Colleges Wary of Scott Walker’s Higher Ed Reforms

The Donald might not notice him and even Jeb Bush may barely acknowledge his existence, but Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is still causing absolute apoplexy on the part of his state’s university professors.

‘Tenure no longer exists in Wisconsin,” Chuck Rybak avers on his blog. “We have entered the era of pretendure.”

“ The only moral thing to do, right now, is abolish the tenure file.” Rybak is an Associate Professor of English and Humanistic Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay.

“As someone who has compiled two tenure cases for the UW, both of them required and successful, I can say without hesitation that I spent hundreds of hours collecting, organizing, and writing these materials,” Rybak writes. “During my 3rd year in the UW Colleges, I missed my sister’s wedding ceremony IN FRANCE because of a January deadline for submitting an onerous retention file that resulted in me producing hundreds of unread dossier pages.”

“And for what? Nothing.”

“The state has reneged on its side of the agreement; all of those hours of work and worry and preparation were for nothing. Because of the new layoff provisions inserted into Wisconsin state law, all faculty are contingent. Asking people who are your employees to spend this much time on documentation that secures them nothing is a staggering waste of our most valuable resource. It is unethical to ask for such a personal commitment for the sake of mere performance.”

Actually, outside of academia, employees are expected to do a lot more for the sake of “mere performance,” like perform.

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