Free Republic

Scott Walker is advocating a reform in Wisconsin that could have more profound an impact on America than anything we have seen in a long time. Establishment leftism depends upon institutions that support and promote its philosophy and agenda using our money. The most obnoxious offender is Big Education, especially tenured professors who mock our values even as they rob our pockets. Tenured professors are impossible to remove, they need do almost no work, and these goons spout Marxist nonsense and abuse conservative students with impunity. Even worse, overpaid professors and bloated state universities not only squeeze the taxpayers in...

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Four years after taking union rights away from teachers and other public workers in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker now wants to strip job protections for University of Wisconsin professors in a move he likens to the 2011 law that made him a national figure and set up his expected presidential run. Eliminating tenure in state law, as Walker proposed in January and a Republican-controlled legislative committee approved earlier this month, is part of a larger overhaul of higher education policy that he is talking about to Republican voters around the country. Walker and Republican backers defend...

Scott Walker’s war on Wisconsin’s public colleges will result in lower quality and higher debt for students and families, which is precisely what his right wing political patrons at the Bradley Foundation have been planning for decades. Wisconsin students have experienced first hand Scott Walker’s assault on public higher education over the last four years. Double-digit tuition increases and historic, unprecedented budget cuts have resulted in declining enrollment, rising costs, and exploding student loan debt for millions of Wisconsin families. The groundwork for Walker’s crusade against public higher education in Wisconsin was first being laid as Walker began his political...

“Bad news always seems to drop on Fridays,” Dave Vanness, an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, wrote on a blog which appeared on the blogroll that the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) maintains. “Friday May 29, 2015 was a particularly bad news day for Wisconsin and for all of us who believe in academic freedom,” he avers. “On that day, Joint Finance Committee of the State of Wisconsin passed Omnibus Motion #521 on a 12-4 party-line vote, including a $250 million biennium budget cut to UW System, major changes to shared governance (a huge topic...

Scott Walker, in hot pursuit of the Republican nomination for president, knows no fear of sacred cows. He is attempting to reform the concept of permanent faculty appointments at Wisconsin’s publicly financed universities. The governor wants to repeat his earlier surprising victory in which a conservative chief executive in a very blue state took on the increasingly powerful and increasingly political teachers’ unions, and trimmed their empty sails. Mr. Walker’s successful campaign to put a rein on the teachers’ unions — to eliminate the obvious corruption of unions contributing to politicians’ campaigns and getting in return raises in salaries —...

It is extremely difficult to underestimate the impact of this move on higher education in the United States. A comparable event would be Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the aircraft controllers’ strike in 1981 by firing 12,000 workers, which completely changed the balance of power between labor on the one hand and government and corporations on the other. The breaking of the strike coincided with the rise of conservative policies as the guiding force of American governance; in the decades since, unions have become increasingly weak, as epitomized by Walker’s demolishing of collective bargaining rights for public employee unions in 2011.Under...

[SNIP].....Wisconsin is rare for including tenure provisions for professors in its statutes rather than in policies set by regents or similar boards. “We are directing the Board of Regents to develop a policy,just as there is in so many states,” Ms. Harsdorf said. “It’s just a matter of recognizing the ability for chancellors and campuses to administer and manage their operations.”Along with tenure,“shared governance” has been a central feature of academic life in universities generally, giving faculty members the primary responsibility for decisions about matters like curriculum, choice of subject matter,instructional methods,faculty status and research. Under the proposed changes in...

"...During a confusing and often tense meeting Thursday at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee,a committee of the UW System Board of Regents recommended the full board support moving tenure policy from state law into board policy. A GOP plan by the Legislature's budget-writing Joint Finance Committee took tenure out of the law, as proposed by Gov. Scott Walker.The full Legislature still must take action on the GOP plan as part of the budget, but the plan is expected to be adopted.Regent Tony Evers,state superintendent of public instruction, failed to get enough votes during the regents committee meeting to formally ask lawmakers...

[Lots and lots of italicized words and phrases used in this "the sky is falling" diatribe, can be found at the source] This column has wasted enough space on the “breathtaking stupidity” of an inordinate majority of the American people. However, although one would hope, and actually expects that politicians would possibly be slightly above the “breathtaking” point of stupidity; it is certainly not the case in Wisconsin. It is true that Republicans typically contrive some seriously stupid agendas and policies, including banning other politicians and state employees from even uttering the words “climate change,” but Wisconsin Republicans have exceeded...

Already dismayed by prospective cuts to the University of Wisconsin System, higher education observers now suggest the state could become an academic pariah if the Legislature scales back two treasured tenets of academia—tenure and shared governance.The impact would be crushing and far-reaching if language in a GOP plan wins support of the full Legislature and becomes law, said Rudy Fichtenbaum,president of the American Association of University Professors.That effectively will be the end of tenure in Wisconsin," Fichtenbaum said. "I'm not aware of any state that has gone this far...I can't imagine anybody taking a job there unless they can't get...

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...

In what is apparently a vogue of Republican state legislators exercising misplaced vendettas against college professors, Iowa Sen. Mark Chelgren recently made headlines when he introduced Senate File 64, “an Act relating to the teaching effectiveness and employment of professors” at Iowa public institutions. Each year, the bill stipulates, any faculty who fails “to attain a minimum threshold of performance” based solely on student evaluations would be automatically fired regardless of rank or tenure. Lest you think that firing professors based on a questionable assessment metric affords them too much dignity, rest assured there is more. Some beleaguered governing body...

At Marquette University, if you write a blog criticizing a student teacher for stifling the speech of a student who doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage, you can lose your job. Commission a mural of a convicted cop killer, well, that’s just diversity of ideas. Yes, Marquette administrators had the mural of black militant Assata Shakur removed Sunday evening, but not until, ironically, long-time Marquette political science professor John McAdams broke the story on his “Marquette Warrior” blog. That’s the same John McAdams who has been suspended from teaching since November, when the political conservative and frequent critic of Marquette administration...

During his farewell address to the Justice Department Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder referred to his tenure at the Department of Justice as its “golden age” and in the same mold as Robert Kennedy’s storied tenure.. Loretta Lynch will take over the department following the Senate’s 56-43 confirmation vote Thursday. HOLDER: I said earlier that when we celebrated Robert Kennedy’s 50th anniversary of his swearing in 2011, people said that was the golden age for the United States Department of Justice. Well, I think 50 years from now, maybe even sooner than that, people will look at the work you...

A lawsuit by parents who claim that tenure statutes undermine constitutional guarantees of an adequate public education has survived a motion to dismiss. Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Philip Minardo determined that Davids v. State of New York, 101105/14, meets "minimal" standards for going forward at an early stage of the litigation and that the plantiffs—11 parents and two children—have standing. The judge said plaintiffs have shown that they may be entitled to relief "under any reasonable view of the facts stated." He also said that children named among the plaintiffs are "clearly" within the zone of a protected interest...

10.1 Procedures for Dealing with Academic Misconduct in Research and Scholarship Unethical behavior in research and scholarship strikes at the heart of the scholarly and educational enterprise. A shared understanding of expectations and responsibilities is, therefore, critical — not only to the quality of the research enterprise but also to the collegial life of this community. Academic misconduct can take many forms, including fabrication or falsification of data, theft of ideas or direct plagiarism, and deliberate interference with the integrity of the work of others. Whatever the form, academic misconduct is behavior that may lead to a variety of disciplinary...

When a California judge threw out the state’s teacher tenure laws, he sent shock waves throughout the K-12 educational establishment nationwide and gave hope to American parents from coast to coast. “On a warm day in early June, a Los Angeles County trial-court judge, Rolf M. Treu, pink-cheeked beneath a trim white beard, dropped a bombshell on the American public-school system,” Haley Sweetland Edwards reported in Time magazine on November 3, 2014. “Ruling in Vergara v. California, Treu struck down five decades-old California laws governing teacher tenure and other job protections on the grounds that they violate the state’s constitution.”...

I guess I’ve been a little off my game lately, butt in my defense, I hadn’t even noticed until Little Mo pointed out that I’ve been wasting a lot of valuable Ethernet time/space yacking about racist topics like ISIS/ISIL/IS/ISZ, Benghazi, IRS, Fast & Furious and how Putin is rebuilding the Soviet Union one country at a time. As a result, he reminded me that I’ve been giving short shrift to the more important issues facing our country, like renegade schools that are dumping Lady M’s “Healthy Lunch & Snack Programs.” Because kids just won’t eat them. So they’re hungry all...

After the Vergara v. California decision in California’s state Supreme Court, which held that key job protections for teachers are unconstitutional, anti-union advocates everywhere began spawning copycat lawsuits. But while reformers may genuinely want to fix education for everyone, their efforts will only worsen diversity in the teaching corps. The truth is that an attack on bad teacher tenure laws (and ineffective teachers in general) is actually an attack on black professionals. If the Vergara clones succeed, black children will lose effective teachers and the black community will lose even more middle-class jobs. Black workers are most likely to hold...

Something has gone wrong in our civil service. Consider some recent developments. The IRS was forced to pay the National Organization for Marriage $50,000 for leaking the group’s donor list. Tea-party organizations and donors were much more likely than others to be audited by the IRS. This misbehavior was not the work of a few rogue employees in Cincinnati. In general, the IRS stalled tea-party applications for status as 501(c)(4) groups. Meanwhile, April Sands, an employee of the FEC, recently pleaded guilty to violating the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from campaigning at the office. Ms. Sands, who worked...