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UW-Madison has a rich history of activism among its students, and that history evolves today as students stand in solidarity with the workers of Palermo's pizza and the good folks of Voces de la Frontera.  What will outgoing Interim Chancellor David Ward do? Why not act, given widespread public support and his short remaining tenure?   Here's what you need to know: (1) UW-Madison's students have always been ahead of the curve when it comes to standing up for the rights of underdogs throughout the world.  It's no surprise they're ahead of the NLRB on this one. (2) UW-Madison's code of ethics is independent from the rulings of the NLRB or any other entity and is supposed to reflect our values, not those of others. (3) It is abundantly clear that moral leadership is lacking on both the so-called Left and the Right in Wisconsin, especially when it comes to standing up to corporate interests seeking to keep wages low and profits high.  It is far harder to battle t...

One of the most stunning moments in the recent Ed Talks Wisconsin came towards the end of a Friday night discussion about MOOCs. The room was heavily populated with graduate students, many of whom were asking about the implications of these online courses for their employment prospects.  With the decoupling of teaching from their future responsibilities, many were (rightly) worried about how they'd be trained, funded, and what they'd do post degree. As one student put it,"What's the incentive for the next generation of scholars to pursue a PhD?"   In response to that question, the Chancellor of the UW Colleges, Ray Cross, responded this way: "Is your goal to get a PhD, or is your goal to change education?" Many in the room looked up, confused about whether he was serious. Well, an email that just arrived from UW-Madison suggests he was.  The newsletter it included contained the following key blurb: " New program trains students to create online cou...

This ran in today's Capital Times.  Stay tuned... more to come. 

All over America, faculty, staff, and students are losing their collective voice as a tidal wave of "reform" washes over higher education. The adjunctification of the faculty is well underway and some administrators and members of the public cast faculty as the enemy of progress, despite hard empirical evidence to the contrary. We've been confronting our own dilemmas at UW-Madison, where a deeply conservative Wisconsin legislature handed us the "tools" requested to bring efficiences to our human resources system.  It is indeed an old system, which insufficiently recognizes the needs of educational institutions, and it is indisputably in need of modernization.  The plans are in process to use the new flexibilities to improve the system, and today the Faculty Senate was to vote on those plans. The problem? The plans aren't yet  fully articulated.  They are still in process, in a draft stage, and it's hard to tell whether they really take UW-Madison forwa...

At 3:51 pm, I received the following letter from UW-Madison Human Resources Director Bob Lavigna in response to the Change.Org petition. The full text follows.   I have underlined key sentences since it is rather long and inserted with ** some comments of my own. I am very pleased with this display of engagement on the part of the administration and shared governance units, and hope you will agree with me that this is a significant step forward.  On Wisconsin! November 2, 2012  Dear UW-Madison colleagues: I am writing in response to the October 30 petition asking me to, “… issue a list of written assurances regarding all planned significant changes to the Human Resources Design Strategic Plan on which the Faculty Senate will vote on Monday, November 5, 2012.”  First, I want to outline where we are in the process of finalizing the HR Design Strategic Plan, and what will occur as we move forward. On September 21, we posted the plan for campus-wide review and comment. S...

This fall marks my ninth academic year at UW–Madison. During my time here I’ve experienced our human resources system in many ways—as a new mother seeking a maternity leave (twice), as a temporarily disabled employee in need of a leave, as a frustrated faculty member seeking a raise, and multiple times as the director of a large research project trying to hire and retain qualified classified and academic staff. I know firsthand that the system needs to change in order to realize our campus goals of equity, efficiency, and effectiveness. That is why I have taken seriously the HR Design team’s request for input from shared governance units, spending significant time studying the plan, and commenting on it in multiple venues. I think further adjustments to the current plan are required, because my own knowledge of higher education reform efforts and the scholarly literature on work and organizations suggests that as currently formulated it will have significant unintended consequenc...

Last night Liam and I attended a talk by Derek Bok , Harvard's president emeritus, hosted by the Spencer Foundation at the meetings of the American Educational Research Association in Vancouver.  Due to a lack of Wifi and data service, I couldn't tweet the speech, which was probably good because we both got a little worked up. Here's a bit about why. Bok is a thoughtful, experienced leader in higher education and I have long appreciated his efforts to get colleges and universities to pay attention to undergraduate education.  He's written a book on the topic, and found a set of Bok Centers on many campuses to try and get faculty involved (unfortunately, as he admitted last night, engagement in the centers is often low). The main thrust of his speech was that professors need to get focused on rigorously improving undergraduate education because policy changes are bringing a reform agenda focused on student outcomes, and we'd best get prepared. We ought to do this, h...