January 17th, 2010
Yesterday, the office of Governor Paterson (New York) issued this press release: http://www.ny.gov/governor/press/press_01151001.html
The full text is reproduced below for the convenience of S&W readers. While we have not had time to digest the details, our impression at first reading is that the problems facing the SUNY system are very comparable to those facing us here at UW and that similar dramatic action and creative leadership are urgently needed. As always, reader comments are invited. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in State-University Relations, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget, The University System, Uncategorized | No Comments »
January 7th, 2010
The following letters from the administration provide another perspective on the recently reported animal lab citations:
January 4, 2010
To: Deans and Directors
From: Provost Paul M. DeLuca Jr. and Graduate School Dean Martin Cadwallader
Re: USDA report on UW-Madison research animal programs
Recently, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) conducted a routine, unannounced inspection of UW-Madison research programs that involve animals used in research.
The inspection found a small number of instances where the university was not in full compliance with the federal rules and regulations.
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Posted in Graduate School, Medicine and Public Health, The UW-Madison Campus | 2 Comments »
January 5th, 2010
The education supplement of the NY TIMES 1/3/10 included a report on the National Survey of Student Engagement in 1200 college and universities. The Times reported on about 100 (visit this page, scroll down and look for heading ‘Engagement’ in the center column).
The survey examines “engagement” in significant facets of university life: time spent in preparing for class, extracurricular activity and for purposes here “quality of relationship with faculty” (helpfulness and availability).
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Posted in Instruction, The UW-Madison Campus | 1 Comment »
January 4th, 2010
The Chronicle of Higher Education has just published a piece entitled Needed: a National Strategy to Preserve Public Research Universities that should be mandatory reading for those concerned about the future of UW-Madison. Unfortunately, we cannot legally reprint the entire article here, and access is for subscribers only (and, rumor has it, those accessing via the library system from a UW account). The following key quotes, however, summarize the problem: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in State-University Relations, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget, The University System | 2 Comments »
January 2nd, 2010
Those readers who have been following the Graduate School restructuring controversy are aware that, in response to widespread criticism of the process, all action on the proposed restructuring has been put on hold by the administration pending reports from ad hoc committees assembled by the Faculty Senate and by the Academic Staff Executive Committee (ASEC). Those reports were due by New Year’s Eve, 2009, and their public release is therefore anticipated in the very near future, perhaps even this week.
We will be very surprised if the reports endorse the wholesale restructuring pushed by Provost Paul DeLuca and Chancellor Biddy Martin. We will be equally surprised if either the provost or the chancellor readily back down from their plan, regardless of what the reports contain.
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Posted in Restructuring proposal, The UW-Madison Campus | 6 Comments »
December 21st, 2009
PROFS is lobbying for what’s known as the Smart Furlough proposal, which would exempt state and university employees who are paid with federal and state funds from the state-imposed furloughs.
Please click here for the complete article from the PROFS website.
Please comment either here or on the PROFS page, or both.
Posted in Compensation, The University Budget | 1 Comment »
December 2nd, 2009
In the summer of 1996, I stood at the edge of what may well have been the largest and most expensive construction zone of the past half-century of human existence: Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. In the wake of the fall of the Wall in 1989, the entire war-damaged, Cold War-neglected city center was being razed and completely rebuilt from the ground up.
Never in my life have I witnessed such a vast beehive of cranes, cement trucks, earth moving equipment, and, of course, thousands of construction workers, all swarming over vast tracts of excavated urban real estate and dozens of steel building frames in various stages of completion. In one massive effort, 21st century architectural wonders were springing up everywhere to evict, once and for all, the lingering ghosts of 1945.
Yesterday, I walked once again (as I do almost daily) through another construction zone that never fails to remind me of Potsdamer Platz, albeit on a much smaller scale: the UW-Madison campus. And on that occasion the same questions occurred to me that always do:
Posted in Facilities, The UW-Madison Campus, The University Budget | No Comments »
November 27th, 2009
For those of us on the faculty, the concept of “furlough days” is as disconnected from reality as the concept of “sick days.”
Every month we have to fill out and submit a form that lists the specific hours on specific days that we took “sick leave.” The bureaucratic fiction behind this ritual is that faculty work 9-5 days and 40-hour weeks and that any day missed because of a cold is a day of productivity lost forever.
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Posted in Compensation, Retention, State-University Relations | 1 Comment »
November 26th, 2009
In our quest to further enhance the visibility of this site, we now have a Twitter and Facebook presence. If you are a Twitter or Facebook user, follow our status updates to get real-time notifications of new posts and other information. And if you are a Facebook user, you can become a fan (click on the button to the right of the name) to show your support.
Here is the Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sifting-and-Winnowing/187340228469
Here is the Twitter page: http://twitter.com/SiftandWinnow
Please consider sharing the above links with your own Twitter and Facebook friends.
And happy Thanksgiving!
Posted in Site Information | No Comments »
November 23rd, 2009
Based at least on the number of people who publicly referred to Sifting and Winnowing during the restructuring controversy over the past month-and-a-half, it seems clear that this site is taken seriously as a place to go for informed independent commentary on campus policy issues. We look forward to bringing in many new contributors and to covering a wider range of issues in coming weeks and months. As always, we welcome suggestions for both, and we encourage unsolicited contributions — see this page for details.
We have now added a new feature to this site, one that is intended to complement the main S&W page: an open community discussion forum for UW-Madison that allows anyone to post informally about almost anything without moderator involvement (except in clear cases of spamming or other abuse). From the main S&W home page, the link to the new forum is found under “Sifting and Winnowing Resources” in the sidebar on the right.
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Posted in Future topics, Site Information, The UW-Madison Campus | No Comments »