"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.
Wisconsin legislative committee moves against University tenure.
FReep Mail me if you want on or off, this wisconsin interest ping list.
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.
Methinks the pigs are squealing. Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out!
The privileged class is whining as they may actually have to work if tenure is done away with.
If only...
LOL - 'top faculty'? The PC pushers who should have been selling shoes in K-Mart? Gimme a break. Tenure was designed to protect free speech - those teaching today attempt to shut down speech. Group think types are a dime a dozen...
What Walker and the WI GOP are doing is, first, eliminate provisions of state law that prevent administrators from taking actions they want to take and, second, cut the budget and let the administrators decide where to implement the cuts.
By removing the provisions of state law that were in the way, they neutralize the administrators’ common complaint that “our hands are tied,” and let them do their jobs.
Of course, it’s also payback for the liberal UW System fighting Walker and the WI GOP tooth and nail for years. As I’ve said many times in here, Walker goes after the Left’s funding sources, which are almost always our tax dollars.
>>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.<<
I wanna have his baby! And I’m a GUY!
What’s not to love?