Fox 11 ran a short update after hearing from the UWO facilities director yesterday. It is found here.
The attached photo of the Halsey native gardens (planted in 2002) was taken by a biology professor some years back, prior to the turn against native landscapes in the heart of our campus by the administration.
We have several people who do indeed use the Halsey gardens (and others in the heart of campus) for teaching, despite the quote in the article which disparagingly questions this. While some of them have worked closely with the grounds crew to encourage care of these gardens, they are professors/instructors and their job is to teach. With funding down and teaching loads up in the last few years, there is even less time for hands-on work even if they'd like to do it. We pay capable people to be the hands-on stewards of our campus, but they get their direction from the top.
The idea that cockroaches and mice are in Halsey because of the gardens is dubious. As anyone who works or studies at UWO knows, Halsey is an aging building with a lot of maintenance issues, including exterior doors that don't fully close. Making sure they close properly would be a fruitful step. People who work in Halsey have other suggestions for addressing this issue that have nothing to do with native plantings on the exterior.
Until our petition seemed to spur an email from the UWO facilities director to the campus, there had been no public information shared about any new campus landscaping plans, whether that be mowing/moving native gardens or the announcement of a "new riverfront site". The provost may have known and, in fact, some from our group had a productive meeting with the provost earlier in the summer to discuss the Halsey gardens, and were told that it likely could remain if a student org or some such could take responsibility for maintaining it. At this point, we're not sure what the status of those gardens is.
As stated previously, the fact is that multiple faculty, staff, and students had contacted the chancellor about this issue going back several weeks and longer but received no response. We reached out to the leader of our campus because our understanding was that the direction was coming from him. Perhaps this is incorrect.
In any case, with no response from the chancellor after several attempts, we created a petition to see whether other people also cared about this issue and wanted to help elevate it quickly, as changes to native plantings were already happening, with more rumored to be on the way. Because so many people did indeed demonstrate that they care by signing the petition, the media quickly picked up on the story and contacted us for interviews at the same time they contacted the administration.
This story is partly about the campus landscape, because many of us clearly care a lot about it, but it's also about the bigger picture of how this university operates. This fine institution has experienced some challenges in the last several years, to say the least, and some of them have resulted directly from unilateral decision-making by the administration, behind closed doors, and involving a small number of people, with limited voice afforded to or collaboration with faculty, students, and other staff. This may be another example. The administration itself may see it differently. We'll see how things proceed.
Finally, it was not that I was unavailable for a follow-up interview with Fox 11 yesterday, but rather that I declined the opportunity because I think it's absurd for this to play out as a back-and-forth in the media. As I shared yesterday, our group responded to the facility director's email with an email of our own to him (copying the chancellor and provost) yesterday morning, asking for a response to a number of questions and requesting a dialogue. Hopefully, we'll receive answers and have a productive dialogue with the administration soon. A couple of us actually just received an invitation to meet with the chancellor in this regard, so hopefully we can make that happen and reach an understanding in the near future.