Failed Leadership

THERE ARE MANY CONSTITUENCIES who deserve criticism for what is happening to the UW System, and the system president, Ray Cross, is no exception. In times of austerity, visionaries take a backseat to bureaucrats and their short-term, mechanical goals. The territory of dreamers is colonized by middle-grade ideologues. This is the case with many institutions of higher education across the country, including the UW System. Instead of talking about our moon shots, about curing disease and producing tomorrow’s leaders, we brag about “streamlining back-office operations” or being a “pipeline” to cubicles in need of an occupant (why do people use “pipeline” as a positive metaphor?). When you have a lobbyist instead of a leader, everyone outside of power is a rhetorical piece ready to be sacrificed again and again to please legislators for whom nothing is ever enough.

Final Update

Austerity is the death of the imagination. The death of ideas and their very possibility. And thus the only line of the current UW “budget” plan I need quote is this:

38. Shared governance, general: Specify that, with regard to the responsibilities of the faculty, academic staff, and students of each institution, “subject to” means “subordinate to.”

This has always been about faculty. The level of obsession with faculty, with bringing talented, humble, and hardworking people to heel—the people most responsible for delivering the university’s mission—approaches pathology.

President Cross, the Board of Regents, and a hostile legislature collaborated to more fully extend Act 10 to the public university system, and they can barely contain their glee. When Regent President Falbo refers to “a new tone” for the UW, he means “shut up faculty.” Falbo, like the legislature, fetishizes authority; their imaginations cannot extend beyond the conceptual framework of “the boss.” They cannot imagine democracy. The central purpose of the omnibus bill is to clear the way to fire faculty, at will, with no effort required for cause—our austerian overlords must simply cite program “discontinuance, curtailment, modification, or redirection.” What doesn’t count as modification or redirection? Given the preceding language, it’s hard to come up with a condition where faculty cannot be fired.

And like Wisconsin’s K–12 teachers, who can be fired based solely on budget projections or anticipated shortfalls, the same tactic will be applied to UW faculty. We have already seen cuts based on a budget that does not yet legally exist. Expect projected cuts and shortfalls to provide future justifications for firing faculty. The bill’s language anchors upon economic causes for dismissal, but that’s merely the garb retribution dons these days. Last year, I sat in a K–12 school board meeting where the members and superintendent explained: if there is a projected budget shortfall, we can fire you, but when the money comes through late in the process, we can rehire you, or someone else, back at a starting salary. These are human beings, talking about other human beings.

And so what’s left for me to update or blog about? What difference has any of it made? Let me take a detour into the personal. Forgive me for this; I’ve always tried not to do that here.

I started in the UW in 2003, working for the UW Colleges. My then-to-be wife was hired into the UW the previous year, and after a year apart, I moved to Wisconsin expecting to teach high school (which I had been doing in Ohio while finishing my dissertation). But I got lucky: my degree plus my tech skills secured my job at UW–Washington County, where I was the first person hired by the UW Colleges with online teaching built into his contract.

We live in Green Bay. Washington County is a hundred miles away from Green Bay. So for six years I commuted just under two hours each way. I lost hundreds of family, work, and creative hours sitting in my car. But I was deeply happy, and I loved and believed in Wisconsin. I started my career here. My first year in Wisconsin, I married my wife (with apparently great symbolism, the ceremony was on a cliff’s edge at Cave Point in Door County), then we bought our first and only home, and soon both of our daughters were born. The most important moments of my personal and professional life are Wisconsin. I am from Buffalo, but Wisconsin is my home.

Pregnant with our second daughter, my wife was in a car accident. Our one-year-old was in the car as well. I didn’t know about it. I was teaching classes more than a hundred miles away. A staff member finally alerted me, and I made yet another bad-weather drive, at great speed, up Highway 41 to a Green Bay hospital. I couldn’t reach her or speak with her, or even know what was happening. She was, as required, out of reach and hooked up to a fetal heart monitor. Everything turned out fine, except the blunt realization that I had to change jobs. I couldn’t be that far away.

Again, I got lucky. A job opened at UW–Green Bay in my fields of expertise. For my family, I gave up my hard-earned tenure and accepted the job. It took me two weeks to decide, as I’d be giving up tenure in the climate of a newly passed Act 10. But I earned tenure again. I’ve earned tenure in the UW System twice. I am aware of luck; I am aware of fortune and circumstance; but I’m also aware that, postluck, I worked and worked and worked and earned my rank. In my first seven years I worked no less than eighty hours a week with a 4/4 teaching load (which was one-fourth of my overall workload and appointment responsibility). I have dedicated my entire professional life to helping people make their lives better. Nothing makes me happier than when my students are hired into the workforce at salaries that exceed my own. Nothing makes me happier than a returning student rediscovering a passion for writing that also leads to the student receiving a promotion and a raise. As a professional and state employee, I work and live and breathe for others. Yet, last night, my wife and I found ourselves asking, “Why does this state hate us so much? What have we done wrong?”

And that’s my question for President Cross, who, upon securing expanded authority for himself and the Board of Regents, is moving swiftly to curtail the job security of UW employees: why do you have such disdain for what people have worked tirelessly to earn?

And for the legislature that barks incessantly about work, about earning your way, about not “freeloading”: why do you dismiss my work and accomplishments? Why look at a class of people who do so much right as if they are always what is wrong? These questions are rhetorical.

So again to President Cross, legislators, regents, and the people reveling in an imagined comeuppance: how are teachers supposed to face students and encourage them to work toward goals and achievements? Are we to lie and say the work will pay off when the fruits of our own labor are constantly derided, devalued, and destroyed? That question is not rhetorical. What should we tell students to work toward? Maybe we should listen to Regent Falbo and simply offer, “Find your bosses. They’ll tell you what you’re worth.”

I feel this needs repeating, and consider this portion an open letter: President Cross, Regent Michael Falbo, Senator Alberta Darling, Speaker Robin Vos, other republican legislators—why do I, and people like me, not deserve what we earned? Why is our work not valuable? Why did the state and the UW ask us to go through this grueling process only to back out on its end of the commitment? It is so contrary to what you offer in public statements and speeches.

Let me put this another way, and again, forgive me for the personal tone and reference: tenure is not a perk for me. I did not erroneously stumble into tenure. It was not “awarded.” I earned it. Twice. But more importantly, it is a symbol of my work, skill, and accomplishment. In my professional life, tenure is a source of pride not because I get to sleep on a state yacht but because it signifies nearly two decades of my life: the study, training, job searches, students and their triumphs, individual and book publications, teaching awards, community work, institutional work, and so on. Twenty years of my life and dedication, wiped away with a grudge and a brushstroke. I’m demoralized and, like many of us, wondering, What was all the work for? In short, the only people who have done their jobs, who lived up to the promise of the UW, are faculty and staff. This is how we are rewarded. President Cross has said he and the regents will “reinstitute” tenure. Maybe in name, but not in any form that fulfills the promise and commitments made to us upon being hired. This is betrayal, and it hurts. It has taken its toll on me, my mental health, my ability to focus on my job, my relationships. Have I failed in some way? President Cross, Robin Vos, Alberta Darling, I sincerely ask, where did I go wrong?

So I’ll leave with this, for all of my colleagues and compatriots in the UW—faculty, staff, students, two deans I can think of—I am so honored to be one of you. Maybe everyone has a little bit of impostor syndrome, and not a day goes by that my breath is not taken away by the sheer amount of intelligence, dedication, self-sacrifice, backbone, and curiosity that surround me. Such goodness, such people, here in a darkening Wisconsin, is a blessing. It is not your fault that our state and our UW leadership have abandoned imagination as a resource.

Final Update 2 (and Even Then, It Wasn’t the End)

I have written tirelessly, endlessly, about the fact that Wisconsin’s higher-ed narrative is dominated by a myth: the myth that faculty have power—the myth that faculty are so powerful that they prohibit the university from flex-o-vating nimble twenty-first-century efficiencies. I have waited patiently for Wisconsin media outlets to rely on something other than Politifact to take a stand. None of this has happened. So let me point out something to outside observers that should be breathtakingly obvious: powerful people and interests are again moving swiftly to curtail the job security of powerless people. If faculty are so powerful, the great titans of the state, why can’t they simply put an end to this attack? Because the power is, and was always, held by the other parties involved: the people who cut budgets, give tax breaks, build stadiums for pungent teams, raise tuition, and collaborate with ease to extend Wisconsin’s new tradition of weakening worker protections and earning power. It’s that simple. So, dear media outlets, stop writing about faculty as if they are, or ever were, the source of any problem the UW has. They aren’t.

Summary: those with power have invested a powerless constituency with the appearance of power (aka “divide”). They then use their real power to attack those people who, all along, were powerless to stop them (aka “conquer”). Get it? They never had the power to cause the problems they are being associated with. (See American workers. Also history.)

Another note to the media: feel free to ask President Cross some very basic questions about motive. Basic information will suffice. I have never seen someone in the center of a conflict be asked to go on the record so little about his intentions. Whether someone agrees with him or not, everyone in the UW deserves a clear, directly stated picture of what his goals are, especially if President Cross agrees that the system should weaken tenure to the point of irrelevancy. Certainly we can all agree that we should have this clear statement of vision and direction.

OK then, let’s walk over to studio 2 and play “Ten Questions for President Cross.” I hope that someone, somewhere in the Wisconsin media landscape, will use this as a cheat sheet—that’s the real point. No one cares about the scribblings of hippy-poet bloggers. I ask these not to be antagonistic; I ask because, literally, I believe almost no one knows the answers, and clarity would be helpful.

Bonus Questions for Media to Ask Legislators and Regents

Bonus Question 1: Yes, we know that Wisconsin is the only state with tenure written into state statute. Still, that is not a reason to change it. How, specifically, does the state benefit economically, via this budget bill, by removing these protections from statute?

Bonus Question 2: What do you hope the result of such an action will be, especially with the expanded powers related to how people can be fired? (Please answer without using the word “flexibility” or “modernization” or any of its variants.)

Bonus Question for Anyone in the Media

Bonus-Bonus Question: Have you asked anyone, and then reported on, the legality of breaking this commitment after people have given up years of their lives, and countless other job opportunities, based on that promise? Is it possible that the UW has a legal department with paid employees?

Regularly Scheduled Programming . . .

It is impossible for me to read these events any other way: the UW System is trying to pretend at tenure (warning: you will hear meaningless austerity cues like “modernize tenure” thrown about). In short, what kind of farce requires people to dedicate more than half a decade of their lives to rolling in the teeth of an exhausting, performance-based tenure metric when job security is actually in service to an entirely different, arbitrary metric? In short, why the heck would you ask anyone to go through the tenure process at all? What kind of person, what kind of moral disaster, asks people to give so much of their lives and effort simply to sweep away those years under “this program isn’t aligned with the needs of this business that doesn’t care about your curriculum and doesn’t pay state taxes anyway”?

In one of the most bizarre developments I can think of in higher education, we are about to have one of the world’s most respected university systems pretend to have tenure.

Final note: I write this from a particular point of view, that of a faculty member. Please be aware that I know the proposed changes affect academic staff and any other number of people. I care about those things just as much; I am just too ignorant of the details to write about them. If you’ve read any of my other work, even before the UW Update series, you’d know that I’ve written about adjunct labor and exploitation and about K–12 teachers. I value all those views and struggles, and I’m simply adding a specific voice to that chorus.