Politics

Walker Takes on Higher Education in Wisconsin

Published

10 years ago

June 11, 2015

In this June 4, 2015, photo, University of Wisconsin of Milwaukee associate professor Lorraine Malcoe, second from left, joins other angry educators and supporters in protest by taping their mouths shut outside a Board of Regents meeting in Milwaukee. A spokesman for university professors says Gov. Scott Walker’s education policy changes that eliminate tenure could embolden faculty in Wisconsin and around the country to become more organized as Walker mounts his expected run for the White House. (Mike De Sisti/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel via AP)

SCOTT BAUER, Associated Press

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — Four years after taking union rights away from teachers and other public workers in Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker now wants to strip job protections for University of Wisconsin professors in a move he likens to the 2011 law that made him a national figure and set up his expected presidential run.

Eliminating tenure in state law, as Walker proposed in January and a Republican-controlled legislative committee approved earlier this month, is part of a larger overhaul of higher education policy that he is talking about to Republican voters around the country.

Walker and Republican backers defend his higher education proposal as empowering university leaders to be more like a business and nimble in how they govern. University professors and their supporters, both in Wisconsin and nationally, are raising alarms that it’s an attack on academic freedom that could gain momentum in other states.

“Within the higher ed universe, this is being seen as an extremely consequential, signal event,” said Barmak Nassirian, director of federal relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

A companion effort would take from professors and staff certain decision-making powers about campus issues including curriculum, research and faculty status. Combined with ending tenure in state law, the higher education proposal would be the first of its kind in the country, Nassirian said.

“Obviously the faculty are opposed, but there are plenty of folks who look at it and believe this, in fact, is the future,” Nassirian said, citing the increasing pressure on universities to be more efficient in light of escalating tuition costs. “And it may be.”

Wisconsin faculty members are sounding alarms that the changes will lead to a flood of departures for universities with stronger tenure. A petition signed by more than 450 of the university’s award-winning researchers asked lawmakers to reconsider.

More than a dozen faculty members came to a Board of Regents meeting with tape over their mouths, holding signs of protest. That’s a far cry from the 2011 protests at the state Capitol that grew to as many as 100,000 people when Walker went after public workers’ union protections.

Still, Walker openly makes comparisons. This is “Act 10 for the university,” he says, invoking the title of the union law.

Opponents say protests could grow, and extend beyond Wisconsin. Henry Reichman, vice president of the American Association of University Professors and chairman of its committee on academic freedom and tenure, said the proposed changes in Wisconsin could embolden faculty both there and around the country to become more organized as Walker mounts his expected run for the Republican nomination.

“One message to higher ed would be you really don’t want to support Scott Walker for president because if he can do it in Wisconsin, he will do it everywhere,” Reichman said.

Walker, who attended Marquette University but did not graduate, initially proposed cutting the university’s state aid by 13 percent, or $300 million. Budget writers in the Legislature have reduced the proposed cut to $250 million, while still voting to eliminate tenure in state law, leaving it up to the university’s regents to set a policy as is done in every other state.

But the Legislature’s budget committee went even further, proposing to change the law to make it easier to fire those with tenure. Now, tenured faculty members can only be fired for just cause or if there’s a financial emergency. Under the new provisions, the administration could fire them “when such an action is deemed necessary due to a budget or program decision requiring program discontinuance, curtailment, modification or redirection.”

The Legislature is expected to vote on the proposals this month or next, when passing a state budget. Walker has been campaigning for the GOP nomination for months, in all but name, but says he won’t announce his decision until the budget is passed.

In taking tenure out of state law, the legislation would let the Board of Regents set its own policy on that matter. But with 16 of the 18 regents appointed by the governor, taken together with the broader authority under state law to fire faculty, opponents of the move say the resulting policy is bound to be feckless.

“Tenure will be gone as we know it and I think it’s a step backward for our relationship with faculty members,” said Tony Evers, who serves on the Board of Regents in his capacity as state superintendent. Evers fought against Walker’s union restrictions against teachers and other public workers four years ago and signed the petition that led to the 2012 statewide vote over recalling Walker from office. Walker won that vote.

___

Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sbauerAP

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Activism

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

13 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

14 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.