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Of Shared Governance, Transparency, and Difficult Financial Times
These are difficult financial times, and this has escaped no one’s notice. Faculty have been hearing this mantra repeatedly on their campuses, local APSCUF leadership is completely aware of this fact, and so is the leadership at State APSCUF. Every citizen in the Commonwealth should, by now, be cognizant of the difficult budgetary situation that looms in upcoming months.
What to do in these difficult times? Begin by reinforcing shared governance. There is much untapped brain power available to the Office of the Chancellor (OOC) and local administrators among our faculty. The faculty are true stakeholders in the financial health of our institutions, and the challenges ahead should be met not by top-down solutions, but by true consensus building that legitimizes the difficult decisions that lie ahead. read more…
Board of Governors Adopts New Graduate Tuition Policies
The Governors of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) adopted new policies at their quarterly meeting on January 19th. The meeting was conducted at PASSHE headquarters in Harrisburg.
Quality Higher Ed from the Faculty View
Here’s an important volley in the efforts of faculty to be heard, coming out of the LA meeting last weekend — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-meisenhelder/higher-education-at-the-c_b_814569.html? —
As I understand, the way Huffington works, the more people who comment, the more exposure they give a posting. So, feel free to bump it a notch.
Best,
Steve
Post-LA
Composed 25,000 feet over someplace mountainous & snowy,
I suspect — no hope — that in the next couple days you will hear from the media several times about the “event” I am returning from in Los Angeles (Monday’s story). The meeting & its results might change the discourse in this country on higher education.
There were somewhere between 60 & 70 people in the room (who can keep them all still for 8 hours? to count them?) from 20+ states. Most had some leadership role, either locally or in state orgs. As you might expect, their were many from California (proximity matters) & almost everyone in the room was from public universities. read more…
Blog from L.A.
Los Angeles — (date & time unclear)
I am in L.A. at the invitation of the California Faculty Association (CFA) — the meeting was referred to in Friday’s Inside Higher Ed article .
There are somewhere between 65-70 attendees from 21 states. Last night’s dinner opening meeting was a bit like a revival: everyone got (pretty literally) a minute to stand up & witness about what’s happening to higher Ed in the U.S.
Almost unanimously we agreed a central reason for committing to come here was to give faculty a voice in the current discussions about higher Ed.
During the discussions, I heard about this article that articulates one aspect of our concern — http://www.truth-out.org/beyond-swindle-corporate-university-higher-education-service-democracy66945.
That’s enough reading.
From sunny (okay, not yet) L.A.
— Steve