Writer seeks to clarify Graduate School reorganization issue
Editor’s note: The following letter was submitted to Wisconsin Week on Nov. 17. Find more information about the resolution referenced in the letter.
Dear editor,
The Wisconsin Week article “Faculty Senate OKs slow research overhaul” covering the Faculty Senate’s Nov. 2 response to the administration’s desire to restructure the Graduate School contains a number of misleading inaccuracies. The most serious of these is a complete misstatement of the resolution at the outset of the article. Because the rest of the article is based on the incorrect characterization of the resolution, the University Committee requests that the entire article be retracted.
That fundamental problem occurs in the article’s first paragraph: “A proposed reorganization of the Graduate School will be slowed down until university administrators have responded to an upcoming review of the plan…” Nowhere in the text of the resolution nor during the related debate was an “upcoming review of the plan” ever referenced. The resolution, which, by the way, garnered but one negative vote, reads as follows: “Whereas the administration’s proposal to reorganize the Graduate School has been presented without a detailed written plan and without time for due consideration of the implications of such a plan for research and graduate education, be it resolved that the Faculty Senate opposes any action to implement such a plan, e.g., through the creation of a new vice chancellor for research or changes in the functions of the Graduate School, until the administration provides a fully developed written plan in response to the University Committee’s ad hoc committee report and recommendations, which has been reviewed and approved by the University Committee and the Faculty Senate with appropriate opportunity for comment by all members of the faculty.”
The faculty’s ad hoc committee that was charged by the University Committee to determine the needs of the research enterprise was not asked to review the administration’s “plan” because the provost’s Power Point presentation lacks sufficient detail to make its critique possible. But that’s not the only problem with the article. The resolution includes no reference to university administrators responding to a review, but rather, the resolution requires that before any plan go forward, it must have “been reviewed and approved by the University Committee and the Faculty Senate with appropriate opportunity for comment by all members of the faculty.” Wisconsin Week’s article presents a reversal of this process.
Even the title of the article is misleading. Neither the resolution nor the debate suggested that the senate was approving a “research overhaul.” The senate’s opposition to the implementation of a plan until it has University Committee and senate approval clearly slows down the administration’s “process.” However, precisely because the administration has proceeded toward a restructuring without an actual detailed plan to which the faculty can respond, the senate invoked its responsibility for the immediate governance of the institution by adopting the resolution. What the resolution does call for is deliberation and participation by faculty governance bodies, critical elements that have been missing from the “process.”
Finally, Wisconsin Week’s selection of quotations for the article exhibits the same apparent attempt to mislead the reader to believe that the senate resolution supports change as long as it is slow.
There is broad-based faculty concern over how the senate resolution has been reported by the administration. To correct the record and give those in attendance an insight into the actual tone and substance of the discussion, the University Committee asks for a formal retraction of the article and that Wisconsin Week publish this letter as well as sociology professor Robert Hauser’s presentation to the senate (below).
William Tracy, chair
Friday Professor of Agronomy
