FACULTY FOR THE RENEWAL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION: Reclaiming the University: Fulfilling Our Promise to Students and the Public

Monday, September 27, 2010

Reclaiming the University: Fulfilling Our Promise to Students and the Public

Please join FRPE and the Education Action Coalition for an exciting conversation about the challenges facing higher education today.

Reclaiming the University: Fulfilling our Promise to Students and the Public

Thu, Sep 30, 5:00-6:30pm
Free and open to all

U of M, West Bank
Blegen Hall, room 5

We are told that the university is in crisis. The administration claims the crisis is created by reductions in public support. Yet even before the recent cuts in state appropriations, the University was doing a poor job fulfilling its educational mission as a land-grant institution. Skyrocketing tuition has limited access to our state’s flagship university, the milking of tuition-generating units to fund initiatives unrelated to education has diminished the quality of instruction, and the pursuit of private sources of revenue has compromised the institution’s ethics and academic integrity. This critical conversation about higher education will illuminate why higher education is failing the public, and consider how collective action can change this situation.

Speakers:
Carl Elliott, Professor, Center for Bioethics, University of Minnesota
“A Fatal Drug Study at the University of Minnesota and Why It will Happen Again” - on the tragic story of Dan Markingson, a mentally ill young man who died in a clinical trial conducted at the University of Minnesota. The case exposes stunning ethical lapses at the U, lapses that are likely to recur without major structural changes.

Gary Rhoades, General Secretary of the American Association of University Professors
“Reclaiming the Public Promise of Public Higher Education” - on how prioritizing private, institutional, and corporate interests in pursuit of revenue and rankings has undercut the public responsibilities and functions of public universities.

Sofia Shank, campus activist and Women’s Studies major at the University of Minnesota
“The Legacy of Bruininks’s ‘Strategic Positioning’: Tracing the Direction of the University” - on the consequences of strategic positioning for students at the University of Minnesota, and organizing for change.

Moderated by Karen Ho, Associate Professor of Anthropology, UofM

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RECLAIM THE U!

As the administration has come to dominate instead of to serve the university, intellectual and educational values have been displaced by market ones like "efficiency" and "productivity." Faculty and students have been commensurately marginalized in the governance of the institution. We do not say that the university ought to be inefficient or unproductive, but we do demand that values central to scholarly and scientific inquiry and education be restored to the center of the university's endeavors, including (indeed, especially) the management of its finances. Our efforts have a fivefold focus:

1. Governance. The university should be governed by those who carry out its mission of teaching, research, and public service. At present faculty have little meaningful role in making decisions that are handed down from central administration. This state of affairs results from manifold causes, faculty in generations gone by having ceded governance responsibilities to an ever-growing body of administrators. We the faculty must resume our proper role in making, rather than merely reacting to, the decisions that govern our work and our workplace.

2. Transparency in budgeting. The administration should make all information about the university's finances, including expenditures as well as revenue sources, readily available to the public in comprehensible form. At present it is difficult or even impossible to find out how the university spends most of the funds at its disposal, effectively prohibiting people without privileged access and knowledge from scrutinizing the administration's allocation of financial resources. (N.B.: All these resources are public funds once they enter the land-grant institution's coffers.) We recommend an independent audit to open the university's budget to such scrutiny.

3. Accountability for the administration. Every office within central administration should be required to provide to the public an account of what it does, what relation its work bears to the university's mission, and why it costs what it does.

4. Workload. The administration demands greater "productivity" from faculty and staff at the same time that it reduces the resources we need to produce anything and increases the burdens that hamper our work. If resources are withdrawn, our workload must be reduced, not increased. We do not want to do less teaching or less research, rather, we demand that unfunded mandates handed down by the administration be eliminated. Meanwhile, adequate support must be provided to enable efficient and productive work.

5. Integrity of the university. We reject the notion that the university can somehow achieve excellence by cutting programs, faculty positions, and curriculum. All disciplines and all modes of inquiry are interrelated, whether directly or distantly; to excise one element affects others, and ultimately damages the whole. This principle of intellectual integration is encapsulated in the motto of the University of Minnesota, commune vinculum omnibus artibus, which is a phrase derived from the argument of Cicero that the study of poetry is essential to a career in law. To unbind the arts from one another, as if any form of human inquiry can stand in isolation from every other, violates not merely the motto but the principle of the University's existence.

FACULTY FOR THE RENEWAL OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

Monday, September 27, 2010

Reclaiming the University: Fulfilling Our Promise to Students and the Public

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RECLAIM THE U!

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