minahkaypoh

There is a reason he is our president. Barack Obama regained my faith in him tonight.  Here are some of his most important words. Here in Newtown, I come to offer the love and prayers of a nation. I am very mindful that mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts. I can only hope it helps for you to know that you’re not alone in your grief, that our world, too, has been torn apart, that all across this land of ours, we have wept with you. We’ve pulled our children tight.... ....We bear responsibility for every child, because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we’re all parents, that they are all our children. This is our first task, caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged. And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we’re meeting our obligations? Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to ke

It's impossible to tuck our kids in tonight, seeing the complete and utter excitement in their eyes about their futures (my daughter, age 2, said "I need to eat more foods so I can get tall and be allowed to go on the bus with my brother to school!"), without understanding that it is our responsibility as the adults to DO something to make them safer.   Enough already with the childish fear of the NRA!  The tobacco lobby was once all-powerful too.  Then we woke up and realized cigarettes were killing  us all, and we put a stop to it.  Smoking is way down, including among teens.  The tide can turn. It's on us to make it happen. Wherever there's a powerful lobby there are powerful wealthy backers. The strength of the NRA lies not in the many average fools who think that having guns in their homes makes them safer (tell that to the gun-toting mama whose boy killed her before shooting those 20 children in Connecticut), but in the obscene wealth possessed by the gun ma

"What happens when the gun shoots through you, Mom? Does your heart come out?" These are not the sorts of questions I expected my 5-year-old son to be asking me on this, the seventh night of Chanukah. What happened to "can I have another piece of chocolate?" As impossible as it sounds, a young man walked into a school this morning, shoved past a brave principal and school counselor, and did his best to shoot as many young children as possible.  Little boys and girls whose parents had kissed them goodbye after packing their lunch, bundling them up in coats, hats, and mittens, and sending them off to practice their reading and handwriting and maybe do a little art.  Off at work, these parents sat, as my husband and I do every day, thinking of them but mainly unconcerned, knowing that hugs would reconnect the dots at day's end. Never again. I spent this afternoon fighting off tears in a faculty meeting, trying not to play out the scenarios that confronted my son

As expected, the UW Regents moved forward Friday, approving the proposal from the UW-Madison Administration to raise the cap on out-of-state enrollment even though it hadn't been vetted through proper shared governance channels.  The cap was moved from 25% to 27.5%, rather than to 30% as requested. In typical style, everyone involved acted like this represented the wise, informed choice arrived at through careful decision-making. Of course, we have real choices given the "new normal," a context so normalized at this point that the vast majority of our campus intellectuals can't even see that "normal" is a political agenda. But as I constantly work to help my students understand, there is always  a choice. And the lack of careful thought being paid by the state and its universities to this particular choice could easily come at the expense of Wisconsin residents. Sure, there are other options.  Let's consider the range of possibilities. Assumptions 1. Unl

UW-Madison is bringing a proposal before the UW System Board of Regents this week to change the cap on the percentage of undergraduates from out-of-state from 25 to 30%. In this post, I'm going to focus on the factual basis for the proposal itself.  I'm not going to speak to the process through which it was brought to the Regents, which I am fairly certain violated shared governance. I'm just going to examine the veracity of statements the UW-Madison Administration has made in support of this proposal using publicly available data.   I think the numbers alone suggest a need for further consideration before any decisions can be made . This motion should be tabled . In its proposal, Madison makes the following remarks: 1. The UW Admissions Policy counts Minnesota residents -- who receive tuition reciprocity--  in a separate category, and thus they are not counted as either residents or non-residents.  This is uncommon.  It means that the percent of out-of-state students (OOS

One week ago, a group of concerned faculty, staff, and students organized a forum at UW-Madison to discuss shared governance: what it is, how it's been challenged in the past, and what current risks it's currently facing.  The forum, held at 5 pm on the Monday before Thanksgiving, drew more than fifty people to the Wisconsin Idea Room in the School of Education. Speakers included former chair of the University Committee, Judith Burstyn , Professor Emeritus of History Jim Donnolly , Professor of Political Science Don Downs , David Ahrens of the Wisconsin University Union, and C had Goldberg , Professor of Sociology. There was a robust conversation about the precedent set by the famed Spoto case in establishing the importance of joint decision-making  in shared governance, a process that in the University of Wisconsin System goes well beyond simply advice and input.  The key takeaway: when faced with an impasse   between faculty and administration on an issue over which faculty

The Chancellor just released the revised HR Design plan. Lest anyone wonder "Why did we postpone the vote at Faculty Senate," here's your answer. The red-lined version of the Plan and the list of changes should be read in full.  But there is clear evidence on the pages as to why a strong pushback at Senate was smart and appropriate.  For example: p. 4  and 41 Mandatory placement of laid off employees has been restored! p. 42 Right of return has been restored (for up 30 days)! p.10 A commitment to using HR to achieve excellence in all  disciplines and to emphasize learning is now included p.25 and 26 Internal equity is now explicitly included as a factor continuing to affect compensation (see Strategic Plan Components #1 and the following paragraph on p. 26) p. 28 Living wage for contracted employees is officially under consideration again But the language on shared governance is still too weak. This is ironic given tonight's forum (which I'll write about tomorrow

With a headline like that, I bet you're assuming this is going to be one scathing post! The last time Scott Walker had ideas for Wisconsin public higher education, they involved separating UW-Madison from the rest of System. Or at least, so Biddy Martin told us. This time, the issue is performance funding for higher education. Walker recently declared his interest in the model, and many people are naturally on the defensive. The common list of concerns is already being circulated (e.g. it will fail to distinguish between institutions with different missions and student bodies, intrude on institutional autonomy, and excuse cuts in regular state funding of higher education), but this is my favorite:  Senate Minority Leader Chris Larson, a Democrat, said that W alker's plan sounds like "social engineering" that would force students to study "what industry wants" rather than what students want . Ouch!  Sounds godawful.   But here's the thing-- this is not

Since last week's Faculty Senate meeting, my email inbox has grown cluttered with letters from faculty, staff, and students who are experiencing violations of shared governance at UW-Madison.  All are afraid to speak out with their names included, fearful of responses from the Administration.  I can't tell you how upsetting this is, especially given my own Biddy battles during the term I was up for tenure. In any case, one brave soul has decided to allow me to quote from his letter.  I hope you'll consider his words (below) and then decide to join us next week for a discussion of the past and future of shared governance at Madison. There will be a FORUM on these issues held on Monday November 19 from 5-630 pm in the Wisconsin Idea Room of the School of Education. Sponsors include WUU, TAA, WISCAPE, and UFAS.  You can rsvp here . ****** Hi Sara, The biggest issue for me now is the apparent demolition of faculty governance. Wisconsin has a long history of egalitarian democrac

The following is a guest posting by Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Robin authored the popular  " Billionaire Education Policy ." She can be reached via email at robinrogers99@gmail.com Follow her on Twitter: @Robin_Rogers The City University of New York (CUNY) is in the middle of a clash over budget-driven higher education reform that could rival the Chicago Public School strike , and that is bad for everyone. The epicenter of the crisis right now is in the small, unassuming English department of Queensborough Community College (QCC).  At issue is CUNY’s implementation of a new program known as Pathways that aims to make transferring among CUNY colleges, particularly from the community colleges to the senior colleges, easier and to improve graduation rates. It is also an attempt to make the CUNY system more cost-effective. All of this seems very rational. In fact, when

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

" Mitt Romney will LOSE this election," says CNN.... We worked hard for this moment. Now, let's make it worthwhile. Agenda #1:  This is not a post-racial era. This is a highly racist era. It's time to deal with it. Agenda #2:  Education is not a business, and teachers are not mid-level managers.  Treat them like their partners in raising the nation's children. They deserve it. Agenda #3:  Families can't succeed if they can't work. Raise taxes dramatically on the Romneys of the world and provide tax breaks only if they create significant numbers of good jobs paying living wages to Americans. Agenda #4: End housing segregation, now. Poverty isn't quite so detrimental when it isn't concentrated. Agenda #5: Make college affordable by recognizing our democracy's need for postsecondary education. Two quality years for free-- minimum. Now. That's just a start.  ON.

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