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Monday, March 1, 2010

Further Report on Council Activities

Council unanimously passed the following resolution on February 23 concerning the Roundtable. The concern is, of course, that the president, provost and dean, all of whom who have shown themselves inimical to faculty, genuine shared governance and students, will tendentiously treat the vague, hopeful and optimistic recommendations of the Roundtable as carte blanche to destroy the College of Arts and Sciences in all but name. They seem to want a big high school or community college that can be run cheaply and in a tawdry manner.  Remember the three rules of business ethics:  1. Get the money 2. Get the money 3. Get the money. Bloggie remembers when Lloyd Jacobs first addressed Council.  Among other things, he said that he always tried to make ethical decisions. Boy, does he!  And what dictator doesn't?  Already the Learning Ventures people are working on ways to redeploy tenured faculty displaced by the destruction of learning planned for UT by its political bosses. 

Here is the resolution as passed:

Resolution on Amendments to Roundtable Report

Resolved that the following amendments, representing the views of Arts & Sciences College faculty, be included in the final Report of the Roundtable Implementation Committee:

  1. Regarding the broadness and optimism of the visionary language of this Roundtable report, matters of final interpretation of meaning, application and operationalization of its terms and recommendations remain the province of CAS faculty as constituted and assembled by its existing academic departments, programs, and the Arts and Sciences Council, and consistent with the spirit of the Liberal Arts.
  2. Departmental autonomy in electing chairs and controlling departmental programs and initiatives is respected, guaranteed, and encouraged by this report.
  3. Academic freedom is respected, guaranteed and further enabled by this report, such that recommendations for technological, integrative, and interdisciplinary change are used creatively to expand scholarship and teaching options, rather than as a basis for any negative evaluation or comparison.
  4. Faculty Shared Governance and control of curriculum and its delivery is respected, guaranteed and further enabled by this report, such shared governance being manifested and exercised in formats controlled, initiated, elected, or designated by CAS faculty, Arts and Sciences Council, and academic departments.




   

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We live in the era of the corporate university. The question that we face is whether or not the University of Toledo will also become a corporate university.

For the past 80 or so years, we have been brain washed that corporations are good for the United States. We have ignored their abuses and their inefficiencies.

Inefficiencies? Yes I mean inefficiencies. Anyone who has held a corporate leadership position and is truthful will tell you that output of the corporate employee is approximately 20% to 25% of the output of a fully employed person. The bigger the company: the more the inefficiencies. Any good efficiency consultant will tell you this: if he can not immediately save 5% in reducing corporate efficiency, then he should not be paid.

Now, our administration wants to bring this to the University of Toledo. They want to tell people what to do. “Nuclear Jack”, GE’s famous CEO (Jack Welsh) said, “Before at GE, we generally used to tell people what to do. And they did exactly what they were told to do, and not one other thing. Now we are constantly amazed by how much people will do when they are not told to do by management.” People in corporations do exactly what they are told to do and very little more. And this is what our administration does not understand.

Our administrators do not understand that most professors (yes, there are exceptions) are self-starters. In the great universities of the world, administrators try to stay out of their way. Where there are so-called strong administrators instructing professors what to do, the university slides downhill into oblivion. Strong universities are built on self-driven professors that challenge their fields of thought. They were told to do this! They did it on their own!

Our administration is intent on telling us how do our business. The recent changes in the Graduate School which has increased the paperwork load x-fold is an indicator. These changes have not resulted in one iota of new knowledge or improvement of scholarship. Instead these changes cause professors and student to take away from the time that they put into their scholarship.

This is sickening and as a Professor with outstanding opportunities elsewhere, I am going to start to exercise these.

Anonymous said...

Excellent post! But please stick around. Deliberately demoralizing seasoned, satisfied professors until they retire or hire on elsewhere is exactly what the Jacobs Team wants to achieve. They are sick men and women serving the Dark Side.

Undergraduate teaching in the future here will not be conducted by a dedicated scholarly professoriate but instead by underpaid "coaches." This is the same plan hatched earlier but thwarted. Not long ago Provost Haggett was about to sign the dotted line with Higher Ed Holdings in Texas. To re-live the specifics, just type "Texas" into the search engine for this blog.

Obviously this present Administration will never take "no" for an answer in their managerial quest for mediocrity. Jacobs' freebooters now beat up daily on our A&S College professors, and especially those in the liberal arts. Their wolf pack smells blood.

The Jacobs Crowd may have its way eventually, but meanwhile we professors should stick around to hold their feet to the fire every time they screw up big time in their rush to sow misery and don golden parachutes. Whatever. I've already instructed my children to dance and piss on their graves.

Anonymous said...

Today, I heard the Provost's pitch at Faculty Senate.

I hope this is not a case of "Humpty-Dumpty" and that there are people around who can put the pieces back together after their adventurism with higher education.

Anonymous said...

The true measure of an organization are the views of the memebrs that work within it. The administration is locking in on the model at Arizona State University. They should read the article and then the comments (most importantly, all 5 pages,) at

http://www.azcentral.com/specials/special48/articles/1214crow1216-ON.html?&wired#comments