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Announcement :: Civil & Human Rights : Education : Elections & Legislation : Labor : Media : Political-Economy : Protest Activity : Urban Development |
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April 2004 issue of The Faculty Advocate now available |
Current rating: 0 |
by David Brodsky via ML
(No verified email address) |
08 May 2004
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The latest issue of The Faculty Advocate, published by the University of Missouri-Kansas City chapter of the American Association of University Professors, is now available online at http://iml.umkc.edu/aaup/facadv14.htm
Although it focuses on the situation in Missouri, included is much information relevant to anyone in higher education (a large part of our community, for instance), who face such issues as budget cuts for public education, attacks on academic freedom, and pressures to privatize and undermine labor rights. A synopsis is below. |
The April 2004 issue of The Faculty Advocate, newsletter of the
AAUP chapter at UMKC, is now online. Its address is:
http://iml.umkc.edu/aaup/facadv14.htm
Honoring tradition, this double issue relates the latest news
from the war zone of the Lesser Duchy of UMKC. AAUP victories
hold some promise. It also features several articles on labor
and academic freedom from the joint conference of the Missouri
Philological Association and the AAUP chapter.
To start with good news, the AAUP chapter endorsed its first
slate of candidates for Faculty Senate elections and won four out
of five positions. Questionable voting eligibility rules,
currently deemed legal, may have denied the slate a clean sweep.
Additional news too late for this issue is the successful
completion of the chapter election for new officers, who will
assume office at the start of the Fall semester. The new
executive committee members are: President, Patricia Brodsky,
A&S; Vice-President/Treasurer, Alfred Esser, SBS; Secretary,
Karen Bame, SBS; At-large representative, Stuart McAninch, School
of Education; Membership Chair, Fred Lee, A&S.
Patricia Brodsky's "Editorial" records the latest ukase by
administration consultants, who have decided to eliminate the
Math Department through an involuntary merger with Physics
following so-called viability audits. "Targeting for an audit
signifies the administration's will to damage and destroy. Thus
the audits in their present form must cease." The Editorial
reiterates a call for campus-wide non-cooperation with audits of
the faculty, and faculty demand for an audit of the
administration.
Ed Gogol reports on the results of an AAUP faculty survey. The
number one issue is "changes imposed on academic units without
real faculty input (using the example of last fall's fiasco
foisted upon the School of Education)." A close second and third
are the use of consultants to run the institution and "the
growing gap the growing gap in compensation (and culture) between
faculty and administration."
Alfred Esser contributes a ground-breaking expose of the enormous
sums the administration lavishes on consultants, who, in
addition, are hired to make policy, in violation of university
regulations. Esser accurately calls these consultants
"mercenaries," overpaid corporate guns for hire. Their function
is to enforce administration policy by riding roughshod over
faculty and public interests. Esser calls for "a stringent
external audit of these illegitimate management procedures at
UMKC and the chancellor's flouting of fiduciary responsibility."
Bruce Wenner, former chair of the Math Department, documents its
maltreatment at the hands of a mercenary-led committee. Nearly
the entire senior staff took early retirement, but their
positions were intentionally left unfilled. Predictably, lower
level courses are now taught by exploited part-time lecturers,
who generate 65% of its credit hours. The committee has imposed
arbitrary hurdles which phase out the graduate program, and the
unit's budget has been raided by the upper administration. The
final act will be a forced merger with Physics.
Stuart McAninch reports on the AAUP Missouri State Conference
Meeting in March, devoted to "protecting the public sphere in
higher education and in the state." Besides lobbying the
legislature for increased state support and cultivating alliances
with a range of affected constituencies, equally important,
faculty must fight "the ideological and political assault on the
public sector" by promoting the principles of the "common~wealth"
and the "public interest." The meeting also passed a resolution
opposing a bill to mandate the teaching of "intelligent design"
(stealth creationism) in public schools.
Susan Adler describes relatively successful efforts by School of
Education faculty to retain control over a planned Institute for
Urban Education. Faculty were supported by the report of a
national accreditation team, which faulted the administration for
undermining faculty governance. However, various
administratively controlled committees have veto power, and no
guarantees have been forthcoming that the Institute will not
simply be outsourced to the Kauffman Foundation, as originally
announced.
Pat Brodsky discusses a plan cooked up by Kansas City developers,
and entertained by the upper administration, to move the Law
School into a downtown building requiring major renovation and a
very expensive lease. The neighborhood provides scant services
or resources for faculty and students, and is being abandoned by
law firms. State law currently requires private
sources--unlikely to materialize--to pay for renovation and rent,
but the underfunded university still would indirectly be
subsidizing the city and the developers. Externally unavailable
funds would, as usual, be seized internally from the budgets of
other units. Relocation would also separate the Law School from
the main campus, harming numerous interdisciplinary programs in
which it participates. The plan, which lacks an educational
rationale and which a law faculty task force opposes, is a
standard giveaway to corporate interests.
News of the Chapter lists academic achievements, awards, and
activities of AAUP members.
Ann Pace and Stuart McAninch write an obituary for Ron Carver,
Professor Emeritus of Education and a progressive civic activist.
Pat Brodsky's "Food for Thought" column congratulates the AAUP
slate on its Senate victories, but notes they were won in the
face of a scandal exposed by the Kansas City Star. The
Chancellor stated in a private e-mail her intention to continue
intefering in faculty elections and made a belated public
"apology" denying well documented past meddling. Brodsky also
proposes reinstating faculty search committees for administrative
positions, where faculty control the process and have a decisive
say. Third, she cautions about a reported proposal to smuggle in
a large program of online distance education courses through the
back door of library renovation. And finally, she challenges
local media to raise the news embargo on AAUP members, officers,
and the chapter.
Education for Democracy Network News delineates the Network's
intensified activism in the past six months, including two public
presentations by its founder and manager, David Brodsky, and an
e-mail campaign aimed at Congress. The campaign's goal is to
persuade the Senate HELP committee to reauthorize the Higher
Education Act with full funding, but to eliminate the
International Advisory Board, which is a political policing
mechanism serving the far right. Membership in the E4D Network
has grown by 30%.
There follows an excerpt from Brodsky's recent talk, "The War on
Public Higher Education," concerning regressive neo-liberal
policy in Europe that destroys both quality education and the
good jobs that depend on it.
Pat Brodsky reports on the successful MPA/AAUP conference held in
Kansas City the end of February, whose theme was "The State of
Academic Lab~or: Defunding/Defending Education in Missouri." The
ground-breaking collaboration between an AAUP chapter and a
disciplinary organization worked well, with one third of the
sessions devoted to academic labor. Highlights included
presentations by the two keynote speakers, Cary Nelson of
University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, and poet Martin Espada,
who teaches at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Three
presentations from the conference follow.
Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies (ILS) at
UMKC, addresses labor and workplace illiteracy among high school
students, which has a profound effect on their lives and health.
To remedy this defect, ILS, in collaboration with other
organizations, has designed "The Labor Awareness Program," a 15
lesson study plan, which the design team hopes to introduce into
every local area high school. Its ultimate goal is to "teach
young people the political and organizational skills of empowered
workers and citizens."
Pat Brodsky critiques the "accountability" movement in higher
education, which more often than not is a means to introduce
"speedups, funding cuts, the cancellation of degree programs, or
the destruction of whole departments," in the service of
"downsizing, deprofessionalization, outsourcing and
corporatization." The first example is post-tenure review, whose
aim is to weaken and eventually eliminate tenure and the academic
freedom which tenure protects. The second is the "viability
audits" at UMKC (see above), which, under the guise of assessment
or accountability, aim to undermine and destroy academic units
and to transfer their looted funds to administrative projects.
In "Academic Freedom at William Jewell College, a Southern
Baptist Institution," Ian Munro, a professor of English there,
recounts the struggle between the fundamentalist Missouri Baptist
Convention and the College, which terminated its relationship
with (and funding from) the Convention, in order to retain its
independent governance and academic freedom. Munro provides
valuable historical background on Baptist-founded institutions of
higher education, their conflicting missions, and their frequent
secularization. He also discusses cases exemplifying the
nationwide struggle between ultra-conservatives, who attempt to
impose faith tests and fundamentalist doctrine, and faculty and
sometimes administrations, who work to defend intellectual and
institutional integrity. Ambivalence about institutional mission
and the proper roles of faith and academic freedom continue to
produce fault lines at William Jewell and similar colleges. |
See also:
http://iml.umkc.edu/aaup/facadv14.htm
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This work is in the public domain |
