Posted on 06/01/2015 1:31:43 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
It’s been a tumultuous year for faculty members within the University of Wisconsin System, from threats to the Wisconsin Idea to a proposed $300 million budget cut to Governor Scott Walker’s suggestion that professors do more work to compensate for the slash.
But many professors and other observers said the roller coaster hit a new low Friday afternoon when the state Legislature's powerful Joint Finance Committee approved, by a vote of 12-4, the elimination of tenure from state statute, along with adding new limits to the faculty role in shared governance and procedures for eliminating faculty members in good standing outside of financial exigency.
Members of the committee said the changes -- proposed in a budget motion -- would give Wisconsin public institutions the flexibility needed to deal with the budget cut, which they also voted to reduce to $250 million over two years from $300 million. But others interpreted the motion as an attack on tenure and the traditionally strong system of shared governance in the state, which they said will cost the university system and the state in the long run.
If eventually passed by the full legislature, a Madison campus-based faculty advocacy organization, PROFS, said in a statement, the changes will “inflict lasting damage on a highly successful institution that was built and nurtured with major investments by Wisconsin taxpayers over a period of 167 years. …In addition to the profoundly damaging effects of the budget cut, it would be difficult to overstate how destructive and unnecessary the [finance committee’s] proposed changes to tenure and shared governance are.”
The statement continues: “Destructive because the changes will make it particularly difficult to attract and retain top faculty. Unnecessary because the changes to tenure and shared governance are not driven by any documented problem with the existing structures and procedures. On the contrary, tenure and shared governance have both been integral to the exceptional success of the [university] over many decades, both as an educational institution and as an economic engine for Wisconsin.”
Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of educational policy studies and sociology at Madison, said she felt as if “there’s been a death in the family.” The university’s been an “extraordinary place to work because of shared governance and tenure,” she added via email. “The ability to sift and winnow through evidence, speak truthfully, and work directly with administrators to serve students effectively -- these are the things that kept me and my colleagues here for all these years. …This is no longer a great place to work, and we are moving on.”
Goldrick-Rab said she passed up a center directorship at an institution in another state several years ago, fearing that shared governance there wasn't as strong as it was at Madison. But now she's actively pursuing opportunities elsewhere, she said. "I can’t work in an institution without genuine tenure protections and I will not work in academia without shared governance. We cannot protect students’ interests without it."
Others shared similar sentiments on Twitter during the meeting Friday. Here are a few examples:
[SNIP]
To be clear, Friday’s meeting was just a step toward the changes becoming law. But the clout of the finance committee makes it likely the Legislature will vote to approve its recommendations. The elimination of tenure from state statute and other parts of the omnibus motion were originally proposed by the governor in his budget proposal, but Friday’s vote makes them much closer to reality. Notably, however, the committee did not endorse Walker’s proposal to make the universities part of a more autonomous public authority, effectively putting that idea to bed.
According to the motion, the fate of tenure would be up to the university system's Board of Regents, which has expressed its interest in preserving the policy. In a joint statement Friday, Ray Cross, system president, and Regina Milner, board vice president, reaffirmed that position.
“When the governor released his budget in January, the leadership of the [Wisconsin] system and the Board of Regents spoke with one voice and immediately expressed our commitment to uphold the tenets of shared governance and tenure,” they said, adding they are still committed to those principles. “We are pleased that the action proposed today by the [committee] keeps shared governance language in state statute, and we are reviewing other proposed changes related to shared governance. As tenure was not retained in statute, we will move to incorporate it into board policies immediately.”
Cross and Milner added that they were “pleased with the substantial reduction of our budget cut and the provision of additional flexibilities.”
Some faculty members have criticized the statement as cowing to the legislature and not sticking up for faculty. And even if the regents reaffirm tenure, they say, it's still weakened in losing its legal status. Some of the reaction on social media has been especially harsh on Cross, who earlier this year said he would resign if the budget cut and challenges to tenure stood. Faculty members also criticized campus chancellors, including Rebecca Blank of Madison, for not lobbying against the changes.
In a statement, Blank said the university was “heartened to see today’s statement of President Cross and Regents Vice President Milner expressing a continuing commitment to shared governance and tenure. As we have stated in the past, these principles are deeply valued by UW-Madison and we are glad to see the tenets of those principles will be upheld.”
According to the committee’s motion, tenure is stricken from state statute, along with “current law specifying that a person who has been granted tenure may be dismissed only for just cause and only after due notice and hearing.” Language limiting a “probationary appointment” to seven years also is removed.
Regarding shared governance, the committee moved to modify current law to specify that the faculty of each institution would have primary responsibility for advising the chancellor on academic and educational activities, along with faculty personnel matters “subject to the responsibilities and powers of the board, president and chancellor.” The committee moved to delete from state statute a more general definition of shared governance, that the faculty of each institution be vested with responsibility for the immediate governance of such institution and actively participate in institutional policy development.
Friday’s motion also included language saying that the faculty members in science, technology, math and engineering are “adequately represented” in the faculty organizational structure.
The motion makes it easier for the university to shed staff and faculty, including tenured faculty. Currently, Wisconsin law is in line with policy recommendations from the American Association of University Professors: faculty members may only be terminated when there is a true financial emergency (AAUP uses the term “exigency”). The committee voted to allow for the termination of faculty members “when such action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision regarding program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.”
The motion says that such terminations would generally follow seniority, unless program needs dictate otherwise. Faculty members would receive notice 12 months in advance, and those claiming “improper selection” would have the ability to appeal to a faculty committee that would make recommendations to the chancellor.
In reacting to the proposal, some faculty members said the lengthy dismissal proceedings seemed ominous, if not wholly inappropriate for a budgetary document.
State Representative John Nygren, co-chair of the committee, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but said on Twitter Friday that the committee was “moving in the right direction, providing [the university] flexibilities and reducing the cut.”
But many faculty members remain dubious, if not cynical.
Chuck Ryback, assistant professor of English at the Green Bay campus, wrote in his blog that the entire 15-page budget motion could be summed up in one clause: that regarding shared governance, “with regard to the responsibilities of the faculty, academic staff and students of each institution, ‘subject to’ means ‘subordinate to.’”
“This has always been about the faculty,” Ryback wrote. “The level of obsession with the faculty, with bringing talented, humble and hardworking people to heel -- the people most responsible for delivering the university’s mission -- approaches pathology.”
"The chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison came under fire last month for publicly admitting to a tactic common among her counterparts at research universities. To keep top faculty members from accepting outside offers, she sometimes will reduce their teaching loads. Critics seized on Chancellor Rebecca Blank’s comments as an example of what’s wrong with higher education, saying that rewarding good professors by reducing their exposure to students was a kind of perverse incentive -- and an expensive one, to boot. But how fair is the criticism, and just how common and how bad -- if at all -- is the practice? It depends on whom you ask.
Blank’s comments came during an interview with The Wall Street Journal last month about Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s proposed $300 million higher education budget cuts and suggestion that faculty members teach more to offset the shortfall. The chancellor called the advice unrealistic, saying it demonstrated Walker’s “serious misunderstanding” about faculty workloads and management. As an example, she said that 15 percent of faculty members approach Madison’s administration each year with better offers from other colleges and universities, and that she sometimes reduces their course loads to convince them to stay.
“I am an economist,” she told the Journal. “I live in a market.”
Many readers criticized Blank’s explanation in the online comments section of the story (most were sympathetic to Walker’s notion that faculty members already don’t do enough work), and blog posts supporting the governor -- including Right Wing Wisconsin -- were soon to follow..........."
"........On one side are UW System chancellors, faculty and staff worried about the narrative getting away from them. They're eager to tell the story of what they believe unprecedented budget cuts would do to a public higher education system considered among the state's crown jewels.
On the other side are Walker and his supporters, who say the cuts combined with new flexibilities for the UW System would help it become more effective and efficient.
Walker started the day Wednesday doing interviews with Milwaukee conservative talk radio hosts. He later repeated the same themes to reporters after addressing the Chippewa Valley Rally at a Madison hotel.
"In the future, by not having the limitation of things like shared governance, they might be able to make savings just by asking faculty and staff to consider teaching one more class a semester," Walker told reporters at the Madison hotel. "Things like that could have tremendous impact on making sure we have an affordable education for all of our UW campuses at the same time we maintain a high-quality education."
Chancellors have been reassuring their campuses that shared governance is a core value they will fight to keep......
.......Walker said making the UW System a public authority, rather than a department of the state, would free it up "to have total control of their budget. It's for purchasing, procurement, construction, compensation, governance — in many ways (it) will be like Act 10 for the UW."
"It will make them do things that they traditionally have not done," he said. "Like I said, things like maybe looking at the use of faculty and staff a bit more efficiently like others have done in government in the last four years at both the state and local level."
Walker several times in recent days has dubbed his proposed budget cuts combined with new flexibilities for the UW System as "the Act 10 of higher education." He credited Act 10 with everything from saving billions of dollars to raising test scores and improving graduation rates in K-12 school districts.
"At the time four years ago, there were people claiming layoffs, there were some people claiming harm," Walker said Wednesday in Madison. "The reality is the districts — school districts and local governments — that fully used our reforms, just the opposite happened. Most were the same, many were better.
"And four years later we see, for example, schools that scores are up, ACT scores are second best in the country, graduation rates are up, third-grade reading scores are up. The districts that used our reforms and the local governments that used our reforms saved literally billions of dollars across our state over the last several years."
Walker said he believes if the UW System becomes a public authority, "this just puts the responsibility firmly in the hands of the management, the regents and the leadership of the University of Wisconsin System."............
When I was in college in the seventies we had a word for tenured professors. Retired.
The Wisconsin Idea is the policy developed in the American state of Wisconsin that fosters public universities' contributions to the state: "to the government in the forms of serving in office, offering advice about public policy, providing information and exercising technical skill, and to the citizens in the forms of doing research directed at solving problems that are important to the state and conducting outreach activities". A second facet of the philosophy is the effort "to ensure well-constructed legislation aimed at benefiting the greatest number of people". During the Progressive Era, proponents of the Wisconsin Idea saw the state as "the laboratory for democracy", resulting in legislation that served as a model for other states and the federal government...............
The Wisconsin Idea, in United States History, also refers to a series of political reforms of the late 19th century and early 20th century whose strongest advocate was Robert M. La Follette, Sr., Wisconsin's governor (1901–1906) and senator (1906–1925). The Wisconsin Idea was created by the state's progressives to do away with monopolies, trusts, high cost of living, and predatory wealth, which they saw as the problem that must be solved or else "no advancement of human welfare or progress can take place". Reforms in labor rights were one of the major aspects of the Wisconsin Idea. The progressive worker's compensation program was first introduced by German immigrants, who were abundant in Wisconsin. The system was adopted from the existing system in Germany, which was based on the idea that the employer was obligated to take care of his employees and keep paying them as they grew old. Many of the reforms were based on traditions and customs brought to the state by German immigrants. The emphasis on higher learning and well-funded universities stressed by the Wisconsin Idea was derived from the education system of Germany. Progressives also proposed the first state income taxes, as well as submitting the idea of a progressive tax. They also passed legislation prohibiting pollution and police brutality.
The Wisconsin Idea would go on to set an example for other states in the United States. The progressive politicians of the time sought to emulate and ultimately transcend the states of the east coast in regards to labor laws. Wisconsin progressives wished to make Wisconsin into a benchmark for other Midwestern states to strive towards. Although many of the reforms went through in 1911, conservative opponents of the progressive party took control of Wisconsin in 1914, thus minimizing the magnitude and effects of the reforms. The Wisconsin Idea would continue to be a revolutionary precedent for other universities, and its educational aspects are still relevant today. Robert La Follette, Sr. was the man who implemented much of this legislature, and he was among the earliest supporters of direct election of senators, which is now a national practice. These progressive politics also helped pass the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments to the American Constitution.
These proposed reforms, all of which were eventually adopted, included:
Primary elections, allowing the rank-and-file members of a political party to choose its nominees rather than caucuses usually dominated by political bosses.
Workers' compensation, allowing workers injured whilst working to receive a fixed payment in compensation for their injuries and related expenses rather than forcing them to go to court against their employers, which at the time was extremely difficult and had little realistic chance of success.
State regulation of railroads in addition to the federal regulation imposed by the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Direct election of United States Senators as opposed to the original method of their selection by the state legislatures, eventually ratified as the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Progressive taxation, where the wealthier pay a higher rate of tax than the less-affluent, made possible on the federal level in part by the adoption of the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Adoption of these reforms marked the high point of the Progressive Era........."
Wisconsin legislative committee moves against University tenure.
FReep Mail me if you want on or off, this wisconsin interest ping list.
[The magnitude of the battle being waged in Wisconsin, since Walker was elected governor, is slowly being realized.]
June 27, 2011: Walker Revokes In-state Tuition For Undocumented Students Attending Univ And Colleges In Wisconsin " - On Sunday, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) signed his two-year 2011-2013 budget, which included ending in-state tuition for undocumented students attending public universities and colleges. In-state tuition for undocumented students was approved two years ago by former Governor Jim Doyle (D) after the Hispanic community struggled for 10 years to pass it."... [only state that has]
2011 Wisconsin Protests [birthed Occupy Wall Street [Walker is only governor to survive a recall election]
July 6, 2011 - J.R. Dunn, American Thinker Democrats Unveil the Weapon of the Future "......Last February, newly-elected governor Scott Walker signed a budget containing minor reforms aimed at the public-employees unions. Union members would be required to pay small amounts into their pension and health-care funds. Collective bargaining was curtailed on this and other matters in order to assure that these reforms would remain permanent....."
David French, National Review: Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought It Was a Home Invasion’
"..................For dozens of conservatives, the years since Scott Walker’s first election as governor of Wisconsin transformed the state — known for pro-football championships, good cheese, and a population with a reputation for being unfailingly polite — into a place where conservatives have faced early-morning raids, multi-year secretive criminal investigations, slanderous and selective leaks to sympathetic media, and intrusive electronic snooping.
Yes, Wisconsin, the cradle of the progressive movement and home of the “Wisconsin idea” — the marriage of state governments and state universities to govern through technocratic reform — was giving birth to a new progressive idea, the use of law enforcement as a political instrument, as a weapon to attempt to undo election results, shame opponents, and ruin lives......"
Oct 28, 2013: Sources: Secret probe targeting conservatives is abuse of prosecutorial powers
"MADISON — For the second time in three and a half years, a Democrat District Attorney of Milwaukee County has launched a secret investigation into conservatives, with the apparent goal of bringing down Gov. Scott Walker, sources tell Wisconsin Reporter.
Though gagged by provisions of subpoenas issued by Milwaukee County Assistant D.A. Bruce Landgraf and others, multiple sources told Wisconsin Reporter the manifold legal attack on nonprofit political organizations has included after-hours visits to homes and offices; confiscated equipment and files; and demands for phone, email and other records.
“This is a taxpayer-funded, opposition-research campaign,” one source said. “This is not a question of what conservatives did wrong. It’s a question of one party in this state using prosecutorial powers to conduct a one-sided investigation into conservatives.”........... [Part 1 of a 204 part [ongoing] investigative series]
Sift and winnow evidence, speak the truth, serve effectively....hardly the toolbox of a liberal.
After reviewing this statement and reading over her twitter page, I am of the opinion that she should, indeed, 'move on'. She's nothing more than a Lena Dunham lookalike who is a political activist. Her Twitter Page has H-O-P-E spanned across it. Frankly, she's one of the last people I'd want teaching and researching educational policy.
“Shared governance” = pipeline back and forth between progressive governance and progressive “education” = a liberal lock on and the promotion of both.
“Times, they are a changing....”
Methinks the pigs are squealing. Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out!
For public institutions, many of the professors and administrators have forgotten their mission and their order in the scheme of things. They work for the taxpayer, they are paid by the taxpayer.
When their service to the taxpayer becomes the seed that poisons the minds of the taxpayers’ children, the only recourse is to invoke control over them in a manner that will get their attention. Tenure and governance is that citizen’s 2X4 with the Legislature and the Governor handing it to them.
Professors going back to teaching? What is the world coming to?
It’s unbelievable incestuous.
unbelievably
Before it passes, include in the legislation a return of mandatory teaching of cursive writing and penmanship skills.
That would be nice.
It’s pretty much all typing now - with thumbs.
In the military we used to call guys like that a ROAD - Retired on Active Duty.
It’s been run their way for a long long time. Let’s try Walker’s way. Everything he’s touched has turned to gold.
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