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Photos by Peter DiAntoni

The fliers and buttons began popping up all over Milwaukee Area Technical College just days after President Darnell Cole got his new compensation package last fall. “Got contract?” they mocked, mimicking the milk mustache ads. “Dr. Cole does.”

It was late September and unionized faculty at the college had already been working three months past the end of their contract without a new one in sight. Union leaders were miffed. And they were only getting warmed up.

In November, scores of union members showed up and overflowed the meeting room of the college board of directors. Rather than exclude them, the beleaguered board canceled its regular monthly meeting after acting on just a few urgent items. In December and January, union members again rallied at board meetings as union president Michael Rosen castigated Cole’s administration.

The contrast between Cole’s new contract – which grants a substantial pay hike and health insurance when he retires – and his demand for givebacks from the teachers particularly galled the union. Cole and his bargainers, Rosen demanded, “should stop the delaying, game-playing and negotiating in the media and settle the contract with the employees who actually work with students every day.”

The union’s anger had been building for more than a year. Back in December 2005, Rosen had attacked Cole in the union’s newsletter, charging that the president “would destroy almost everything this union has spent decades building!”

The perpetrator of this alleged destruction, the man at the center of a near-labor war, has weathered a divided board of directors, a state audit bureau report criticizing MATC’s financial management, and attacks from Republican legislators and talk radio for failing to clamp down harder on the college’s spending. Darnell Cole is the man in the middle, squeezed between competing forces while still trying to run what is perhaps the most important and overlooked institution in the metro area.

How important? A study in the late 1990s by the UW-Milwaukee Employment & Training Institute found that one of every five workers in the four-county metro area had taken courses or received a degree at MATC; combined, they earned $4.3 billion annually.
MATC is a key driver for the local economy, the single most frequent destination for young men and women who graduate from Milwaukee-area high schools – and for many more people who don’t. Each year thousands of students – from very poor to well-off, including whites, blacks and Hispanics – pass through the college’s doors hoping it will make their career. Employers count on MATC to fill scores of job vacancies in hospitals, factories, restaurants and skilled trades. With labor shortages threatening businesses and minority unemployment at crisis levels, MATC could provide the solution to two major civic dilemmas.

That arguably makes Cole the most important black official in the metro area. Yet he and the institution he leads are so little-known that they seem hidden in plain sight. The public mostly thinks of MATC as the anonymous Downtown campus stretching over several blocks from the corner of State and Sixth streets. But it also has campuses in Oak Creek, West Allis and Mequon, and serves students in four counties. More than 50,000 part-time and full-time students prepare for jobs ranging from carpentry to welding, food service to photography, nursing to graphic design, making this one of the nation’s largest community colleges. Students earn everything from high school diplomas and short-term certificates to two-year college degrees and four-year apprenticeships in the building trades.

“We are the most diverse college, public or private, in the state of Wisconsin,” says Cole.

And possibly the most contentious.

Cole’s record sparks wildly divergent views of how he runs the college. Board member Lenard Wells is impressed, calling Cole “a hard worker” who “doesn’t want the spotlight.” But former board member Sheila Cochran, a labor activist who helped hire Cole and then quit the board in 2003, sees him in an entirely different light. “It’s always about his image,” she charges. “I think he’s totally inept when it comes to how you run that college.”

To admirers, Cole is a genial-but-demanding leader bringing needed change to a huge and hide-bound institution. To critics, he’s little more than a slick opportunist and power-hungry martinet.

“You either like this guy or you don’t,” says Lyle Balistreri. He heads the Milwaukee Building and Construction Trades Council, whose member unions rely on the college to help train apprentices. “I personally like the guy.”

But Cole faces a lot of challenges and the solutions aren’t obvious, Balistreri notes. “He is walking around in a field of land mines without a map.”

 

A former halfback who has managed to avoid middle-aged paunch, Darnell Cole has a barrel chest and a firm handshake. He walks stiffly from old football injuries, sports a beard (he briefly went to just a mustache this past fall) and favors sharp suits. He’s the kind of guy who opts for oatmeal instead of richer fare during a breakfast meeting. In his college office, amid the usual family photos and grip-and-grin pictures, there’s a tattered child’s reading primer from 1923: a gift from his mother.

Education was key to Cole’s success. Born in 1947 in Arkansas City, Kan., just outside Wichita, he spent much of his childhood on his grandparents’ farm, where his grandfather still used a jackass to plow the fields. While in elementary school, Cole moved to Flint, Mich., where his mother worked as a hospital dietitian and his stepfather at General Motors. After high school he worked on a GM assembly line, too, served two years in the army, then attended Ferris State College (later renamed Ferris State University), a school that awards both two- and four-year degrees to the children of Michigan’s working class.

In high school Cole had lettered in football, basketball, baseball and track; at Ferris he played football. These days he remembers the sport mostly for the toll it took on his body. “I’ve had back surgery, I’ve got a new hip, and I’ve got a plate in my neck. The only good thing for football was that I met my wife.” She was a Ferris cheerleader named Theresa.

Cole tended to his image when he first met Theresa. As he tells it, each of them let the other assume they were from Detroit, the sophisticated big city, when they started dating. They didn’t learn otherwise until they shared a ride home to Flint from college. “We lived less than a mile apart,” Cole says, still amused by the memory.

Graduating from Ferris with a bachelor’s degree in accounting, Cole went back to GM. On the accounting staff he learned budgets, but also the limits of his interest in bean counting.

“There was a pallet of screws or something that had gotten damaged,” he recalls. The vendor wanted to be paid; Cole’s bosses were balking because of the damage. Cole’s supervisor demanded he go through the entire pile and count how many screws were damaged. “I knew then that I was going to leave,” says Cole. “I could never get a sense of accomplishment.”

Cole had a mentor named Donald Butcher, a dean at Ferris who had previously served as one of Cole’s elementary school teachers in Flint. Cole turned to Butcher for help and Butcher got him a job in the placement office at Ferris assisting military veterans. At Butcher’s urging, Cole enrolled at Central Michigan University and got a master’s degree, but Butcher didn’t let him quit there. “If you really want to be successful in higher education,” Butcher told him, “you’ve got to get a doctorate.”

Butcher soon lined up a spot for Cole in Michigan State’s Ph.D. program and introduced Cole to Don Coleman, director of a diversity program at Michigan State’s osteopathic medical school. The two men had much in common: Coleman was a football player (a former All-American tackle who had played for Michigan State), an African-American, and hailed from Flint. When Butcher introduced them, “it was kind of like he was handing me off,” Cole reflects.

Butcher helped Theresa, by now married to Cole, start her career as a schoolteacher, and Cole got a job working under Coleman. It was the mid-1970s, and Cole was assigned to boost minority enrollment in the medical school. He wrote his dissertation on his program to recruit students from Detroit. When graduation day came, Cole was planning to blow off the ceremony until his mother “threatened me physically” and insisted he attend, he chuckles. “I didn’t realize how prestigious it was,” he says.

Butcher wasn’t finished with Cole yet. In 1978 Butcher was named president of the State University of New York’s College of Agriculture and Technology in Morrisville, near Syracuse. Not long after his appointment, he flew Cole out East to visit and offered him a job as his assistant. Cole turned him down. “It was out in the boonies,” Cole recalls, and very white. “There were only two or three people that looked like me.”

Undaunted, Butcher next flew Theresa Cole out and offered her a job as head coach of the women’s tennis team. She took it – and her husband decided to go work for Butcher after all.

Cole spent four years at Morrisville, then went on to the SUNY College of Technology at Delhi, near Albany, where he served eight years as senior vice president of academic affairs. In 1991 he moved again, this time to Indiana, becoming vice president and chancellor at the Gary campus of the statewide Ivy Tech Community College.

At Ivy Tech he oversaw the establishment of technical-training partnerships with other colleges and new programs, such as one to train employees for northwest Indiana’s burgeoning casino industry. He and his wife reared the couple’s four children – three sons and a daughter. (Cole also fathered two daughters, now grown, before his marriage.) The family had finally settled down. He had established himself.

“I’m a lucky guy,” he says.

Cole says he wasn’t really looking in 2001 when a headhunter pitched him the job as MATC president. But it was a step up in pay (his salary would rise from roughly $155,000 to $185,000) and a higher-level job at a bigger college.

Members of the MATC board who hired him say they did so enthusiastically – with one exception. Paul Pedersen, a longtime critic of MATC who was on the board at the time, says that he’s responsible for casting the only vote against the new president. Cole struck him as “a backslapper and a glad-hander,” Pedersen says.

The fact that Cole was the only candidate who hadn’t dropped out of the race by then was also worrisome. As Pedersen puts it, “he was the last man standing.”

 

The new president’s start was painful. Cole arrived in September 2001, two months after his original start date, after recovering from neck surgery. He soon found himself in the midst of controversy. The college’s $250 million budget was short by more than $1 million. He blames a budget mistake made before his arrival. Cochran, the former board member, says it was Cole who recklessly threw the budget out of balance by reinstating part-time faculty positions that had been cut. The 2003 report by the state’s Legislative Audit Bureau, however, blamed unexpectedly high wage hikes in the faculty union contract settled in 2001.

That contract was reached shortly after Cole’s arrival, as the new president was settling in and appeared eager to ingratiate himself with the union.

“When he first got here our approach was that we wanted to work very closely with him,” says Rosen, the dour, blunt Local 212 president who teaches economics and once worked at American Motors. Like Cole, Rosen inspires both admiration and enmity. He’s smart and strategic. He has an influence with some MATC board members, and was also appointed last spring to the state vocational college board by Gov. Jim Doyle. When Republican legislators killed the appointment, Doyle criticized them and re-appointed Rosen; the newly Democratic state Senate confirmed him in February.

Rosen’s office is in a gritty, single-story blockhouse, located a block north of the MATC’s old, brown-bricked Downtown building at Sixth and State. Reflecting its trade-school heritage, MATC has the look and feel of an old-line Milwaukee factory complex, and its tough union seems in keeping with that culture.

Indeed, Local 212 has managed to negotiate contracts that would make it the envy of any industrial unionist. MATC’s salary level is so controversial, it’s one of several issues that the Legislative Audit Bureau was asked to study, and its report was due out in mid-March. And Rosen himself has commanded compensation that has become a target for critics of his union. While his annual pay is currently $86,304, MATC records show that by teaching additional classes, he’s raised his actual pay to between $116,000 and $120,000 over the last three years.

When Cole took over the presidency of the college, “We requested to be part of the process,” Rosen says. That seemed to work at first. Rosen says the union and Cole met regularly in those days.

But from outside, criticism of the college was rising. Not long after the first labor agreement Cole approved, which included raises of 6 percent a year, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel published a long story on MATC’s pay. The article found 60 percent of the college’s nearly 600 full-time teachers were paid more than $72,300 in 2001 and identified some 44 teachers that were paid more than $100,000. It also took note of Cole’s combined salary and benefits, valued at $224,000. And it put those numbers not just in the context of the college’s $1.5 million deficit at the time, but also the Milwaukee County pension scandal.

Ten days later, union official Charlie Dee shot back with a letter to the editor criticizing the article and describing the board members quoted – one was Pedersen – as “a minority faction on the MATC board consistently opposed to MATC President Darnell Cole’s initiatives.”

Cole clearly had the union’s backing, and throughout 2002 and into 2003, relations remained harmonious. Rosen says he did favors for Cole. In the aftermath of the 2001 labor agreement, he persuaded his members to accept postponing a portion of the wage increase to help Cole out of a budget jam. “He came to me and said he needed my help,” Rosen says. “I told my people, ‘We’re trying to work with this guy. He made an honest mistake. Let’s just bite the bullet on this.’”

But Rosen also saw “warning signs,” he says. One came when Cole asked for Local 212’s support in holding an “academic convocation.” Rosen says he agreed, until he found out that a guest speaker would be an official from President Bush’s Education Department. Rosen blamed that official for defunding an adult vocational education program at the college, threatening the jobs of some 60 teachers. “I told Dr. Cole, ‘You don’t bring in a person whose policy position is that the work that we’re doing is not worth funding,’” Rosen says.

The breaking point, though, came in late 2003. Rosen says that when he learned of a proposal being floated to eliminate the college’s adult high school, he went to the college president. “I said to him, ‘Dr. Cole, I don’t know a lot about the adult high school, and you know even less.’” Rosen proposed instead a committee of faculty and administrators to study the program, and says he told Cole, “If there are inefficiencies in the adult high school, I commit to you that we will be proactive in addressing them.”

Cole seemed to accept his input, Rosen remembers. “He ended by saying, ‘We’re going to work together.’ Then he ordered it shut down.”

When those plans became public, however, the faculty union and people from the community who used the program mobilized. In

the end, MATC reorganized the program instead of eliminating it.

Another confrontation arose in 2004 when Cole proposed cuts in MATC’s child care program. Again, union members and users reacted and the administration backed off.

Board member Mark Maierle, a seasoned union leader in his own right as business manager of International Union of Operating Engineers Local 317, defends Cole. He says the president was simply offering options as a frustrated board struggled with closing budget gaps. “It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” says Maierle. “The classic story I’ve seen in Dr. Cole’s tenure is that he’s asked to do something, and then he gets criticized for it.”

Budget deficits forced the college to tap into reserves while cutting faculty and administrative staff. By then, contract negotiations had turned especially contentious. With the previous pact expiring in June 2003, it wasn’t until April 2004 that the union and the college reached a new labor agreement, setting wage increases of less than 3 percent a year, quite a drop from the last contract.

Attorney Peter Earle, a board member and Cole critic, argues that the union made noteworthy concessions in 2004: “MATC was among the first public institutions to negotiate voluntary co-pays with the union.”

But his fellow board member Jeannette Bell, the West Allis mayor and Democrat who says she is a “strong union person,” had misgivings. In retrospect, she says, it may have been a mistake to postpone seeking health care concessions during the 2001 talks. When Cole arrived, “there was a little problem of being naïve – wanting to please everybody,” Bell says. The first contract “gave the union unrealistic expectations that he would roll over for them.”

 

Lenard Wells is a retired Milwaukee police officer who headed the League of Martin, which fought for decades to achieve equality for African-American cops. He suspects racial politics in the conflict between Cole and the white-led teachers union. “You hear this over and over again in Milwaukee,” he says, “‘You can’t have a black leader in Milwaukee too long. You’ve got to cut him down.’”

Union leader Rosen, who has three biracial children from a previous marriage, bristles at the implication that race influences the union’s opposition to Cole. So does Cochran, a Cole critic who is black.

The divisions on the school’s board certainly don’t line up neatly by race. The four board members who generally support Cole include Wells and three whites: Jeannette Bell, Mark Maierle and William Hughes, superintendent of the Greendale School District.

The two Hispanic board members, Peter Earle and state Rep. Pedro Colon, are more critical of Cole, and are generally joined by white board member Lauren Baker, a Milwaukee Public Schools employee.

Two other black board members tend to straddle the middle: Bobbie Webber, a Milwaukee fire department captain and head of the firefighter’s union, and Ann Wilson, who manages the Hillside Family Resource Center under the Milwaukee Housing Authority and once chaired the labor-friendly organization Jobs With Peace.

Both Webber and Wilson speak well of Cole, but along with Earle, Colon and Baker, make up a board majority who want Cole to mend fences with labor.

Webber was elevated to chair the board last year, succeeding Bell a year early, with the aim of forging consensus among divided board members. Cole is “doing a good job,” Webber says. “He has the right stuff to take this institution to the next level.”

But Webber has also joined with the majority in pressing Cole to improve his relationship with the union. “Bobbie is a longtime union advocate,” says Wells. “He brings a common-sense approach. He’s respected by the union and he’s respected by the administration.”

Off the record, Cole’s allies say the other board members reflexively side with the union. Cole’s critics, in turn, accuse his supporters of blind loyalty to the president. On the record, everyone is more reasonable. Colon says he doesn’t oppose Cole: “I find him quite amiable and generally competent.” But battling with the union “has been difficult for him,” he continues. “At times it gets personal – more personal than I’d like to see.”

The labor issue, rather than race, may more clearly explain the disagreements. Board members are appointed through an arcane, little-understood process: a committee consisting of the board presidents of each of the K-12 public school districts in MATC’s taxing district makes the selections. Under state law, board members are chosen by geography and race; also to represent constituencies such as schools, labor, employers, government and the general public.

This has generally given unions considerable power on the board, though even that math isn’t so simple, as evidenced by the support Cole gets from unionists like Maierle and even, at times, Webber. Still, critics of the appointment process have called for more representation from business, or for having the public vote directly for board members. Any change, however, would have to be approved by the state legislature.

In September, when board members approved Cole’s new contract, they also reviewed the list of goals the president had set for himself. Missing was any reference to shared governance with the faculty. That’s something “we’ve always had as a goal,” Earle told board members.

The union has traditionally enjoyed a powerful position within the college. “The tradition of colleges, going back to the Middle Ages, is essentially a compact between the faculty and the students,” Rosen says. Shared governance means that “we should have an important voice in setting policy for the institution.” Yet since 2003, union leaders contend, Cole has frozen them out.

Wells urged the board to put the issue of shared governance aside “until contract negotiations are over with.” Webber, however, disagreed.

“We need to keep it on the table to be addressed on an ongoing basis,” Webber insisted. Board members agreed to add this to Cole’s list of goals.

Despite his enthusiasm for Cole, Webber says the president’s chief mistake has been his relationship with the unions. “There are times when the union is going to disagree with management. But the tone and the tenor doesn’t have to be venomous.”

Webber himself has met with union leaders regularly since joining the board in 2003. “Shared governance is a critical tool,” he says, and more communication with the union could have avoided the messy public fights that occurred over the child care and adult high school programs.

But some board members disagree. “I’m not sure how shared governance can work in a unionized setting,” says Hughes. “I see a conflict between board members who place the needs of faculty over those of students, the taxpayers and the employers.”

Criticism of Cole involves more than his handling of the union, though. Tony Baez, the former provost and highest-ranking Hispanic administrator at the college, says he resigned after Cole undercut his decisions and shifted a critical assignment, overseeing the college’s accreditation, to another administrator. Cole “did not have a vision of the academic direction of the college,” Baez charges.

Baez, Cochran, and other critics complain of a number of hires Cole made of administrators, several of whom he’d once worked with at Ivy Tech or Delhi. Like his old mentor Donald Butcher, Cole has reached back to bring some of his old protégés here.

His appointment of Dessie Levy as dean of Health Occupations also drew considerable criticism. Union officials complained she had no teaching experience and that Cole had pushed aside standard procedures. Established screening committees had not recommended Levy, a nurse and clinical manager from Aurora Sinai Medical Center, for the $95,000 post. The board split 5-3 in favor of the hiring.

“There was resistance,” Cole acknowledges. “But we worked and worked and worked, and she’s here.” He hired her, he says, because of “her reputation in the health arena by her colleagues,” including having been active in and honored by the National Black Nurses Association. “She’s a keeper and she’s local,” he says. Hiring Levy from Aurora Sinai “helped connect us to one of the facilities that trains our students,” he adds. “I have no regrets.”

Cole’s supporters consider the various claims of cronyism a red herring. “He hired some key people. He made some mistakes. He had to let some go,” says Bell. “Now he’s got an excellent team.”

 

In September 2005, Bucyrus International CEO Tim Sullivan turned heads when, at a Business Journal-sponsored breakfast, he criticized MATC for not graduating welders with the skills his company needed. Bucyrus has been a much-discussed manufacturing success story, smashing rust-belt stereotypes as demand has soared for its mining shovels. Sullivan complained that his company, desperate for skilled welders who could earn $22 an hour, had spent $1.5 million on training when it ought to be able to count on MATC and “it shouldn’t cost us a dime.”

Cole wasn’t at the talk, but word got back to him. He called Sullivan and made a half-day visit to Bucyrus’s South Side factory. The problem was that Bucyrus needed very specific skills in welding heavy metal plates. “We were graduating students in traditional welding that frankly were not able to go into his operation right away,” Cole says.

This past fall the college worked with the company to roll out an intensive, 10-week training program. Since then, Sullivan has praised the president’s response. “MATC and Dr. Cole have been very, very supportive,” the Bucyrus CEO said. “The only problem we’ve had has been the pipeline. He’s built it. Now we have to get people to come.”

Growing out of the Bucyrus experience, MATC has established a smaller-scale training program for welders with Tramont Corp., another Milwaukee manufacturer. “This is what this college should have been doing all along,” says Cole.

Cole has paid special attention to marketing MATC, both in the overall community and particularly to new populations of students. It’s desperately needed, says Wells, who credits Cole with “reaching out to the business community.”

Cole commissioned a survey on a possible name change to “Milwaukee Community Technical College” – aimed at broadening the institution’s appeal and conveying its larger mandate. “We look at the technical college system for producing general laborers,” says Wells. “They do that and much, much more. We have done a poor job of getting that out to people.”

The name change, however, was shelved. Still, Cole has negotiated new agreements with the University of Wisconsin, both in Madison and in Milwaukee, to make it easier for MATC graduates to transfer in as juniors. Similar agreements have been reached with some historically black colleges.

To his critics, these actions suggest Cole is turning MATC away from its core mission of giving Milwaukee’s poor and working class a pathway to the job market. But for Cole, it’s not a case of doing one or the other, but both. “If anything we’ve expanded significantly our technical programs in areas where our enrollment is low,” the MATC president says. At the same time, however, he argues there’s a demand for “academic programs for individuals who may not want to be a welder.”

“When I came here people didn’t see us as a partner,” says Cole. He has championed new programs in which MATC has joined hands with the relocated Discovery World museum, launched a training partnership in the heating/air-conditioning trades with Johnson Controls, and, last summer, broke ground on a new $9 million Energy Conservation and Advanced Manufacturing (ECAM) training center in Oak Creek.

“These are some significant accomplishments,” says Webber. “Cole has been dynamic about getting the word out about the college.”

Cole’s outreach has included meeting with his harshest critics. After the self-styled watchdog group Citizens for Responsible Government issued a three-part attack charging that the school had bloated payrolls and “Cadillac” benefits while “failing” at technical training, Cole called up the group’s organizers and asked to meet.

Cole “came off as a very sincere guy,” says CRG’s Chris Kliesmet. “A lot of the people we have differences with won’t even get in the same room with us.”

But Cole’s focus on MATC’s image provokes complaints that he promotes sizzle over substance. One board member said privately that college public relations personnel offered coaching in advance of an interview with Milwaukee Magazine. And not long after the magazine began researching the story, and well before the first interview with Cole, one member of the community called this reporter to volunteer his praise for Cole.

The call came from Robert Miranda, publisher and editor of the Spanish Journal and, more recently, executive director of Esperanza Unida, a job-training and social service agency based on National Avenue. Miranda really admires Cole. “He has been a man up there, doing the outreach, linking up with the community,” said Miranda, whose agency’s pending contract with the college to provide welding training came under fire in late February.

Cole himself is quite willing to join in on the praise.

“I’m here early and I work late,” he says. “It’s a standard joke in this college: ‘The president e-mailed me at 3 in the morning.’ When I get up, I figure I might as well get some work done.

“I’ve learned that, at least in this job,” Cole continues, “there’s always going to be criticism. I’ve taken the high road, I’ve been fair, and I’ve listened to all sides of the discussion.”

 

In February 2006, the faculty union took the highly charged step of publicizing a vote in which members gave Cole a ‘D’ for the job he’d done leading the college. It was a hardball tactic heading into bargaining.

Cole wants a contract that requires faculty members to pay a portion of their health insurance premiums, ends lifetime health insurance for new employees, and offers more modest wage hikes. “Our raise may not be what it’s been in the past,” he says. “I think that’s reasonable.”

Board members – even some of those who favor Cole – admit the timing of his new contract may have exacerbated tensions. The contract gives Cole full health insurance coverage in retirement until he turns 65, and pays half the costs after that, with all coverage guaranteed after he completes his sixth year as president.

MATC’s administration has already petitioned for binding arbitration – something board members say they do not want. Nor does the union. The problem with arbitration, says Rosen, is that it’s winner take all: Either the union’s or the administration’s contract offer will be accepted, rather than crafting a compromise through give-and-take.

One wild card shuffled in with the negotiations is that three board members’ terms expire in June. The changeover could be enough to tilt the board in a different direction.

“The only tension with the faculty has been negotiations and with the leadership of Local 212,” Cole says. “Once the contact is settled, I think a significant number of these things…” Then he pauses, tellingly.

It’s by no means clear that there will be smooth sailing between Cole and the union even after the contract is settled. While several board members indicate that this is their hope, they don’t seem to be on the same page as Cole.

“There has to clearly be an understanding that the president’s accountable, the president’s making decisions,” Cole argues. “This is different than in the past. Some of the things that labor was allowed to do” – such as sit on the president’s executive board – “did not provide a vehicle for them to say the things they need to without polarizing. I really believe we provide opportunities through our core committees for everybody, faculty, staff and students, to have input.”

That is exactly what the union and its supporters on the board oppose: a view of “shared” governance that is top-down. But Cole seems to have mapped out that way of proceeding, no matter how many land mines might await him. n

Erik Gunn is a frequent contributor to Milwaukee Magazine.