own personal agenda in it.   So I began that process then in October or November, and was given the responsibility and Ben gave me a list of what he thought were logical groupings of things that needed to be decided, and we established 18 teams covering different aspects ranging from insurance to personnel transactions to accounting systems to purchasing processes to custodial and maintenance functions to operating food service facilities, to operating the conference center, that’s the Town Center. So each one of these, and we asked WARF to provide one or two people to each one, the University to provide one or two people to each one of these groups. And then I established – I separated them into 3 parts. These were working groups on the ground.  And then I put a coordinating team on top of that – “Working Group Coordinating Committee” is what it decided to call it, which was three people from the WARF side and three people from the University. So the attorney from both sides: Carl chose to have Darlene Gluck as the Facilities person since so much of it was about facilities and Kathi Stanek was the Controller that they had hired from MIR so she’s a financial person, so she’s a controller person for financial…for MIR and to some extent WARF. You have to understand that WARF is a 501 (c ) (3) independent of the university so it has its own Board and it created a subsidiary called MIR- Morgridge Institute for Research and had several other subsidiaries that were folding into this, one which is WiCell, which is the stem cell research group. That’s probably the other part. They have several other subsidiaries though. So Kathi’s role was not only to design an accounting system for MIR but to coordinate that with an accounting system for WARF as it was beginning to blossom over the past ten years into a multi subsidiary structure. So WARF appointed those three people and said that you should work with us as a coordinating committee over that. And on this side, Ben and myself and Peter Schroeder, who’s the Associate Dean of the Graduate School who is also involved in a lot of the personnel transactions and the research compliance activities that the graduate school is responsible for. So the six of us basically formed the Coordinating Committee and once we began to put names to each of these people who began to participate on each one of these 18 teams, it really turned out that one or more of the six of us was on every one of them so it was pretty easy to have a linkage (laughs).
19:45
And then, I did this deliberately, publicly – not that I did deliberately –I separated the executives out of that. So when it came to the President of WARF or the Operating Manager of WARF, Carl, or it came to the Vice Chancellor for Administration or the Provost or the Chancellor here. I said you people can’t design what’s on the ground with all due respect. You have to listen to these people from the bottom part. So you’re going to be the Executive team. We’re not going to enter into an agreement that the Executive team can’t live with, but you got to let the work happen underneath there and come to you with recommendations and come to you with things they cannot resolve. So I separated them away from the working people. It’s a common technique used in these sort of things, in administration in general. The funnier side is that the University has an Emergency Operations Plan that really we began to perfect after 9/11, how we would respond to an emergency of some sort and the first thing that the police chief learned in running this was separate the Chancellor from the people who have to put up the barricades and handle the traffic, otherwise the Chancellor will be in there trying to direct traffic, which doesn’t really work. So these executives can be public faces, that is their responsibility, they provide resources, budgetary, and they make decisions, if the group can frame the decision for them. So, we out that structure in place then and it’s operated fairly well. It took some turns I didn’t expect it to take.
What do you mean?
21:34
I tried to make it a  little more black and white than it ended up being and it turned out to be a lot more negotiating where I was basically running middle man between them – an intermediary role.
Could you elaborate?
Yeah. So on a mechanical level – it would be easy if we made this mechanical. We established a web space as a storage fault of all the documentation on what we were doing, and we established a folder for each of the 18 teams and the Coordinating Committee established about at least on a periodic basis of every two to three weeks, we would ask for a written report from them of what issues they had, an ongoing history, like you’re taking, and so we would put a single document in there and it would say ‘status as of this date’. The chairs of that committee had the responsibility to write that status, which I would then consolidate all 18 of these together and the Coordinating Committee would get together and look for conflict and look for areas where this team seems to be discussing something as well as this team and they need to coordinate. So we were the Coordinating Committee. It was our job. We did that drill for three times, maybe four times and people got the hang of how to get in the web sites, get the documents  (laughs), add another section that says ‘status as of this,’ which was down below the section that says ‘status as of this,’ – so a history of this evolving, and we got enough of a flavor and we did connect dots sometimes so the insurance group was talking about needing to understand who’s going to be doing maintenance work in the building in order to buy the right type of property insurance.  And the custodial group had to talk to the insurance people to let them know how this was working. So we spent a little while doing those dots and that went okay. After about two months it didn’t start to go okay to do it that way, so I ended up adapting on the fly how we were going do this. And the reason it didn’t…We were getting a decent amount of concurrence on how all these things would fit together and when you get interviews of the people, they are likely to admit that. But what was becoming a little confusing was the cultural clash. WARF is a private foundation. They like to play on a very close-mouthed basis. 
24:09
And I make no bones about it, actually. I had Carl, who I love dearly and we’re good friends, just sitting across the table right where you’re sitting and I said to him, “Carl, the reason this is difficult and the reason it was difficult before I took it over is that we’re dealing with two different cultures. You’re a top down culture. Everybody is used to listening to you as the director of a relatively small organization that has to be very protective of the patents and licenses it’s trying to maintain in the marketplace, and you’re calling a lot of shots and making decisions. So I can’t get Darleen to commit to something until she runs back to your office to check with you if it’s okay. On the University’s side, it’s a wide open culture because of the nature of the university is to create an environment…the administrative part of the University is about creating an environment that allows for the discovery and dissemination of knowledge. And you can’t order people to do that. That just happens. 
25:08
So you let a lot of freedom go and that results in when I administer the University or the Chancellor for that matter, half the time, the University is running itself and the Chancellor is running after it to catch up (laughs) and it’s good. I mean you don’t want to kill that. That’s what creates knowledge. It’s these people who go out on a limb, who go out on the edge and try something nobody’s ever tried before. And they don’t ask for permission per se, they really are very independent. So these two cultures are clashing wildly, and we’re trying to write an agreement where all the people that we stick up on the University side feel like they are empowered to make whatever decision is appropriate for their unit and the University’s good, and all the people on your side feel like they can’t commit anything till they run back to you and you have to get involved in every decision. It’s not your personality, it’s just the way that the organization is organized and it’s the way it lives. So this is really hard (laughs).
26:10
So at that point what I began to do, instead of calling this meeting together periodically, the Coordinating Committee giving all the reports, the teams still existed and it was clear we had defined what questions each team had to answer, and they still need to do that no matter whether they’re going to have Carl’s permission to do it or not, or somebody’s going to call the shots. I began to identify a few of those teams as being more problematic than others in coming to an agreement, and I began to do back and forth negotiating language, and began a document that ultimately came, out at least from the University’s side, a set of drafting instructions for what to write in this area and what everybody seems to agree to in that area, and concentrate on the ones that were having difficulty, which turned out were custodial services, building maintenance services and operation of food service structures.  We also broke away, which made perfect sense when we thought about it a little bit. There are still - I’m talking here – to date these things are not resolved you have to recognize that. 
Oh they’re not resolved?
As I speak to you, too, university bias in some way but that’s what I see where people will have to compromise in some way, is the personnel relationships that’s the other area that’s fairly unsettled. So you’re a Principal Investigator at the UW or tenured faculty member and MIR makes you an overture to become an associate of MIR, your intellectual property, let’s say your discoveries at the University you own, that’s a university policy. We offer WARF as a licensing agent, that’s how it works. You can use them or not use them but you own them. If the federal government was involved in funding your research, then we must use WARF as the licensing agent. And MIR and WARF adopted their change in strategy of how they want to work. When you become an affiliate there they want to own all your IP. And they want you to sign a document that says so. So that’s one problem. And you’re also…are you also going to take a leave of absence from your university department to go become a MIR investigator for three, or four years, whatever it might be because this is a sign of pass through, this is not supposed to be permanent residence in this building? There are concepts in this building and different people who research different concepts over time.  What’s going to happen to your retirement benefits while you’re there?  Are you going to become part of the retirement structure that WARF has for its employees or MIR has for its employees? Are you going to remain part of the Wisconsin retirement system where you’re going to have this gap in service? So these sorts of questions on the personnel side are also difficult to answer. If you phrase it from an academic point of view, which was phrased a number of times, if MIR hires you, from the outside, as the world’s best investigator of Science X and the University is also studying Science X in the department over here with the PIs. Can they grant you tenure? You didn’t come through the normal tenure process here (laughs) on the university’s side so is it possible that you could teach a course, and all the other things that are involved in the department, how is that going to work? So these problems kind of became…rose to the Provost level on the University side more than to my boss. And so we segmented off the personnel, there are a couple of groups about personnel things, to form what will eventually become an Affiliation Agreement as opposed to an Operating and Services Agreement. So the Operating and Services Agreement will be about who will do what for who in the building and who will pay how much in the structure, whereas the Affiliation Agreement will talk about the relationships of the people. We do that a lot and so we have the medical school and we have to place those medical interns and residents in various places around the (country), in other settings besides our hospital to get their background so we have Affiliation Agreements that talk about what happens when this person is doing an internship at Marshfield clinic. We have an Affiliation Agreement with Marshfield clinic establishing rights and so forth. So, rightfully it made us wait till the personnel part of this becoming an Affiliation Agreement, the Operating and Services Agreement becoming a different document. So we ended up developing two documents then with two different teams.  Going back to the Operation and Services side, what I ultimately ended up doing was, developing, oh I don’t know how many pages, it was probably a dozen pages of each group name followed by bullets about what they were agreeing to and feeding that out to people. I’d email without letting them see the entire document because they could flame off on any particular area and say, is it okay…are you on agreement about these five bullets? Yes or no. And they would say well number 4 needs to be worded this way. And then I would take that and talk to the person on the University’s side who was more comfortable with number 4 the way it was worded before, and work out some compromise language. Then we got it to the point, about three weeks ago really, where I thought that most everybody is comfortable with most of the parts of it. Then the lawyers took over and began to turn it into documents that could be exchanged back and forth. And that’s where we sit today, some of these things are still somewhere up in the air. 
32:36
So what has been resolved so far?
Oh, well, if you look at Food Service, the building will have three restaurants in it. It was designed for three restaurants.  There’s a dairy bar, a sit down restaurant with an alcohol bar. And a coffee shop. And the coffee shop and the restaurant are in the two-thirds of the building that on this diagram are part of MIR, WARF and the dairy bar is on the University side. Originally, everybody was starting out to try to get the University and its Food Service operations to run all three of those. And the WARF board decided no, it wanted to really issue a contract for two of the restaurants and hire somebody to come in and do that, for the restaurants, as opposed to the ice cream shop. So it was decided then that that’s how we’ll do this. And so we crafted the language that way. It is agreed that the University will provide all the custodial services throughout the building because it’s just way too confusing to order sweeping the floors stop at a particular nonexistent point. It’s agreed that there will be a lot of coordination of events because in the public spaces on the first floor of the building are spaces enough to run a -  I don’t know the exact number - but  run a conference on X where a thousand people are there and there are break out rooms and big session rooms. But across the street from that building is also building that’s got much the same legroom in the new Union South.  So, some conferences are large enough that they’ll use both spaces. So there needed to be some coordination going on and so there was an agreement reached about how they will share room scheduling software, even though there is some…and who will control, deciding that this group has priority over that group on the uses and it ended up that they created a Town Center Advisory Board of university people and WARF people who established policies and rates. So those things worked themselves out. And since there’s set up a crew, those who set up and break down the chairs and all that for Union South when we do it at the other Union all the time, that they would do that for the building for a price, which would be passed on to the people who are using the space and the conferencing. It was also agreed as to how we would pass money back and forth. That we would each maintain our own accounting systems, which was going to happen anyway and when one side owes the other side money, that would be recorded as a receivable or payable in each of the accounting systems and once a month we would look at who owed who money and we would settle up.  So that process was put in place and the two accounting systems were compared in how they were going to a do grant accounting because there’d be grants that were awarded to MIR and grants awarded to University. Sharing how equipment would be used is another area that’s working itself out well. On the laboratory floors of the building, the top three floors, its 50-50 in terms of design of space. Again without the big physical boundaries between them so you have a MIR lab on one end of the floor and you have a University lab on the other end of the floor and they might want to a share a piece of equipment so that’s all fine and we will write individual agreements and if there’s costs involved, those will be designed at the time they want to share, but in terms of ownership, we’re not going to jointly owned any of the equipment. The equipment will be either bought by the University or bought by WARF and recorded in their accounting system as assets and remains there. So those sorts of things got worked out, to answer your question. 
And the other things that were not worked out?
They’re still rumbling around I guess (laughs). To be fair, the agreement actually answers all the questions. Now it’s a matter of whether both parties are willing to sign the agreement.
And then what would you say were some of the achievements of….you said that you were on the Coordination Committee?
Yeah.
So some of the achievements or accomplishments of that committee?
37:36
As I said, it went for a certain length of time and then I didn’t say it became dysfunctional, but it wasn’t really producing enough so I had to do a lot more of the legwork myself in between there. But we would spend 2 or 3 hours working through concepts and deciding that, let me use a good example, in building systems maintenance activities. So operating the heating, ventilating systems, plumbing, everything like that.  When we talked through it, Darlene would come to the table as a Facilities Manager and say I am living next door physically to a building full of plumbers. I don’t really need to have my own plumbers. When something goes wrong with the plumbing, I will insert myself into their call system where they maintain a log of an emergency need over here and a plumber will show up. And we can pay for that. We can figure out how to do the money. So these philosophical agreements that this was most logically done in a particular way, I think the six of us were able to come to that agreement. As I said before, the model had difficulty and breakdowns because in my opinion, on the WARF side, while they could all sit there and say this was reasonable, they all had to go back to the WARF management to get that approved. On the University’s side, coming to the table felt like they were empowered to make a decision. And so that’s the culture clash I described before. So sometimes we would all have a happy smiley meeting and then the email we exchanged later which was a 180 degrees from what we all talked about, and you could see that it was influenced by discussions that happened elsewhere so we had to get them together again to do that again, to start all over again. 
So outside your formal roles and responsibilities, it seems that you’ve done quite a bit of informal work, you’ve had informal connections, you’ve had informal conversations and meetings. Could you elaborate on those? 
Yeah, that was the only way you could work it. My boss and Carl would have to remain very businesslike in their transactions and I’ve a little more freedom to move and it’s because of the way I know the people personally so when I call them, they listen to what I’m talking about and so that works out. 
So outside of your then formal roles, what were some of the informal roles that you had?
I don’t know how to describe it, I could go and play hypothetical with them say if we did this, would that…what would you see if costs go up,  challenge their ideas so I had more freedom to do that.
Yeah, but like the connections that you made – as the Vice Chancellor you had certain formal responsibilities and you volunteered for some, but outside of your role as the Vice Chancellor of the University, did you take part in any other meetings, or you know, bring something…any conversations you had that were influential in the development of the Institutes, if any?
Not seeing something along the lines you’re asking about.
That’s fine, let me see so you’ve probably answered a lot of these…so you talked about the important idea or features that defined the early definition of WID-MIR so what do you think were these important ideas?
41:50
I got a lot of input. This concept was - people will tell you – I just remembered this and I have to say it again on record: I had been working at the job for two weeks or so and it was clear that I was worming my way into everybody and just talking to everybody and as I said, I know Carl, but his secretary calls me, my neighbor across the street and says, ‘Carl wants to talk to you Friday can you make it over?’ Sure, I can do anything. So I go over there and it was pretty much to tell me how it happened, how it was and gave me copy of what he calls the Red Book, which is the original concept of how this happened. And so I let that play out and I had a bunch of that history and knowledge of that bunch of history before. And the Red Book tells one version of it. All history has – you’re in that field – all history is in the eyes of the person who saw it happening, and they saw it from a certain angle. So others might say otherwise, but I had access to Carl and his involvement in the background and his development of some relation with the Morgridges for putting money into the Institutes and forming the Institutes. I had access to John Wiley as the former Chancellor and I had known John since he was a faculty member or even a graduate student perhaps in Engineering, so he’s not afraid to tell me anything and he tells a slightly different history when you listen to it of who started this and why it went the way it went and then you can talk to the Morgridges and they’ll tell you a certain history, which is that they wanted to fund something similar to what was at Stanford and the Clark Institute and all that stuff and then you can talk to the PI’s involved and I think most of them realize that they’re highly interdisciplinary in the sciences and this is about science building so to do science you really have to know a lot about different fields even though it might look like you just need to know about chemistry.
44:15
And so their interdisciplinary part was well known, but they’ll also tell you about conflict, and departmental boundaries and those things coming into play, which can impede the progress on this and then I knew that…I didn’t realize what was quite happening to this extent, but I knew of an internal from my own field, which is educational administration, I know that there’s always this struggle between the haves and the have-nots and that tends to be between the humanities versus the sciences in general, and so I knew this was being built as a science building, so people in the humanities might feel slighted about this much money being spent in this way and though it’s not really true that humanities studies the science because science is everywhere and that the Town Center was really being designed with some of the areas being more about human contact types of sciences than necessarily the hard sciences outside the building. But it turned out that a lot of the conflict is about the money, when you come down to it, and who gets the money that WARF injects into the University. And this is an old issue.
45:34
WARF is this University’s secret weapon. There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And the reason it’s been its secret weapon is that it’s able to fund elementary…fund research of those who do not have the power to go out and get the research funds themselves and be a start up instigator. And that’s done through the WARF gift that’s provided annually to the University and allocated through the Graduate School’s Research Committee to, as much to the humanities side as to the sciences’ side, if not more to the humanities side than the science’s side., trying to make that balance to rebalance itself a little better. So people began to think that this science thing was going to drain WARF’s resources and this is still an open sore. I think it will become played out over the next several years as to how it plays out. It depends on the orientation of the WARF Board. If their whole life is about developing the Morgridge Institute for Research, using the money that’s derived from patents that people give them. That’s a very different model than taking that money derived from patents and reinvesting it in all parts of the University. And I think that tension is going to be a real issue in the long term here with the Morgridge Institute and what it represents.
Yeah, because that as going to be my next question. I was going to ask looking five years, because these Institutes are an experiment and so looking ahead how would we know that these Institutes have succeeded or at least they’re doing well?
Well, you certainly measure it by inventions that they create. Would they have been created without the Institutes?  Probably (laughs). So, I don’t really think that that’s the magic bullet. It certainly give s them a physical place to do things or physical places since the Institutes, there’s  another building in Research Park and there are other parts that are going happen here. I think though, it’s my bias, in other words said,  that if it turns out that the investments we’re making in the non-sciences area using the money out of science patents start to drift more away, that it’s going to tear this place apart, that it’s going to do a lot more pitting of the sciences and the humanities than what already existed and so if we see that happening, then maybe it was a failure in that regard even though I don’t think…and I know John Wiley pretty well, and he’s good at vocalizing the fact that the humanities are an important part of an organization and during his  regime as Chancellor he made it clear of how he made investments, that he was making investments in both directions and Biddy probably even more since John had come through the sciences side of life and Biddy has come through the humanities side of life.  So it’s going to be a challenge over the five years for the Chancellor and the higher levels of decision makers to keep the balance here and this is adding to difficulty probably, keeping that balance.
Yeah, so then did the early conceptualization of WID-MIR change or evolve over time?
I don’t know. Despite that fact that he gave me the Red Book and I did kind of read it, I don’t…you’d have to ask the people whore funding this like the Morgridges like what their expectations were relative to this question of are we just investing in the sciences here? So what was the original intent? The original intent I’ll tell you was a collaborative research facility. No ownership. People float in and out as necessary to do things, but as I said if you look at the brochures and the pictures, it’s all about science. So ok, is that to the exclusion of everything else?
Yeah, and that’s why I was going to ask you is what kinds of relationship were the Institutes intended to have with the rest of the campus initially?
50:11
That’s what kept it from becoming a reality for a long time I think so Wiley couldn’t get consensus, couldn’t get the whole leverage to make that work.
He couldn’t get consensus?
Well the Red Book had described early attempts to put together a collaborative research facility that wasn’t working. The computer science people were arguing with the people from the medical industry, arguing with engineering and other type of sciences, and so that was…at least the way Carl tells the story, that was an impedance to making this happen until there was an injection of money…a   $25 million gift…sorry…$50 million gift from the Morgridges, certainly set a tone that somebody was willing to back up a particular direction. And it would be interesting to ask them. They’ve made investments both in the sciences and humanities here.
Yeah, yeah, I intend to talk to them at some point. So we’re approaching the end of the interview, but last one or two questions. The first is that a lot of the publicity about the Institutes talk about the broader public and its relationship to these Institutes. So who are these public, who are the audiences for these Institutes?
The standard argument that you’ll hear is that the Town Center provides that gathering place and that the Town Center is focused on a number of different outreach activities so it’s designed to draw in school teachers, it’s designed to draw in low income people, using the law clinic that’s been talked about. So those are the public. And there’s this public access to science knowledge the extension function or ways around here… science outreach that’s intended to be wide open so public displays like a museum, sort of…hands on museum side of things. So I think that’s the publicly piece that people are talking about.
And what responsibility if any do you think the institutes have to these groups?
It’s hard to talk (smiles) so the Institutes, right? So there’s the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, which is a part of the University and all university departments are supposed to have an instructional research and  public outreach component to them so that responsibility comes with being an academic department is to use and extend your expertise out to the public. So I could speak of that half of the …third of the building (laughs)…half of the building, if you think that the floors are divided 50-50, that the dimension of knowledge be a critical factor there in the public purpose. On the MIR side it remains to be seen, what approach would be…without having a physical boundary and with all the collaboration, you’d have to assume that the public purpose will win out and it won’t be that possible to shelter things and that’s going to be another tension, as I said, this whole difference in the two organization is this a closed organization this is a wide open organization is going be challenging. 
Thank you so much Don. I really appreciate this. Is there anything you’d like to add, anything that would help us as researchers?
No.
And, who else do you think is important for us to speak with?
I gave you a bunch of names during that process if they’re willing to talk.
Yeah, yeah, definitely, if they’re willing to talk. Well, thank you very much. I’m going to turn this off now.
Don Miner 2
Background: This part was recorded after the official interview was over and I got ready to leave. Miner resumed talking and I switched the recorder back on.
So we were talking about the web site. So MIR created this web site you can go to and I think you can glide over or maybe it’s got tabs. I don’t remember how it looks right now. You can be in the public side of the building, you can be on the private side of the building. In the private side was created the MIR tab. One of the first things that appeared was make a donation to MIR. Well all nonprofit organizations love to get endowments and donations and so that’s fun (laughs), but over here you have a university that is becoming less public in terms of its funding, that’s no secret, and is relying more on philanthropy. So now we’re going to get into a competing situation? So if on the WID side we put a link to the UW Foundation, which says make a donation to the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery as opposed to the Morgridge Institute for Research, are we going compete? I mean it would be fine if we’re all sharing the proceeds. Having multiple groups go out and raise money for the same thing is sometimes a good strategy, but are we really competing with each other here or are we trying to do it collaboratively? So there’s going to be a lot of examples of that where people end up competing as opposed to collaborating. That question never got answered .  Again, it was never probably explicitly asked on the donation side. I do a lot of work with our relationships with the UW Foundation and other 501 (c ) (3)s that raise a lot of money for the university. And as I talk to our financial counterparts, there’s this, “Oh yeah they’re going to steal money from us. We’re just not going to have as big a campaign. So you can see it developing, you can see the attitude developing that’s going to cause people to clash instead of collaborate.
Yeah. Thank you so much.
Well we’ll see what happens and who ends up sweeping the floor. I mean there’s no competition for sweeping the floor (laughs).
02:02
Addendum: Thinking that the interview was over, I switched off the recorder and was on my way out the door when Miner resumed talking. As I had packed away my recorder and note book in my backpack, I made “head notes,” which I wrote down as soon as I had left his office.
He mentioned that another area of conflict was the payment of wage labor.  The University has unionized labor and has signed an agreement with the city of Madison to pay students and other employees a ‘living wage’ which is $11/ hour. WARF, being a private institution, has no such obligations, nor student unions, and can pay its employees the minimum wage which is $7.5/ hour. So, if staff are to be hired for restaurants or the dairy bar, there will be discrepancies in wages based on notions of public and private employment contracts? What will this mean for WID-MIR?