BY BOB NOWLAN One of the most egregious dimensions of outgoing University of Wisconsin system president Ray Cross’s May 7 “Blueprint for the University of Wisconsin System Beyond COVID-19”—which calls for a radical restructuring and effective elimination of the comprehensive dimension of the system’s eleven regional comprehensive universities, as well as an effective jettisoning of…
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…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE Yesterday the AAUP’s Committee on College and University Governance released the following statement: In October 2017, news broke of University of Wisconsin system president Ray Cross’s decision to propose a merger of the system’s two- and four-year institutions. It was the latest in a number of unilateral and secretive actions taken by system…
BY MICHAEL DECESARE “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!!” That’s part of an October 11, 2017 email message from University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross to a UW regent. Cross was complaining about the backlash he…
BY BRIAN C. MITCHELL One of the more interesting and at times alarming changes in American higher education is the redistricting of public college systems in various states. The most active discussions – some of which produced radical change – have been in states like Vermont, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Maine, New Jersey, and Wisconsin. In Vermont,…
BY KELLY HAND Kelly Wilz, author of the May–June Academe article “A Day in the Life of a Public University Professor in Wisconsin,” recently won the 2015–16 Teacher Excellence Award given by the student body of the University of Wisconsin-Marshfield/Wood County. Becoming an award-winning teacher is never easy, but as Wilz’s article demonstrates, it has…
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…
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…
The AAUP issued this statement today after the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents adopted a new policy weakening tenure protections. Tenure in Wisconsin It is now clear that the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents has adopted a policy that provides weaker protections of tenure, and thus of academic freedom, than what has…