In March I reposted from the WMU-AAUP blog comments delivered to the Western Michigan University (WMU) Board of Trustees by WMU-AAUP President and AAUP national Council member Lisa Minnick. Below are comments delivered today, June 29, to the same board by Professor Minnick. They offer a truly eloquent and effective defense of fundamental academic values…
BY HANK REICHMAN As regular readers of this blog know well, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to decimate public funding for the University of Wisconsin System and erode the protections of tenure and shared governance have aroused broad opposition among faculty members. On the defensive, Walker has issued a series of misleading and outright false…
Tenure is under fire both economically and politically—as the percentage of faculty who are tenured or on tenure tracks declines and as state governments undermine the legal standing of the concept, as they have in Wisconsin. So we all need to be better prepared to defend the concept, whether in professional or personal conversations or…
Among other things, I am (or have been) an historian of railroad labor, so I was especially thrilled to learn that University of Wisconsin-Madison labor historian William P. Jones had joined the conversation around the assault on tenure in the Wisconsin system. Professor Jones, by the way, will be the plenary banquet speaker at AAUP’s…
The parade of “no confidence” votes directed against University of Wisconsin President Ray Cross and the Board of Regents marched on today as an overflow meeting of nearly 300 UW-Milwaukee faculty voted unanimously to approve a resolution of no confidence similar to ones previously passed at the Madison, LaCrosse, and River Falls campuses. UW Eau…
As the faculties at one University of Wisconsin system campus after another vote “no confidence” in the leadership of system head Ray Cross and the Board of Regents, new evidence has emerged to demonstrate that, despite public claims by Cross that under his leadership “the substance of tenure was simply moved from statute to board…
BY DAVE VANNESS Dear Colleagues, I am writing to you in my role as a fellow member of the UW-Madison faculty and not in my role as President of the local AAUP chapter. Our chapter is engaged in an ongoing, vigorous and respectful debate about the merits and risks of voting “No Confidence” in UW-System…
BY HANK REICHMAN This is the fourth in a series of posts on issues in the University of California system, the nation’s premier public research institution. Previous posts in the series may be found here, here, and here. On Friday, the University of California at Berkeley announced that Provost Claude Steele is stepping down from…
BY HANK REICHMAN In a unanimous decision issued today (April 14), a three-judge panel of the California Court of Appeal for the Second District overturned the infamous lower court decision in Vergara v. State of California, which had declared tenure and seniority protections for K-12 teachers enshrined in California’s Education Code unconstitutional. Los Angeles County…
The following piece by Christopher Newfield, Professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is re-posted with permission from his Remaking the University blog. Somewhere Michael Lewis tells the story about what the boss of a trading floor–perhaps John Meriwether–would do when a trader hung on too long to a losing position,…