POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN
The following resolution was adopted unanimously on February 15 by the Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
WHEREAS UW System President Ray Cross has publicly declared his support for shared governance, promising at one point on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus to resign his position if he failed to protect shared governance;
WHEREAS it has now been publicly disclosed that President Cross disparaged and intentionally circumvented shared governance in decreeing that the University of Wisconsin System be restructured, having emailed Regent Gerald Whitburn that he was “Getting hammered by the ‘shared governance’ leaders because they weren’t involved in the process; however, had they been involved we wouldn’t be doing anything!!”
WHEREAS shared governance is ultimately responsible for implementing UW System President Cross’s hasty, top-down decision that the UW Colleges be broken up and merged with four-year, comprehensive, and research universities;
WHEREAS shared governance is an essential mechanism to guarantee the accountability, transparency, and high quality education we have come to expect from the University of Wisconsin System;
WHEREAS shared governance was instrumental in helping UWM to achieve its R1 status by starting new PhD programs and raising the university’s research profile;
BE IT RESOLVED THAT the Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, hereby demands that President Cross honor his earlier pledge to protect and respect shared governance in all relevant administrative decisions regarding the UW System and its campuses.
I’d be a little discreet and cautious about throwing the verb “demand” around. What if he says “Demand noted and rejected.” Using “demand” here makes the Faculty Senate sound like a bunch of 19 year olds from S.W.I.N.E (“Students Wildly Indignant About Nearly Everything.”)
Not only should we make demands, why not? We need to demand the impossible! To grab some words from a book titled the same, we need to “imagine a world beyond what this rotten system would have us believe is possible.”
Mr. Foster’s comment is so clever and precious–comparing faculty at a major, urban research university to 19-year-olds. Perhaps Mr. Foster might want to consult what Frederick Douglass had to say about demands, it being Black History Month and all. But then Mr. Foster might not know that faculty ARE the university, and it is the job of administrative staff, like Ray Cross, to do their utmost to facilitate faculty’s charge, to produce and disseminate knowledge. May hap the UWM faculty have only taken the first step in demanding Ray Cross resign because he is incompetent. he was incompetent when his reorganization of UW Colleges caused their enrollment to fall. He showed his incompetence when he ORDERED (note bene) dissolving UW Colleges into the other campuses of UW System wthout bothering to ensure that they would be accredited. He showed his incompetence when he consulted with business leaders (maybe from Taiwan [i.e., Foxconn], maybe the Koch brothers, et al.), but did not bother to consult or even tell the faculty of his plans. Instead, he got the Governor Walker appointed Babbits on the Board of Regents to approve his plans in secret. The faculty at UW and throughout UW System should be demanding Ray Cross’s resignation for incompetence and betraying the Wisconsin Idea of education by, for, and of the people.