1. Will you attend the CSN holiday party at the Hilton this year? (Why or why not?)
2. What do you think of how they're charging $5.00 per ticket ($10.00 per couple) plus asking for a food donation at the door? (Good idea, bad idea, or just a "sign of the times"?)
Today's Question: Tuesday December 8
All the CSN news fit to read: Merry Mike's Monthly Chronicle
Posted by Tazzie 7 Dec 2009
Source:
http://blog.csn.edu/?p=208
December Chronicle
The CSN Chronicle
This is the December CSN Chronicle. You may note that Chronicles are posted on my blog for your convenience and as a way of letting me share with you some of the news and questions raised by our faculty and staff members.
iNtegrate Project and Hiring
iNtegrate was a handle created several years ago to describe our new administrative computing system. The idea was to represent Nevada electronically integrated for all administrative computing. CSN is ready in 2010 to begin “production” of its student information system (SIS). To help with the transition and the continuing operation of the new system, CSN joined with other NSHE schools to request an addition to the technology fee. The Board approved the request. Revenues from this fee will support the hiring of several new positions that you will soon see announced. Among the positions are user and information security specialists. I bring this to your attention because when you see the position announcements, you may have questions about the resources for the positions and what the jobs are all about. Please let me know if you’d like more information on the iNtegrate project.
Check out this blog regularly at http://blog.csn.edu. We post updates and other information frequently here for your convenience and comments.
Accreditation Changes
The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) oversees the regional accreditation of CSN. For the past several years, members of the Commission have worked with representatives from member institutions to revise accreditation standards, and that work has now been completed. Accreditation will be a very different process for colleges and universities. It will be a process of continuous improvement, regular reporting (about every other year), assessment at institutional and program levels, and driven by data and themes. In CSN’s case, the themes are derived from our mission statement: access, quality and diversity. We will be integrating the new process into our organizational structure as we begin preparations for the first CSN submittal that is due fall 2011. Work for our report will involve departments, divisions, schools, and offices of the College. And down the road, I fully expect that as we engage this new process, we will be asked to provide assessment data at the course level. This would be a significant change for CSN as departments would need to determine and assess course outcomes for the curriculum. Course level assessment may not be required for the first report, but it’s coming, so we’ll need to prepare.
September sales tax revenues were down 17.7%, continuing downward pressure on state revenues. Although I have not heard anything official about a special session of the Legislature, we are anticipating state action on the budget and on an issue affecting public education. We have taken limited precautions in preparation for a budget cut just in case. If I hear anything official from the state, I’ll certainly share it with you.
Questions from Faculty and Staff Members:
“Will classified employees be required to take a second furlough day?”
As of this writing, I am not aware of any such requirement. There are rumors about a second day, but that’s all it is—a rumor. You may recall that the State Personnel Office provides governance of classified employees. To my knowledge, State Personnel has not changed the furlough requirement.
“The media are reporting possible 1.5% and 3% budget cuts. What’s that about and will CSN be implementing a cut?”
The Governor’s staff raised the possibility of a budget cut and asked for plans at reduction levels of 1.5% and 3%. Chancellor Klaich reported this to the Board of Regents at its December meeting. No action was taken on the request. System staff and members of the Board are awaiting further and more definitive information.
“Will CSN be offering an employee buyout program this year?”
For the past two years we have offered a buyout program for professional employees. Although this program has helped with the budget crisis, we often lose experienced faculty and staff with such a program. Continuity and leadership are victims of buyout programs. We have this option in our pocket in case the fiscal situation worsens, and we’ll hold it until there is a clear need.
Best wishes to you all for a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Let’s enjoy this holiday season. I look forward to seeing you in the New Year.
–Mike Richards
University of California system facing extreme cutbacks
Posted by Tazzie 19 Nov 2009
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/education/20berkeley.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&emc=eta1
BERKELEY, Calif. — As the University of California struggles to absorb its sharpest drop in state financing since the Great Depression, every professor, administrator and clerical worker has been put on furlough amounting to an average pay cut of 8 percent.
In chemistry laboratories that have produced Nobel Prize-winning research, wastebaskets are stuffed to the brim on the new reduced cleaning schedule. Many students are frozen out of required classes as course sections are trimmed.
And on Thursday, to top it all off, the Board of Regents voted to increase undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — by 32 percent next fall, to more than $10,000. The university will cost about three times as much as it did a decade ago, and what was once an educational bargain will be one of the nation’s higher-priced public universities.
Among students and faculty alike, there is a pervasive sense that the increases and the deep budget cuts are pushing the university into decline.
The budget cuts in California, topping $30 billion over the last two years, have touched all aspects of state government, including health care, welfare, corrections and recreation. They have led to a retrenchment in state services not seen in modern times, and for many institutions, including the state university system, have created a watershed moment.
The state’s higher education budget has been slashed by $2.8 billion this year, including $813 million from the university system — about the equivalent of New Mexico’s entire higher education budget.
“Dismantling this institution, which is a huge economic driver for the state, is a stupendously stupid thing to do, but that’s the path the Legislature has embarked on,” said Richard A. Mathies, dean of the College of Chemistry here at Berkeley, long the system’s premier campus. “When you pull resources from an institution like this, faculty leave, the best grad students don’t come, and the discoveries go down.”
As the litany of cuts continues, there is a growing worry that senior faculty members may begin to defect. In fact, some colleges around the nation have begun identifying funds to use to recruit U.C. professors.
Since California adopted a master plan for higher education in 1960, the state has been, in the words of the historian Kevin Starr, “utopia for higher education.” Eight of the 10 University of California campuses — all but Merced and San Francisco — are in the top 100 in this year’s U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. But maintaining that edge, without resources, is difficult.
In 2004, international rankings by the London-based Times Higher Education named Berkeley the No. 2 research university in the world, behind only Harvard. This year, Berkeley plummeted to No. 39, mostly because of its high faculty-to-student ratio. The other international rankings, by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, rated Berkeley No. 3 this month.
Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, a nonpartisan group that promotes access to higher education, said that while public universities in many states were facing financial problems, California was in a class by itself.
“In most states, it’s the economy, and you can say that in a couple of years, it will bounce back,” Mr. Callan said. “But in California, it’s really part of a significant retrenchment of the whole public sector. If the perception is that it’s going to be chronic, and people give up on California, the pre-eminence of Berkeley and U.C.L.A. would be in danger.”
No wonder, then, that people like Bruce Fuller, a Berkeley professor of education and public policy, are asking themselves whether it is time to move on.
As co-director of the Institute for Human Development, an interdisciplinary research group that suffered big cuts, Mr. Fuller worries that the unit is losing its intellectual excitement and its ability to support his grant proposals. Then, too, he lost his two best graduate students last year to Stanford.
“To stay on top, you need to be bringing in new people,” Mr. Fuller said. “And I’m not sure how many of my most stimulating colleagues will still be here in three years.”
So although he was not swayed last year when the University of North Carolina came calling, Mr. Fuller said, he may be more receptive this year.
Formerly taboo ideas, like allowing U.C.L.A. and Berkeley to charge substantially more than other campuses, or even eliminating the research mission at some of the newer campuses, are being put forward. Many here seem to be in a state of shock that things have been allowed to get so bad at one of the nation’s leading public research universities, one with a long tradition of excellence. Berkeley faculty, past and present, have won 21 Nobel prizes. And last month, two of the 24 MacArthur fellowship grants went to a Berkeley computer scientist and a molecular biologist.
Students, professors and union workers alike say the state’s 20 percent cutback in financing imperils the system’s ability to provide a top-quality education to all qualified California students, particularly those from low-income families, who make up almost a third of the university’s student body.
Mark Yudof, the university system president, has created a commission that will make recommendations next spring on the future size and shape of the system. Just about everything seems to be on the table. There is even talk of creating an online “11th U.C. campus,” to bring in new revenue by offering courses — and degrees — to qualified students in other states and countries.
As support from the state dwindles, it is inevitable that the university will begin to look more like a private institution. The proportion of out-of-state students will rise next year: at Berkeley, almost a quarter of the freshmen admitted for next year will be international or out-of-state students.
And, as at private universities, student fees are rising rapidly, balanced, in large part, by bigger aid packages for low- and middle-income students. Across the 10 campuses, instructional budgets are being reduced by $139 million, with 1,900 employees laid off, 3,800 positions eliminated and hiring deferred for nearly 1,600 positions, most of them faculty.
Mr. Yudof rejects suggestions to retrench, like adopting a two-tiered system in which the Santa Cruz, Riverside and Merced campuses would be teaching institutions and no longer focus on research.
“My mission is to defend, protect, enhance and grow the University of California,” Mr. Yudof said. He added that he hoped the current measures would be enough to get the system back on track.
But that may not be the case. Just to fend off further cuts, he said, the state will need to add nearly $900 million to the university’s budget next year.
Whatever that budget looks like, Mr. Yudof said, there will be no more furloughs. “It’s too demoralizing,” he said.
This year, the University of Texas lured three senior faculty members from the University of California, among them William F. Hanks, and his wife, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, both anthropologists.
“Last spring, when we made the decision, there were issues, but the budget hadn’t quite slammed down to the extent it has since then,” Mr. Hanks said. “It looks a lot bleaker now.
“But in our case, it wasn’t so much wanting to leave Berkeley as wanting to come to U.T. Surprisingly, there’s more intellectual excitement and dynamism here. The department is growing and expanding, and we’re part of a cohort of new people, which is a fabulous feeling, fraught with potential.”
Meanwhile, back in his old department at Berkeley, things are tight — and no replacements can be hired. “Our biological anthropology course, which is required for psych majors, used to be offered every semester,” said Meg Conkey, an archeology professor, “and now it’s just spring semester, and probably there will be students who don’t get in.
“We just don’t have as many people to draw from, and we’re likely to have three retirements coming up,” she said. For undergraduates, the budget cuts are creating new strains about graduating in four years. Classes will be larger and teaching assistants fewer, and already, dozens of students have been unable to register for sections of introductory chemistry courses.
“Last semester, I couldn’t get into a lab section for Chem 3A,” said Nawal Siddiqui, a bioengineering major who hopes to go to medical school. “So now I’m taking Chem 3B lectures, with the labs for Chem 3A. It’s kind of hard.”
The chancellor of Berkeley, Robert J. Birgeneau, expresses optimism that more money can be saved without cutting into the educational muscle of the university. “If the budget doesn’t get worse,” he said, “we can recover in two years.”
Dr. Birgeneau tells of a recent meeting with a student leader, who said students were most unhappy about the decision to end Berkeley’s tradition of keeping the library open 24 hours during finals, and an hour later, a parent meeting where he mentioned that complaint — and immediately got a $30,000 pledge to pay for round-the-clock library access during finals.
“If they keep cutting, it’ll take us longer to recover,” Dr. Birgeneau said. “But Berkeley can always recover.”
Today's Question: Monday November 16
As Thanksgiving approaches, what changes at CSN would you be most thankful for if they were to happen?
"AAUP Announces Effort to Shore Up Academic Freedom at Public Colleges"
Posted by Tazzie 10 Nov 2009
Source:
http://chronicle.com/article/AAUP-Announces-Effort-to-Shore/49100/
November 10, 2009
AAUP Announces Effort to Shore Up Academic Freedom at Public Colleges
By Peter Schmidt
Washington
The American Association of University Professors is embarking on a campaign to protect academic freedom at public colleges in response to recent federal-court decisions seen as eroding faculty members' speech rights.
The new campaign urges national faculty unions and higher-education associations, as well as individual public colleges' faculty groups and administrators, to push such institutions to adopt policies broadly protecting faculty speech dealing with academic matters, institutional governance, teaching, research, and issues outside the workplace. The campaign also calls for faculty members to work with the AAUP to help it monitor and weigh in on new court cases in which the speech rights of faculty members are threatened.
"The right of faculty members at public colleges and universities to speak freely without fear of retribution is endangered as never before," the association said in a newsletter sent to about 400,000 faculty members that describes the campaign, called "Speak Up, Speak Out: Protect the Faculty Voice on Campus."
In a report being issued in connection with the campaign, an AAUP subcommittee consisting mainly of prominent First Amendment scholars says that recent federal-court decisions dealing with academic freedom are "unexpected and potentially ominous."
A Ruling of Consequence
What triggered the shift in the legal climate, the report says, was a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in the case Garcetti v. Ceballos, which held that government agencies can restrict statements their employees make in connection with their official duties. The case did not deal directly with higher education, and the court majority's opinion explicitly put aside the question of whether its reasoning "would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching." Nevertheless, several federal courts have cited the Garcetti ruling in subsequent decisions holding that faculty members at public colleges were not protected by the First Amendment in speaking out about matters related to their official duties.
Most recently, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit held last spring that Delaware State University acted within its rights in disciplining a professor for statements made in connection with activities that were not specifically covered by his contract. In another case pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Hong v. Grant, a lower federal court held that an emeritus professor at the University of California at Irvine was acting officially—and thus not entitled to First Amendment protections against actions by his employer—when he made statements connected with the hiring, promotion, and staffing decisions of his academic department.
In light of such rulings, the new AAUP report says, faculty members at public colleges can no longer count on the courts to protect their First Amendment rights and instead should work to ensure their speech is protected by institutional policies.
In an interview on Monday, Rachel Levinson, senior counsel at the AAUP, said, "If we were to say what is the one single most important thing people should do, it is to look at the current academic-freedom policy language in a faculty handbook or contract or collective-bargaining agreement, and make sure that it protects the sort of speech or involvement in institutional governance that we discuss in the report."
The AAUP report, "Protecting an Independent Faculty Voice: Academic Freedom After Garcetti v. Ceballos," was endorsed by the association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. It offers suggestions of policy language that colleges can adopt, calling attention to what it regards as a model policy adopted by the University of Minnesota's Board of Regents in June.
The Minnesota policy defines academic freedom as "the freedom to discuss all relevant matters in the classroom, to explore all avenues of scholarship, research, and creative expression, and to speak or write without institutional discipline or restraint on matters of public concern as well as on matters related to professional duties and the functioning of the university." It also states, however, that faculty members have a responsibility to faithfully perform their professional duties, to recognize "the demands of the scholarly enterprise," and to make clear when they are speaking on matters of public interest that they are not speaking for their institution.
In a written statement announcing the new AAUP campaign, Cary Nelson, the organization's president, said, "The current threat to faculty speech jeopardizes more than just individual educators" because faculty members speak out on "issues critical to society."
Among the organizations that the AAUP subcommittee's report suggests enlisting in the campaign is the American Council on Education, an umbrella group for colleges and higher-education associations. That organization's general counsel, Ada Meloy, said Monday that the council has not officially joined the AAUP's campaign but "we do have the important issue of academic freedom on our radar screen," and that ACE plans to devote a session to the broad subject, and the recent court rulings, at its next annual meeting, in March.
Comments
1. pcncarolina - November 10, 2009 at 11:00 am
What a joke! Since when have any faculty had academic freedom to inject anything even remotely religious into a classroom discussion without fear of retribution?
2. 11134078 - November 10, 2009 at 03:14 pm
Re: pencarolina: In my thirty something years at an NJ state college, I never heard of anyone being afraid to "inject anything remotely religious into a classroom discussion." And certainliy there was no retribution if only because "retribution" would almost certainly have triggered an immediate union grievance.
3. jffoster - November 10, 2009 at 03:47 pm
PC N Carolina, I taught a course called Religion in Culture in an Anthropology department for 38 years without let nor hindrance from the Administration. And taught ethnographies on Japan, Siberia, Central Asia, and the Balkans, and in the latter explained to them about the Nicene Creed, filioque clauses, the use of icons, the Great Schism, &c, &c, again without let nor hindrance from the Administration. And this in conservative Cincinnati, heavily Roman Catholic and the cradle of Reformed Judaism. Sorry you feel the Tar Heels haven't provided the same atmosphere of intellectual freedom.
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