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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Letter of Honest Concerns

This was forwarded to Bloggie in today's emails: 

-Original Message-----
From: Coleman, Douglas W.
Sent: Thu 9/16/2010 11:37 AM
To: Rouillard, Linda; Patrick, Brian; Black, David C.; Davis, David H.; Tucker, David E.; Haase, Dwight; Caruso, Michael J.
Subject: Re: Faculty Stakeholder meetings

  Dear A&S Executive Committee,

I would like to offer my two cents on the proposed reorganization.  I
simply do not see

   1. How, in a time of supposedly limited resources, the increase in
      /administrative/ costs that accompanies the proposed
      reorganization is supposed to improve UT's missions of /teaching/
      and /research/, and
   2. How /dividing/ colleagues into separate colleges is supposed to
      /facilitate/ cooperative ventures among them.

Take the extra cost of the new deans' salaries and imagine it /instead/
being made available to faculty for interdisciplinary course
development, interdepartmental faculty research initiatives,
interdisciplinary student research projects, and so on.

Consider now how the creation of a cross-listed interdisciplinary course
now needs to go only through two departments and A&S Council before
getting to Faculty Senate.  With the proposed reorganization, yet
another layer of approval would be needed.  The same goes for arranging
many other types of interdisciplinary projects -- there would be an
additional layer of approval needed.

Since simple facts suggest that the proposed reorganization would
actually take funding away from interdisciplinary activity to pay
additional administrators /and/ would add extra barriers to
interdisciplinary cooperation within what is now A&S, it is not a
stretch to look elsewhere for the motivations for the proposed change. 
The change would break up A&S influence on faculty governance into three
parts -- I suspect this is not irrelevant to President Jacobs' support
for this reorganization.  A&S would go from being the largest college to
being three separate smaller colleges of UT, each with far less
influence.  The reorganization would, both symbolically and in actual
effect on faculty governance and the college-by-college distribution of
enrollment, change UT from being most influenced by a broadly-based,
liberal arts and sciences tradition to an institution dominated by its
professional schools.

      -- Doug Coleman

PS: If the Board of Trustees, as many of us in A&S have long suspected,
wants the University of Toledo to become the Toledo Institute of
Technology, they should keep in mind that MIT, which they might perceive
as a model to emulate, has one of the most famous PhD. programs in
linguistics and philosophy in the world.



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

You faculty really argue with a straight face that Jacobs wants to create a university universally seen as subpar to the institution he took over in 2006?

This notion that he actively wants UT to be a university that crumbles on his watch just makes you easier to dismiss. And the more they dismiss you, the more ridiculous your arguments become and it's even easier.

Besides, after you get all upset over nothing, he's not gonna change anything. You'll declare victory, except he's been toying with you from the start and the strategic plan flies through because he "omitted" the controversial part he was never gonna include anyway.

You're all being played and it's getting to the point it is kinda sad to watch.

Anonymous said...

How naive! Do you really think the BoT model is MIT?
I would rather say University of Phoenix at best!

Anonymous said...

Hmm, working on personal stuff when he's being paid to work for students. Shocking. ly usual. Must be nice to not work whenever it pleases you not to work.

Anonymous said...

Poster #1: Exactly how do you see that this university has improved from 2006?

For a student, there is more paperwork, higher fees and fewer choices naw than ever before.

I do not believe that the university was subpar in 2006. It was no MIT or Ohio State or Michigan. But we know that. Plenty of universities like UT are good schools but not part of the elite. Today I wonder if UT is even the good school that I thought it to be in 2006.

Anonymous said...

A copy of a draft memo found in garbage of one of our senior administrators:


“I, swear, as an administrator of this company, errr… university, that faculty are spending too much time in their classrooms and not enough time on their research. What you do on your time is your own damn business but while at my university, I want you developing money making patents. Idle conversation, website blogging, web surfing and gossip will result in immediate employee termination. It is none of your business and you are not paid to know what other people are doing on this campus.

This memo is not intended for all employees, but all employees must be included because some have abused these things. The ones who have not abused any of my rules and regulations should not have their feelings hurt or be concerned. Just do your job!

I don’t want any excuses about not being able to do your research, your grant writing or patent application processing – just find the people you need, and we will balance it out in the end.”

(Thanks, Tiger Mike!)

Anonymous said...

Anon 5:21: Huh?????????

Anonymous said...

"I'm not half as think you drunk I am. I fool
so feelish I don't know who is me and the drunker I stand
here the longer I get. I'm not under the affluence of
incohol as some tinkle peep I am."

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