mortiz055

I'm tired of band-aids on university policy problems that never heal the underlying wounds, so I asked that we faculty do some new things in a piece that appeared in  Inside Higher Ed  last week.  Called "Time for a New Strategy,"  it argues that defenses of tenure and academic freedom will increasingly fail, as they did in Wisconsin this year, unless we call for the same protections for all employees. The big advantage, I argue there, would be that we faculty would no longer base our claim to academic freedom on an exceptional status that most of the public doesn't accept. Another advantage would be that we would no longer have to rely on our university boards and executives to protect us, which is also not working well.  A third advantage would be that we could broaden our claims to public benefits beyond the competitive excellence that we generally mention first as tenure's product. For a crib on all this, the Wisconsin-Madison School Education does a better ...

By Jennifer Ruth, Portland State University             Tenure is what makes shared governance real and shared governance is one of the primary reasons faculty need tenure so it’s no surprise that the “ University of Wisconsin System Omnibus Motion ” explicitly guts shared governance while going after tenure: “ Delete current law specifying that the faculty of each institution be vested with responsibility for the immediate governance of such institution and actively participate in institutional policy development.” Governor Walker’s target audience is not the higher education community: it is the Republican Party. In Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education (2015), William Bowen and Eugene Tobin—two men with long careers in higher education— want much the same thing as Walker but since we (people involved with higher education in one way or another) are their audience, they’ve worded...

As expected, Wisconsin Republicans passed , and the UW Regents implemented , a budget that will impose approximately 250 million dollars in cuts on the system over the next two years.  In addition, the state legislature--at the urging of Governor Scott Walker--has effectively ended the tenure system and shared governance in the state system. Although a good deal of attention has been focused on the Legislature's plan to move tenure protection from Statute to Regental policy that is not the most significant change they are imposing. Instead they are redefining tenure out of existence.  As laid out in the " University of Wisconsin System Omnibus Motion " the University's ability to fire tenured professors (that is to say without individual cause) will no longer be limited to financial exigency.  Instead, the state has determined that the University can fire "any faculty or academic staff appointment when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program...