A Petition to UW-Green Bay Chancellor Mike Alexander
UW-Green Bay Chancellor Mike Alexander
From: UWGB-United and the UW-Green Bay community
This summer, the legislature and Gov. Evers agreed to a budget mandating a specific teaching load for all UW system instructors. Leveraging this time of crisis, UW-Green Bay Chancellor Mike Alexander, unfortunately, wants to even more drastically change our working conditions, as he has now proposed to create a two-tiered system of faculty designed to divide us and, most distressingly, to take control over who serves as unit chairs by creating directors who would not be elected and instead be selected by administration.
In short, here’s all that Act 15 actually requires:
A teaching load of 24 credits for full time faculty and instructional academic staff
The law explicitly allows exemptions for chairs
Of course, this increased teaching load, unless other changes are made, means a 14% increase in workload for us at UW-Green Bay. But instead of convening a conversation about how to make that change easier for us as faculty, what Alexander has decided to do is to eliminate our democratic practice of electing chairs to represent academic units.
Here's what Alexander’s proposal would actually do:
Require most instructors to teach an additional course with the same course caps, thus forcing most of us to do 14% more work.
Exempt a select few faculty from this workload increase if their research is deemed worthy by the administration (these would only teach 18 credits a year).
Select a small number of directors to do the work unit chairs have typically done. These directors would have a 0-6 credit work-load and they would only be accountable to the chancellor’s office, who would select them.
Petition by
Sponsored by
To:
UW-Green Bay Chancellor Mike Alexander
From:
[Your Name]
We, the undersigned, who have devoted our livelihoods to the mission of UW-Green Bay, reject this effort to divide us and to destroy the fabric of the democratic governance at the center of our university. We reject this assault on the norms that have made our university great, and we call on Alexander to do the following:
1.) Retract the plan entirely to replace chairs with unaccountable directors.
2.) Negotiate with faculty and staff to reduce course caps so that the 14% increase in workload is mitigated by lower class sizes.
3.) Negotiate with faculty and staff so that high-impact, individualized instruction efforts (such as independent study courses and/or student research projects), which many faculty have undertaken for years without explicit recognition, are accounted for when computing teaching loads.
4.) Offer any course reassignments for research and service (as allowed by state law) through a democratic process that puts faculty and staff in charge of determining how best to offer these reassignments.
We are at an inflection point for the future of our university, and we pledge, collectively, to defend our university’s mission against the efforts by any one person to undermine that mission.