A group of faculty and staff met last Saturday afternoon to discuss these questions. The individuals represented a reasonable cross-section of academic staff and faculty (in length of service) and most of the employee organizations such as PROFS, UFAS and academic staff governance groups. The meeting was organized by Wisconsin University Union (WUU) for the purpose of assessing interest in a campus-wide organization and figuring out what that organization would do.

There was a unanimous opinion that an employee organization is needed. Many of the discussion participants were members/leaders of the staff and faculty governance organizations and spoke to the limitations of those organizations. Academic staff discussed the inability of the Academic Staff Assembly to address most of the major issues facing the staff e.g. layoffs, promotions, pay inequities. And noted the low level of participation and interaction with those they purport to represent. Faculty noted that the Senate failed to take a strong position on the Public Authority proposal until it was effectively dead. Given the structural ties between the Faculty Senate and PROFS, that organization is often hamstrung from positions that most members of PROFS endorse.

Both governing institutions and their related lobbying arms, PROFS and ASPRO, have low revenue. ASPRO also has a very low percentage of the academic staff as members which limits their capacity.  Also, neither organization has played a role in representing individual employees in job-related disputes and as a result has little experience with some of the major issues facing employees.

If there was agreement on the need for such an organization, there was less agreement on what it would do. The discussion focused on two elements, internal objectives (employee-based, campus policy development) and external directed objectives (legislative, public information).

The main points raised in the discussion of campus objectives were:

• Participating in/ monitoring the development of a new personnel system. Most people don’t know UW employees lost civil service protections in the new budget or what it might mean. A new personnel system is being created over the next year and we should be engaged in that process.
• Whistleblower protections. This was a statutory protection that was lost with the civil service law.
• Advocating for institutional integrity. This includes being “budget watchdog.” We’re watching the action so you don’t have to.
• Protecting rights of individual employees. The grievance committee process is weak and at best deeply flawed. Most people don’t know what to do. Effective employee representation can serve an important function.
• Improve rights of academic staff in regard to layoffs, transfers, etc.
• Advise employees. Many employees don’t know where to go for reliable information on important personnel decisions such as retirement. Having a practical and immediate function builds membership support too.

Some of the external roles and objectives were:

• Positive public information on UW. Our problems in compensation go beyond the immediate budget shortfall. Popular opinion of UW-Madison is low.
• Support the lobbying effort. Given the number of affected employees, the lobbying effort is low and can benefit from additional support.
• Working with other UW campuses. We are not alone in this mess and need to work with other faculty and staff on other campuses. It appears that the current inter-campus faculty committee has been disbanded by the UWS.

Obviously, more ideas were brought up. But the discussion turned to how do we do this? It was suggested that we do a survey of staff and faculty to directly determine their interests and priorities. It was agreed that we could do that in the next few weeks. Following the completion of the survey we will meet again, hopefully bring more people into the discussion and continue the process. If you would like to participate or be kept in the loop let me know at dmahrens@gmail.com.

DMA

Save the date!

Saturday, Sept 24 — 10 AM- 3 PM

Building an Effective Organization for Faculty and Staff

If you read Sifting and Winnowing then you recognize that the events of last semester underscore the need for a viable organization of University staff and faculty. The Wisconsin University Union (WUU) invites you to a planning discussion about what that might look like. We’d like to hear from campus employees what they’d like that organization to focus on and do.

What issues should this organization prioritize?

• Improve compensation?
• Protect academic freedoms?
• Secure employee protections on layoffs, promotion, etc?
• Re-gain right to collectively bargain?
• Retain rights of self-governing institutions?
• Other?

What function/activity should this organization prioritize?

• Provide accurate and timely information on issues affecting employees?
• Advocate for individual employees in workplace disputes?
• Conduit information to decision-makers at state and campus level?
• Develop political capacity to advocate for campus interests such as lobbying or organizing a PAC?
• Work with similar grassroots groups on other UW campuses?
• Other?

We intend this to be a wide-open/no-preconceptions meeting — a frank (and fun) discussion of what’s really needed and how best to organize getting it. Please join other individual and organizational activists to discuss and plan an effective organization designed to meet our real challenges.

• On-campus location
• Ample food and drink available throughout!
• (More precise agenda to follow shortly)
• RSVP: dmahrens@wisc.edu / 334-1156

Higher education is changing. We see this in how students approach learning, the infusion of technologies into our everyday work habits and the financial stresses on our organization. Biddy is a strong leader who is future focused, she recognizes that changes are needed and fights to make them happen. There is no question that our leadership and administration must be vigilant and continually examine whether changes should be made that would enhance our endeavors. But, running a university is a people business. You must take into account the people of the organization or risk becoming irrelevant.

While Biddy knew where she wanted to take the university, her administration sometimes lacked transparency of plans and process. Plans to make fundamental changes in who we are were not always openly debated. Consider the proposed plan to reorganize our research enterprise by separating graduate education from our research endeavors. The PVL for a vice chancellor for research was drafted prior to engaging the campus in a discussion. The negative response to this plan resulted in a series of townhall meetings that presented the plan, rather than providing an opportunity for open debate. And while the points of the New Badger Partnership where openly presented, the plan to separate the UW from the system came as a surprise to campus. Again, the campus engaged in a discussion of whether this action would be good for the campus. The campus hardly discussed the process and transparency of the Biddy administration that lead us on this path.

It has been reported that UW System President Kevin Reilly will name the interim chancellor but has “no hard deadline for when he wants to name the interim chancellor.” We need an interim chancellor now. One who will work with and lead us with vision and passion in an open, transparent manner in order to enable the mission and vision of the institution. A transparent decision making process must be in place to support a shared governance model that supports good decision making throughout the organization. Faculty must be engaged in addressing these problems—both individually and in collective governance bodies. Biddy is moving on in August. We need to move on now.

I was among those faculty who greeted with enthusiasm her arrival as our new chancellor in September 2008, a scant three years ago.  And a bit like those for whom the Obama administration failed to live up to (possibly unrealistic) expectations, I am among the most disappointed today.

For despite continued broad and enthusiastic support among many faculty, students, and alumni, Biddy Martin also came to have a fair number of detractors, especially with regard to her attitude toward shared governance, which some — including this author — perceived as stubborn, arrogant and divisive.  This attitude was especially manifest in her aggressive (yet ultimately unsuccessful) top-down campaigns first to restructure the Graduate School and, not longer after, to split the UW-Madison campus from the rest of the UW-System.

There was no reason why either proposal needed to engender the alarm and bitter controversy that they did, had they only been handled differently.   Unfortunately, in neither case were we given much reason to believe that the chancellor was interested in encouraging a careful, nuanced analysis of the pros and cons of each proposal, let alone serious consideration of alternative solutions to the problems she identified.

While at other public universities today, this kind of top-down, corporate-style administration has become the norm rather than the exception,   UW-Madison has — rightly, in my opinion — resisted the trend.  And I believe that our long tradition of bottom-up shared governance has been a major reason for our success, not an impediment to it.

But even for those who have been critical of her management style, Chancellor Martin’s announcement of her departure for Amherst is cause for sadness, not celebration.   And for all campus citizens, it should be an occasion for sober, thoughtful reflection on the opportunities that were missed, on the unnecessary battles that were fought, and on the energy and resources that were diverted from our most pressing tasks.

Most importantly, it is occasion to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, internalize the lessons of the past three years, and  redirect our intellectual resources and energy toward building an even brighter future for UW-Madison despite challenging economic and political times.

I hope that our next chancellor will have all of the admirable qualities that Biddy Martin has.  But I would add to that wish list the single quality that I believe is more essential for a chancellor at UW-Madison than at any other campus in the world, and that is an abiding commitment to the tradition of shared sifting and winnowing in the search for truth and for solutions to the thorny modern problems facing public higher education in general and UW-Madison in particular.

I wish Biddy Martin well.

Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education

In addition to the other issues raised, many of which have been well-covered, I find the following excerpt interesting:

As Gaye Tuchman explains in Wannabe U (2009), a case study in the sorrows of academic corporatization, deans, provosts and presidents are no longer professors who cycle through administrative duties and then return to teaching and research. Instead, they have become a separate stratum of managerial careerists, jumping from job to job and organization to organization like any other executive: isolated from the faculty and its values, loyal to an ethos of short-term expansion, and trading in the business blather of measurability, revenue streams, mission statements and the like. They do not have the long-term health of their institutions at heart. They want to pump up the stock price (i.e., U.S. News and World Report ranking) and move on to the next fat post.

Ideologically, Huebsch is (by his own admission) joined at the hip with Scott Walker, so we can safely take this as an authoritative statement of what the governor’s office really wants for UW-Madison.

The Public Authority may be legislatively dead (or at least on ice), but we would do well to keep Scott Walker’s ultimate objectives in mind as we contemplate any “gifts” offered to UW-Madison and/or the UW System by the GOP-controlled state government.

And we would do especially well to study the example of Texas, where the struggle for ideological control of two university systems is coming to a head, as described in an exceptionally disturbing report by the Chronicle of Higher Education

Conservative Group’s Influence on Texas Higher-Education Policy Takes Center Stage Again

In case you don’t have a Chronicle subscription, here’s just a taste of what we learn:

The influence of a conservative movement that would apply a greater business orientation to Texas higher education came into stark relief this week, when the chancellor of one of the state’s university systems [Michael D. McKinney, Texas A&M University] unexpectedly resigned and the other seemed to push back against regents who have embraced what some call a heavy-handed ideological agenda.

and

Dr. McKinney has provided no reasons for his retirement, but The Dallas Morning News, citing anonymous sources close to the chancellor, reported Wednesday that Dr. McKinney was forced out for not being “assertive” enough in carrying out the foundation’s ideas, which have been embraced by Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, and some of the regents he appointed.

In the current political climate in Wisconsin, the institutions and traditions that protect us from going the way of Texas are fragile indeed.

Complacency is not an option. Resignation is not an option. Wishful thinking is not an option.

Vigilance, and bold defense of academic freedom and of the unique Wisconsin tradition of true shared governance, are how we will preserve the qualities that make UW-Madison unique in the world.

Here’s the key passage:

… Mike Huebsch says he and Gov. Scott Walker remain hopeful that the guv’s proposed split of UW-Madison from the rest of the university system will pass.

Speaking in Brookfield Wednesday at a gathering of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce, he told the group it would bring a free-market approach to the university system similar to that of a corporate business. [emphasis added]

I now have two burning questions for Chancellor Biddy Martin, for our Faculty Senate,  and for other prominent and enthusiastic supporters of the public authority plan:

1. Do you have any plausible basis whatsoever for doubting Huebsch’s characterization of the public authority plan as regards the actual intentions of those who inserted it into the budget bill?
2. Do you support this vision for UW-Madison?

If you answer “no” to both questions, then the most obvious interpretation is that your endorsement of Scott Walker’s public authority plan reflected a grave lapse in judgment and due diligence on your part.

I look forward to hearing the arguments for a more generous interpretation.

-GP

But who knew that the first branch campus of Koch University already opened in Tallahassee, Florida, way back in 2008?  Only now, in May 10th’s St. Petersburg Times, is the arrangement finally getting wider attention:

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University’s economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting “political economy and free enterprise.”

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they’ve funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it’s not happy with the faculty’s choice or if the hires don’t meet “objectives” set by Koch during annual evaluations.

If the scenario described above alarms you, then you should (1) sit down, and (2) read the entire article.  And then you should ask yourself (and others) what safeguards, if any, exist to prevent similar deals from being concluded here.   Not “assurances”, mind you, safeguards.

Vague argument, elitist attitude hurt UW-Madison autonomy plan

It seems unlikely that Mr. Bush reads Sifting and Winnowing, yet he concisely and  eloquently raises many of the same concerns about both the goals of the NBP, and the process by which it is being sold, that have been voiced by a variety of  contributors to this page  and elsewhere (e.g., Education Optimists) over the past few weeks.

In his closing remarks, he appropriately takes NBP advocates/salespersons/lobbyists to task for both their politically tone-deaf elitism and their failure to promote a healthier and more balanced discussion of UW-Madison’s options:

Why do they think so many legislators of the governor’s own party have turned against one of his major proposals? Do they really believe arguing that the other UW campuses drag Madison down is an effective message for winning statewide support?

Wisconsin needs a serious debate over the future of higher education. It involves consideration of all the options. It requires credible leaders articulating a statewide vision. And it deserves at least as much consideration as the UW System merger had four decades ago.

Unfortunately, the debate over the public authority proposal has none of these qualities.

Amen to all of the above.

This Bloomberg article documents how that model has worked out for other universities, and it’s not a pretty picture:

Schools Find Ayn Rand Can’t Be Shrugged as Donors Build Courses

If you support the public authority and believe that private donations will be an important source of new revenue, please explain to the rest of us how we will avoid the same fate. Or at least explain why we should embrace that fate.

Either way, it’s past time for more honesty, more facts, more figures, less wishful thinking, and fewer empty platitudes.

- GP