Academe Archives: Assaults on Higher Education in Wisconsin

POSTED BY KELLY HAND The AAUP, along with the Wisconsin AFT, has condemned a series of actions taken by Governor Scott Walker, the Wisconsin state legislature, and the University of Wisconsin system board of regents over the past few years in a concerted attack on the university as a public good. Regular readers of Academe…

Shakespeare on Shared Governance

BY TIMOTHY V. KAUFMAN-OSBORN This is a guest post by Timothy V. Kaufman-Osborn, the Baker Ferguson Professor of Politics and Leadership at Whitman College. Offering a sorry imitation of the Bard, I composed my recent history of shared governance in Wisconsin in the January–February issue of Academe as a tragedy in three acts. In my article, I explain…

Pursuing Virtue in State-University Relations

BY DAVID J. WEERTS Guest blogger David J. Weerts is associate professor and faculty director of the jCENTER for Innovative Higher Education at the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities. His research focuses on state-university relations, community-university engagement, and alumni giving, volunteerism, and advocacy. For those interested in the politics of higher education, the ongoing sparring in…

UWM Faculty Sets the Record Straight

Yesterday in my post reporting on the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee faculty’s unanimous vote of no-confidence in UW system President Ray Cross and the UW Board of Regents I noted that the vote came less than two hours after Gov. Scott Walker issued a statement — titled “University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee faculty fuss leaves out important facts”…

UW tenure: as little as possible

BY NICHOLAS FLEISHER (Cross-posted from languagepolitics.org) “Tenure weakened in Wisconsin.”  So says the national AAUP in response to the UW System’s now-official policies on tenure, faculty layoff, and post-tenure review, which were adopted by the Board of Regents this past Thursday, unaltered in their essentials from the problematic drafts issued by the Tenure Policy Task…