Right-wing Regents, Gov screwing over UW students + faculty. Will Bucky fight back?

It doesn’t sound like the rollout of UW System President Ray Cross’s plan to merge UW Colleges and Extension with 9 of the 4-year UW campuses is going over well. And faculty officials say a big reason why is that it continues a disturbing trend of UW workers not being given input on Administration-led changes at the UW.

The actions have further strained relationships with UW’s faculty and students, many of whom were already distrustful of System leaders after actions in recent years that weakened tenure protections and the role of those groups in campus governance.

According to Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, and Noel Radomski, managing director at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, the alignment between System leaders and conservative lawmakers could threaten the independence that distinguishes UW from other, more politicized state offices.

“There’s a pattern here of … ideologically driven decision-making,” Radomski said. “The culture has changed significantly — it’s gone 180 degrees. The independence that the UW System Board of Regents used to have, and the quasi-independence that the System administration used to have, is gone.”

Even Cross has admitted in public that his plans were developed through closed-door discussions among Regents and selected business leaders (which seems like a dodge around Open Meetings laws), but left UW faculty and students out in the cold.

This doesn’t seem to bother Cross much, but that act is what Nassirian says is a big reason behind the worries that faculty and staff have for the proposal UW reorganization. It also goes hand-in-hand with another recently mandated change from the non-academic Regents.

Nassirian said criticism of the merger proposal had more to do with the process by which it was created, rather than opposition to the idea itself.

The reaction from faculty and students was amplified, he said, because it came soon after another move to consolidate power under administrators — a new policy requiring that Regents hold five of the 10 seats on committees that search for UW chancellors. Faculty will have two seats while students and staff would each have one; the last would be filled by a community member or alumnus.

It’s very reminiscent of the Fox-con and WEDC’s “oversight”, isn’t it? Do you wonder why anyone with an IQ over 80 might be concerned that these UW changes aren’t being done for the best of reasons?

And it looks like the UW’s branches of the American Association of University Professors and AFT-Wisconsin have had enough with the regressive policies attacking UW faculty and staff in the Age of Fitzwalkerstan, and are asking the Board of Regents to re-dedicate themselves to including and respecting those who work there.

In 2011, Governor Walker proposed, and the legislature passed, Act 10, curtailing the system faculty’s rights to negotiate collectively. In 2015, the legislature severely weakened tenure, shared governance, and due process—and, by extension, academic freedom. The board launched its own salvo earlier this month, approving an anti-free-speech proposal allowing for the expulsion of students for “disrupting the free speech of others,” announcing a plan to merge the system’s two- and four-year institutions, and changing the procedures governing searches for chancellors and presidents—all without meaningful faculty input. Troublingly, the new search procedures put virtually the entire process of hiring new ‘campus CEOs’ in the hands of the very regents who seek to undermine the public obligation of the university, with limited roles for other campus constituencies. At the time of this writing, there is also a bill before the state legislature that would abolish a partnership that allowed university employees to work and train students at Planned Parenthood. (a bill that could get Madison's OB-GYN program decertified)

These actions constitute a brazen partisan assault on the Wisconsin Idea, the century-old notion that public higher education is a common good that exists for the benefit of the state’s people. They also exemplify a broader crisis in American public higher education, described in a recent AAUP investigative report as “occasioned by headstrong, thoughtless action by politically appointed regents who lack any respect for the faculties of the institutions over which they preside.” Nowhere in the country is this more evident than in Wisconsin.

We therefore call on the Wisconsin system board of regents to cease its attacks on the institutions it stewards; to recognize tenure, faculty governance, due process, and academic freedom as foundational to higher education; to support and encourage free speech for faculty and students; and to govern the system’s institutions for the common good of the people of Wisconsin.

As for how to solve this mess, Isthmus’s Alan Talaga noted that a lot of these concerns of top-down, pro-corporate decision-making and secrecy are a direct result of the appointment power of Governor Scott Walker. Governor Dropout has stacked the Board of Regents in his 6 years in office with people less interested in having the UW excel than they are in carrying out an anti-intellectual agenda promoted by ALEC, the Koch and Bradley Foundations, and other right-wing benefactors.

There are two reasons why the regents have become more aggressive in the last couple of years. The first is a nationwide war waged by conservatives on public universities. Even though the Republican Party controls the White House, both chambers of Congress and a majority of state legislatures, they need a boogeyman that proves that conservatives are the true repressed minority. Professors and undergraduates have become that boogeyman.

The second and far more important reason why the regents are pushing a hardline agenda is because the board is now almost exclusively made up of appointees of Gov. Scott Walker. Almost all regents serve seven-year terms. While Walker has been in office since 2011, the last few appointees of Jim Doyle finished their terms in 2016, leaving Tony Evers — superintendent of public instruction and Democratic gubernatorial candidate — as the lone voice of dissent on a board full of puppets.

Let me be clear: Scott Walker is the sole agent responsible for the attacks and erosion of the UW via his proxies on the board of regents. They will continue to carry out his agenda as long as he has the sole power to appoint new regents. They will continue to damage the legacy, reputation and work of campuses across the state.….

The only way to save the UW System as we know it is to defeat Scott Walker in 2018. A Democratic governor can start appointing new regents, cutting off the bleeding and slowly healing the board. They would make it harder for the conservative majority to pass these secretive policies under the radar. By 2022, Walker’s appointees would no longer make up a majority of the board.

This Isthmus graphic sums up the plan quite well.

Sadly, Talaga is correct. The lowlifes in today’s GOP will not invest in higher education and respect UW workers because they think they will get larger political rewards and donations for beating up on “elites”.

Madison’s Becky Blank and other UW chancellors need to recognize they cannot “play ball” with WisGOP legislators and think they will get payback in the form of more funding or fewer roadblocks in competing for 21st Century talent. In theory, it’s nice to wish for compromise and understanding among both sides, but that’s not going to happen in today’s ALEC-GOP and their war on intelligence and higher education. So the better strategy is for campus administration to publically go to war against these regressive scumbuckets, and get them removed ASAP.

The UW is not going to stay at an acceptable level of quality or service if the GOP stays in charge anyway, so Bucky and the rest of the System may as well fight, and at least have a chance at surviving.