Students, staff and alumni say goodbye to University of Wisconsin’s Fox Cities campus

The University of Wisconsin’s Fox Cities campus was the place where Lynnette Kopetsky figured out how to thrive as an adult.

Kopetsky enrolled at the two-year college in 1991 without any money or parental support. But the campus offered a bargain for someone trying to get their footing in life. In her first semester, she took 15 credits of classes for $720.

“I went there because I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to ‘college,’” she told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “I would have never made it anywhere else if I didn’t have that two-year experience.”

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Kopetsky went on to get a degree in history from UW-Madison and started a career working in libraries. Returning to the Fox campus as an academic librarian in recent years, Kopetsky saw her own experience reflected in the new generation of students at Fox.

“They don’t necessarily know where else to go, but they know they want to go to college,” Kopetsky said. “Having that local link so close to home with such a high-quality experience — it made a world of difference.”

A young person with long blonde hair leans on a wicker chair, wearing a white shirt and smiling slightly at the camera. — Lynnette Kopetsky in a high school senior photo, 1991. Kopetsky said she had no money or parental support when she started her college education at UW-Fox Valley later that year. *Photo courtesy of Lynnette Kopetsky*

People who are in a similar place that Kopetsky was after high school no longer have the Fox Cities campus to turn to, after it officially closed last month. Formerly called UW-Fox Valley, the two-year college has been a community hub in Menasha since 1959.

It was home to the Weis Earth Science Museum, which received national awards for its collection and programs that highlighted the geology of Wisconsin, and the Barlow Planetarium, which is currently closed but set to reopen soon with funding from Winnebago County.

With Fox and five other two-year UW campuses shuttered in recent years, local educators worry that students in rural parts of the state will miss out on educational opportunities without a campus in their community.

“The focus of our work on the two-year campuses was accessibility, affordability. We served students who couldn’t commute or who couldn’t move, who were place-bound, students who were underprepared,” said Carrie Tirel, a professor of mathematics who started teaching at Fox in 2010.

“We were proud of that work,” she added. “And I’m worried that we’re going to completely miss a whole population of students in the state of Wisconsin by losing these two-year campuses.”

A hallway at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh features a banner for the Weis Earth Science Museum and a Closed sign blocking entry to a room at the end. — The Weis Earth Science Museum was a pillar of the Fox Cities campus. Now, its collection and exhibits are being relocated to the History Museum at the Castle in Appleton. *Screenshot courtesy of Ken Brosky*

A group of people sit in a planetarium, looking up at a projection of stars on the domed ceiling. — Inside the Barlow Planetarium, the first major planetarium in Wisconsin, which was housed on the Fox campus and will soon be under the ownership of Winnebago County. *Screenshot courtesy of Ken Brosky*

‘A long and painful goodbye’

For Tirel, teaching at Fox was a “dream job.” She told “Wisconsin Today” that it felt like coming “full circle” after starting her education at UW-Manitowoc, a two-year campus that is now integrated with UW-Green Bay.

“It was a professor at Manitowoc who really inspired me. She pushed me to be a tutor, and then she showed me what good teaching of mathematics could look like,” Tirel said. “I really feel like the two-year colleges are what brought me to where I am.”

Last summer, the chancellor of UW-Oshkosh announced that the Fox Cities campus would be closing. Even though many staff knew this was a likely outcome given other two-year campus closures and declining enrollment, it was still “surreal” and “heartbreaking” for Tirel and her colleagues.

“Going into the fall semester already knowing that it was the last year, and trying to stay positive for students and make sure they were getting what they needed, to continue to deliver quality instruction — that was a really hard thing to do,” she said. “I think it was a very long and painful goodbye.”

Two side-by-side photos: left shows a person smiling in a decorated, cluttered office holding signs; right shows same person standing in an empty office. — Carrie Tirel’s first day of classes at Fox in 2025, left, and Tirel standing outside her empty office at the end of the school year.. *Photos courtesy of Carrie Tirel*

As a tribute to the campus, Ken Brosky, a professor at UW-Whitewater at Rock County and a higher education advocate, produced a 30-minute documentary called “‘We’re Losing a Gem’: The Closure of UW-Fox Cities.” The film, which is available on YouTube, includes interviews with staff and alumni, including Kopetsky, Tirel and Don Merkes, who started his college education at Fox and later served as mayor of Menasha from 2008 to 2024.

This is a follow-up to Brosky’s first film, “Closure: The Dismantling of Wisconsin Colleges,” which documented the closures of UW-Milwaukee at Washington County and UW-Platteville Richland last year. For Brosky and many of the educators he has interviewed for the films, it is a major loss to the state of Wisconsin for campuses like Fox to close. In their telling, it’s an avoidable tragedy that began with the restructuring in 2017, which put two-year campuses like Fox under the umbrella of four-year UW schools.

Kopetsky thinks that legislators and university officials should have found a way to keep these institutions thriving.

“I really think if they would have put their heads together and made some hard decisions early on, it would have been possible to save our campus, and it just didn’t happen,” she said.

Tirel also felt a major shift after the restructuring. She described a “vicious cycle” where budget cuts meant that her department couldn’t offer as many math classes, which led to a loss of students, which then led to additional curriculum cuts, and so on.

“There was no chance for us to survive,” she said.

A person with shoulder-length hair and glasses sits and smiles in front of a colorful, patterned tapestry and stools. — Lynnette Kopetsky attended UW-Fox Valley in 1991 and later came back to Fox as a librarian before the campus closed in June 2025. She appears in a new 30-minute documentary from Ken Brosky about the campus closure. *Screenshot courtesy of Ken Brosky*

Now, Kopetsky and Tirel are headed to UW-Oshkosh in the fall. They both expressed gratitude for having a job, but they are sad to say goodbye to their dream jobs at Fox. Tirel said she hopes she can bring some of the Fox spirit along with her.

“It’s kind of a joke among my colleagues that we’re on our way to Fox-ify the Oshkosh campus, like, ‘Let’s see what we can do to make it more Fox-y,’” she said with a laugh. “So, hopefully we have some impact there.”

Kopetsky also looks forward to bringing her expertise on working with first- and second-year students to Oshkosh, but she said she is “heartbroken” to leave Fox, which has been her home for so many years.

“We’re losing a gem,” she said.