Posted on 06/10/2015 1:06:50 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
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 — focused national attention on him. No other governor, with perhaps the exception of Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio (who’s also running for president), has been capable of such feats. Can lightning strike twice?
The rising cost of academic tuition, increasing much faster than inflation or the depreciation of the dollar, has become a national crisis. Only professors, as the faculty lounge wit observes, can afford to send their children to college. But it’s no joke. One “solution” talked up by some politicians is that maybe it’s not so important for everyone to go to college. But perhaps the place to start the discussion is the proposition that maybe it’s not so important for the professors to get lifetime guaranteed employment. It’s rarely available in state and federal judicial systems. Volkswagen mechanics, body-and-fender men, truck drivers and motel housekeepers rarely get it. What’s so special, except to themselves, about professors?
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
If the common worker is going to lose out to H1B’s, why can’t teachers?
Boston College professor of history: They really are the party of stupid: The real story behind Scott Walker’s war on higher education
"...Walker’s Act 10 for higher education is not just about tenure. Its attack on the university that gave birth to the original Wisconsin Experiment is the logical outcome of eighty years of maligning universities as hotbeds of socialism in an attempt to undercut workers’ influence in government. It is a decisive power play in the struggle over the nature of the American government. Should workers have political power, or should a few rich men alone determine government policies? Walker’s stand is clear. He has long worked in lockstep with ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, through which corporations write legislation that goes to legislatures for approval. He is backed by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have indicated they would like to see him in the White House..."
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AlJazeera ^ | June 5, 2015 | Mark LeVine, professor of history (Middle Eastern Studies) UC Irvine:
".......Think about the stifling of the debate over climate change, with states such as Florida and — surprise! — Wisconsin barring scientists from discussing actual science. Or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, research on the economy, sexual health, drugs and the “war on terrorism.” The relevance of tenure, shared (as opposed to corporate-bought) governance and academic freedom has never been greater.
In particular, shared governance has been a bedrock principle of higher education, through which faculty members have meaningfully participated in the institutional governance of their universities alongside other staffers and senior managers. Together with tenure, shared governance means that faculty members can have a voice beyond the particular departments, disciplines and schools in which they teach.
It is not surprising, then, that conservatives — who have long attacked the notions of tenure, shared governance and academic freedom more broadly — would now set their eyes on Walker’s Wisconsin (it’s worth noting here that Walker did not graduate from college) as the moment to break the institution of tenure, based on the same corporate-dominated neoliberal principles that supported the near fatal weakening of unions a generation ago. In fact, as University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee English professor Richard Grusin wrote on his blog, Ragman’s Circles, the “daisy chain of Republican power” now extends from the governor to the regents he appoints, the system president they appoint and the chancellors he appoints.
There is little doubt that, should Wisconsin succeed, corporatized boards of private universities and state legislatures in the majority of Republican-governed states will jump on the bandwagon and move with lightning speed to remove tenure protections, shared governance and, ultimately, academic freedom protections from their universities. ......." - Killing tenure is academia’s point of no return
May 27, 2015: Provision slipped into budget dilutes teacher license rules "Anyone with a bachelor's degree could be hired and licensed to teach sixth- through 12th-grade English, math, social studies or science in Wisconsin under a provision slipped into the state budget proposal by a Republican lawmaker.
And any person with relevant experience — even a high school dropout — could be licensed to teach in any other non-core academic subject in those grades, according to the provision."....
The UW system IS a hotbed of socialism. Especially at the largest colleges in the system. Madison, Milwaukee, and the 2nd tier LaCrosse, Green Bay, Eau Claire and Whitewater.
"Strangely, it all started with No Child Left Behind. School systems everywhere scrambled to find certified teachers in math and science. East Baton Rouge Parish, La., was no exception. Administrators didn’t know where to turn. Then they met Lourdes Navarro, a Filipino-American whose company, Universal Placement International, advertised high-quality teachers from the Philippines.............
It’s been a lucrative business since 2001, when a California-based agency supplied some of the first Filipino teachers to Boston Public Schools. They were considered so important that the late Senator Ted Kennedy intervened to get their visas before the school year began.
Since then, more than 60,000 H-1B visas have been approved for school teachers, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services data. There are 600 Filipino teachers who paid up to $8,000 each in fees to work in Baltimore schools. In El Paso, two school administrators were sentenced to probation for their role in a human trafficking case in which 273 Filipinos paid $10,000 apiece for teaching jobs, but arrived to find fewer than 100 positions available.
In East Baton Rouge, at least, the story has a happy ending. With support from the American Federation of Teachers and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Cruz and her colleagues sued Navarro and won $4.5 million. Navarro claimed bankruptcy, so they don’t expect the money. But the verdict means they are free. They don’t owe her anymore....."
"........"The Wisconsin Idea is the policy developed in the American state of Wisconsin that fosters public universities' contributions to the state: "to the government in the forms of serving in office, offering advice about public policy, providing information and exercising technical skill, and to the citizens in the forms of doing research directed at solving problems that are important to the state and conducting outreach activities". A second facet of the philosophy is the effort "to ensure well-constructed legislation aimed at benefiting the greatest number of people". During the Progressive Era, proponents of the Wisconsin Idea saw the state as "the laboratory for democracy", resulting in legislation that served as a model for other states and the federal government."......
*ping*
"....Going into Tuesday's midterm elections, education reformers thought it was time to clean house. And with nearly every teachers union-backed candidate failing to secure a win, it seems reformers got their wish.
Even in states where Republican governors had implemented policies unpopular among teachers unions, and after those union members threw their money and voter-mobilizing muscle behind Democratic challengers, the union-backed candidates lost governor's races in Kansas, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and Florida. ...."
Academia has long had “publish or perish” as a requirement prior to getting tenure. After tenure, academics usually do nothing useful and don’t actually teach - often they let/make their aides teach their classes.
I have no problem with eliminating tenure and implementing ‘teaching or termination’ for those that are supposed to teach but can’t (because they suck at it) or don’t (because they are lazy.)
This has most definitely reached the tipping point.
And they get grants to publish a lot of stuff that's causing our nation to "perish."
Studies on the environment, education, healthcare - you name it, these studies are being pumped out of these liberal hot houses called higher education (studies published in house or in publications like "Science," where they're "peer reviewed" by like minded ideologues), while opposite opinions are blocked.
People are told that there is consensus among scientists and that if it comes out of a university it's sacrosanct - if you object, question or in anyway disagree you're label as anti-[fill in the blank] and will be shamed and shunned.
Science has become dangerously politicized.
It’s so they can’t ever be fired for being flaming Marxists.
This fleshes it out somewhat:
Losing Hope in Wisconsin - June 5, 2015 - By Colleen Flaherty
With Wisconsin legislators poised to remove public university tenure from state statute, many faculty members were hopeful that a Board of Regents committee would respond forcefully Thursday. But the committee meeting ended with faculty leaders feeling that they had been let down.
The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents’ Education Committee did vote to preserve tenure in the system regulations even if it is removed from state statute, but many professors said the committee could have done more to oppose proposed legislation making it much easier for faculty members in good standing to be laid off.
“This was a missed opportunity,” and one that increases the likelihood that the full state Legislature will approve new limits on faculty power approved last week by its powerful Joint Finance Committee, said Noel Radomski, director and associate researcher for the Wisconsin Center of the Advancement of Postsecondary Education at Madison.
Radomski, who attended Thursday’s meeting, said the regents could have “sent a message to the [state] assembly, senate and governor that they disagree with what’s been proposed, and the fact that they didn’t is very sad and depressing.”
David Vanness, an associate professor of population health sciences at Madison who presented the Education Committee with a 2,800-signature petition opposing the changes, also said he was disappointed.
“For a while I thought we were going to have some progress,” he said, noting that some regents supported the idea of formally asking the Legislature to reject proposed language broadening the circumstances under which tenured faculty members may be laid off or terminated. In the end, however, the committee voted to refer a basic tenure policy to the full board for a vote today, with the proviso that a board committee will create its own layoff and termination procedures.
“I’d say it doesn’t look good,” Vanness added, “unless some political pressure is brought to bear and people consider what the economic impact would be to the university system and the state of Wisconsin.”
Last Friday, in a surprise to many, the Legislature’s influential Joint Finance Committee passed an omnibus budget motion striking tenure from state law, effectively leaving its fate up to the regents. The motion also puts new limits on the legal definition of shared governance and, perhaps most concerning to critics, includes lengthy new procedures for eliminating the jobs of even tenured faculty members.
Currently, in line with widely followed policies established by the American Association of University Professors, tenured faculty members who are performing to standard only may be laid off for budgetary reasons in cases of true financial emergency (AAUP uses the term “exigency”). According to the legislative committee’s motion, faculty members going forward may be laid off or terminated “when such action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision regarding program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.” It should be noted that AAUP policy allows for termination of tenured appointments or probationary appointments “as a result of bona fide formal discontinuance of a program or department of instruction” that enhances the college or university as a whole. But such decisions “will be based essentially upon educational considerations,” not cyclical or temporary variations in enrollment, “as determined primarily by the faculty as a whole or an appropriate committee thereof,” according to AAUP. Whenever possible, the affected faculty members will be moved to another program. (Note: This paragraph has been updated from an earlier version to include AAUP’s educational reasons for discontinuing a program.)
It’s that last portion of the budgetary motion — which reflects many of the changes proposed in Governor Scott Walker’s original budget bill — that generated the most debate Thursday among members of the board’s Education Committee. Faculty members have said the language doesn’t belong in a budget motion, and that it leaves them professionally vulnerable.
Regent Tony Evers, who is superintendent of Wisconsin’s K-12 system, said he’d seen how Walker’s Act 10 limiting the collective bargaining power of public employees negatively impacted teacher morale. Consequently, he said he worried about how the new proposals would impact university faculty and staff. Indeed, many professors already have publicly stated they would consider leaving the state if the motion becomes law.
As the committee considered a proposal to adopt a similar tenure policy to the one currently in place under state statute, Evers proposed an amendment that all nonfiscal language about layoffs and terminations be removed from the omnibus motion section in question, effectively preserving the status quo in tenure policy, if not as a matter of law. He said the purpose was to send a message to the Legislature that the regents were against the changes becoming law. His amendment echoed a statement from Madison’s University Committee, the executive committee of the Faculty Senate.
In the end, however, Evers’s amendment was defeated, 4 to 3. The tenure policy the full Board of Regents will consider today charges a joint task force, including faculty, to consider new layoff policies — presumably more protective of faculty positions than the proposed legislation — if the motion becomes law.
But some faculty members say the task force’s work will be moot, since the state budget is to be settled before July — months ahead of the new board policy deadline. That is, law trumps policy. The tenure policy the board’s Education Committee approved Thursday even includes a clause saying that if adopted, “it must comply with applicable state law.”
Questions of what’s next, and of supremacy of law to policy, also tripped up Ray Cross, the university system’s president, in a question-and-answer period with the full board on the omnibus motion Thursday afternoon.
When asked by Regent Charles Pruitt about which document would “prevail” if the task force came up with something different than what the state legislature ultimately passes, Cross said he was “going out on a limb” but believed there was room for regents to flesh out state statute and adopt a “legitimate, agreed-upon process.” He also noted his commitment to academic freedom, saying a university doesn’t exist without it.
Still, Cross noted that the board was working with the omnibus motion, not final statutory language, and that that was contributing to some of the confusion and “rumor.”
Regent Mark Bradley raised another point: What might happen if a future Board of Regents — not so “conscientious” as the current — sought further limits to faculty power, which were supported by state law?
That’s what concerns faculty members like Radomski. He described Thursday’s meeting as an exercise in “political theater,” saying that tenure is significantly weakened as long as the controversial layoff and termination language becomes law.
Wisconsin State Senator Julie Lassa, a Democrat who is opposed to the omnibus motion, said she thinks it will pass, given the Joint Finance Committee’s power within the Legislature. But she advised students, faculty, staff and others to contact their state lawmakers and voice their opinions.
To Lassa, the changes — coupled with a $250 million higher education budget cut over two years — pose a real threat to the state.
“This will serve as further incentive for quality faculty members to leave,” she said, saying that the state could have taken up $360 million in federal Medicaid expansion funds to plug its budget hole. Salary compression and relatively low pay are already problems at campuses such as her alma mater, Steven’s Point, she said, and new restrictions on faculty power will make it harder to recruit and retain talent.
Sheila Harsdorf, a Republican who is chair of the Senate Committee on Universities and Technical Colleges and co-sponsor of the omnibus motion, said such concerns were overstated. She noted that Wisconsin is one of the only states to include tenure in law, and that the changes were aimed at bringing its university system more in line with its peers.
“This gives the Board of Regents the chance to look at the policy and what needs to be in place as it affects faculty and campuses,” she said.
Harsdorf also said some of the other changes in the motion — such as shared governance that more narrowly defines the faculty role as advisory in curricular, academic and academic personnel matters, or new guidelines for merit pay — offer the kind of flexibility the system needs to deal with the $250 million budget cut, originally set for $300 million. She said the university system has been requesting additional flexibility for some time; indeed, Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank, who was not at Thursday’s meeting, was a proponent of Walker’s now-dead proposal to make the university system into a more autonomous public “authority.”
In a statement Wednesday, Blank reaffirmed her commitment to tenure, saying she pledged to do everything she could create campus policies to “guide” how the new laws would be applied.
“Removal of tenure should always be a last-case option,” she said. “Even in the face of program closures — I can think of a number of such cases in peer institutions — top-ranked universities relocate and reorganize their affected faculty if at all possible. Most importantly, these statutory changes should never be used as a mechanism to terminate faculty whose scholarship and research is viewed by some as misguided or without value — the very heart of what the tenure system is meant to address.”
Asked whether she thought any regents’ policy on tenure would be definitive, even if it conflicted with state law, Harsdorf said the omnibus motion language was “permissive.”
“The board will determine the policy as it affects tenured faculty,” she said.
Nicholas Hillman, an assistant professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at Madison, said that whatever the policy says, the university — faced with the massive budget cut and tuition freeze also included in the omnibus motion — is effectively being put in a “stranglehold that creates the conditions in which program closures and other difficult decisions can be made much more easily.”
There’s a sense of it all “ratcheting up to some really scary conclusion,” he said. “But maybe it blows over and nothing happens.”
The AAUP is concerned. It sent a letter to Cross and Michael J. Falbo, board president, offering assistance as the legislature weighs the omnibus motion.
“The proposed changes in tenure and due process and a $250 million proposed cut to the UW system amount to a direct attack on higher education as a public good, a vision of higher education that has shaped the UW system from the formulation of the Wisconsin Idea in 1904 to the present day,” the letter reads.
Rudy Fichtenbaum, a professor of economics at Wright State University and national AAUP president, said tenure simply doesn’t exist when tenured faculty members can be dismissed for any of the “vague” reasons outlined in the omnibus motion.
“It pretty much allows them to dismiss anybody for whatever reason they want, and I really worry about that in this kind of political climate, where we’ve seen other programs eliminated for political reasons,” he said, citing North Carolina as one example.
The shared governance changes also are alarming, Fichtenbaum said, since “tenure and shared governance go hand in hand. Tenure is largely seen as being a protection for individuals being able to exercise individual academic freedom, but shared governance is really faculty collective academic freedom, in the formulation of academic policy, budget priorities, the hiring process and the very process of granting tenure.”
There’s no way to reform the current education system other than to take a wrecking ball and raze it. The PTB are too entrenched to be taken out gradually. The buildings and the campus’ are fine, but most of the educators and all of the administrators need to go so we can start to rebuild some type of system that works for the kids and NOT for the unions.
Yeah, I know.... But a guy can dream can’t he?
There’s another way around this. Raise the requirements for admission. Much of the riff-raff would be weeded out before it got in. Fewer students, fewer professors.
‘Most importantly, these statutory changes should never be used as a mechanism to terminate faculty whose scholarship and research is viewed by some as misguided or without value — the very heart of what the tenure system is meant to address.”
Misguided or poor teachers need to e fired! This is the heart of quality education. And it’s time to make value judgments on them. Fire the commies and hire patriots.
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address warned against exactly that:Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.
My late, beloved girlfriend was a faculty member for 33 years at a well known Boston area university, and was head of her department for the last eight of those years until her death two years ago.
She didn’t have tenure. She was just fantastic at what she did, and everybody at the university loved her.
Which proves that it can be done - when you are good at it.
Lovely post.
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