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King said in 90 days, he’s attended about 300 civic and university functions including campus events with students and alumni functions in Madison and Milwaukee.

“What I had to realize when I started was the train already had left the station, the institution was already moving forward as of January with spring classes. Whatever I did when I started March 1, it was intentional, not to disrupt that train,” King said.

King said he and university administration have since been working on a new five-year plan that’s now completed. Some ideas and initiatives that the chancellor wants to tackle as part of that include equity and inclusion programs, an expansion of a two-year engineering program to the Janesville campus, and other initiatives aimed at boosting enrollment.

King, a 30-year university educator, took the helm at UW-Whitewater this winter after serving as vice-chancellor of inclusivity and student affairs at UW-Green Bay.

His entry followed a period of controversy and upheaval that has marked the UW-Whitewater chancellor’s office since 2018, including the resignation of former Chancellor Beverly Kopper, after her husband was accused of sexual harassment and was barred from campus.

Dwight Watson, the next full-time chancellor, left in 2021, after just two years after he learned he had cancer. A former vice president of academic and student affairs, Jim Henderson, then resigned after a university dustup over plans to poll UW System students on free speech.

King’s own hire drew the ire of a Whitewater-area Republican lawmaker Steve Nass, who said he felt Gov. Tony Evers’ office and UW System officials were more interested in hiring a “social justice warrior” than someone to focus on educational quality and addressing UW-Whitewater’s portion of the university system’s financial woes.

King said under his leadership, UW-Whitewater over the next half decade will work to increase equity and inclusion for all students on campus, saying the university needs to become “not only a place of diverse races and ethnicities, genders and orientations, but also a space for civic discourse and opinions, ideas, beliefs and philosophies.”

“The surprise for me that has been a positive is that the university knows its challenges. The university knows the solutions to those challenges. It’s just getting and garnering the courage and the pathway to make those things happen,” he said.

King also said another of his top priorities is financially based. King said the university needs to learn how to stanch a half-decade of enrollment losses at both UW-Whitewater and UW-Whitewater Rock County in Janesville.

University data showed a spring campus enrollment of 9,769 at UW-Whitewater’s main campus, a decrease of about 100 students compared to 2022, following a 10% enrollment decline during the pandemic.

King said there’s a win buried in the numbers — a small uptick this spring of 30 more students than the spring prior at the UW-Whitewater’s Janesville campus. That’s a reversal after a 30% decline during the pandemic that continued through much of 2022 at the Janesville Campus.

King said university officials hopes to see a rebound in enrollment that he believes could come out of a new nursing program that soon will be offered at the Janesville campus. That’s in conjunction with what King called the expansion of a two-year pre-engineering program from the main campus to Janesville.

Moves like that, King believes, could help more students to afford a college education.

“Affordability is real,” he said, predicting that the cost of attending UW-Whitewater compared to some other UW System or out-of-state universities, will continue to lure students.

He said cost is one main factor in why UW-Whitewater sees more undergrad students transferring in from other colleges than most other UW-System campuses.