Posts Tagged ‘Center for 21st Century Studies’
So Here’s Everything You Missed While You Were Paying Attention to the Election Links
* It was an absolutely crazy month trying to get the final proofs locked down, but The Cambridge History of Science Fiction has an Amazon page and a publication date: November 30, 2018. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this massive undertaking! Obviously $175 is a hefty price tag, so talk to your public and university library about science fiction today…
* SFRA Review #326 is up with my last vice president’s note (sniff).
* I think I forgot to hype my review essay in the latest Science Fiction Film and Television on Arrival and parenting. Consider it hyped!
* I was also lucky enough to participate in the symposium for the new issue of Science Fiction Studies on climate crisis. (The end of my contribution for those who can’t get past the preview.)
* Wired has a profile of KSR in honor of Red Moon, which I’m meant to be reviewing for LARB one of these days…
* Ted Chiang’s second collection, Exhalation, is finally coming out in May 2019. An absolute must-buy.
* J.R.R. Tolkien’s Final Posthumous Book Is Published.
* It’s been too long since I last posted and this CFP is out of date now, but it looks like a great event at Madison next year: CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* At least the Post45 CFP is still active! And this one! Transgressions: McGill University’s 25th Annual English Graduate Conference.
* CFP: The Sanzed Empire on Fire: A Panel on N.K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy.
* Call for Papers: Insecurity Conference (Spring 2019). At UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
* Another thing I missed in a month of not posting: Jaimee’s first review for the Rumpus. It’s a good one!
* Monsters vs. Empire: Mark Bould vs. the Space Force.
* Nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come.
* Race and Halloween in Milwaukee.
* A special issue of the Canadian Journal of Canadian Studies: Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures—An Introduction.
* Why I’m Fighting To Get Rid Of The “Baby Graveyard” At Marquette University.
* Jesuits to release names of accused priests in the west. This is going to hit Catholic higher education like a sledgehammer.
* Superstar-professor-industrial complex. Academia as cult.
* Architectural history in an era of capitalist ruin.
What if I told you one of the largest ever undertakings in American historic preservation was happening not through the graces of any large institution, but through the autonomous participation of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of individuals across the country, who are collectively stitching together their own narrative of architectural history?
The “Kmart” group on the photo-sharing website Flickr has amassed a staggering twenty-five thousand photos of its subject, a struggling American discount store. It hardly matters that, against the grain of the high-architectural image factory, many of these photos could not be called artistic—a number of them appear to have been taken with shaky cell phones, or from the wrong side of a speeding car. The production of high-gloss photography is not the purpose of this group. It’s purpose is to document a slow extinction.
* “I’m about to hit the ground but the bottom of my shoes were melting. I … prayed to God, ‘Please, don’t let me die like this,'” said nurse Nichole Jolly. Nurses fleeing fast-moving Camp Fire scramble to save patients — and themselves.
* Microplastics found in 90 percent of table salt. Insect collapse study ‘one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read,’ expert warns. Humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, report finds. Entire cities evacuate as hellish wildfires whip through California. Here’s Where the Post-Apocalyptic Water Wars Will Be Fought. As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future. Geoengineering as a weapon of war. Left-wing climate realism and the Trump climate change memo. Weather 2050: See how your city’s weather will be different in just one generation. Capitalism torched the world, fascism rose from the ashes. No Empires, No Dust Bowls Ecological Disasters and the Lessons of History. Best prepare for social collapse, and soon. Climate Change Is Already Damaging American Democracy. Climate Change is Already Drastically Altering the World’s Climate Zones. High Tide Socialism in Low Tide Times. Disaster socialism. Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change. The end of the world is over. Now the real work begins.
* The Wandering Earth could be China’s breakout sci-fi blockbuster film.
* How Marvel and Corporate Comics Are Failing the ‘Vulnerable’ Creators Behind Their Superheroes. The case of Chuck Wendig.
* Citation as gratitude. Should Scholars Avoid Citing the Work of Awful People? Over time all cultural work asymptotically approaches the condition of Twitter.
* The NCAA is gaslighting you. The secret betrayal that sealed Nike’s special influence over the University of Oregon. Scandal at Maryland. Nearly 100 More Women Accuse USC Gynecologist George Tyndall of Abuse.
* Going Hungry at the Most Prestigious MFA in America.
* Secretive Campus Cops Patrol Already Overpoliced Neighborhoods.
* Meet the UW professor who just killed the death penalty.
* When you wake up this morning from unsettling dreams, you find yourself changed in your bed into a monstrous vermin. You Are Jeff Bezos.
Politics corner!
* Years too late, the end of Scott Walker. Wisconsin’s $4.1B Foxconn Boondoggle.
* Back to this. No asylum. These Companies Are Helping Trump Wage ‘Technological Warfare’ Against Immigrants. Amazon is helping ICE track, detain and deport immigrants, report say. Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court. The Five-Year-Old Who Was Detained at the Border and Persuaded to Sign Away Her Rights. The war inside 7-11. How A Massive ICE Raid Changed Life In One Small American Town. ICE Is Imprisoning a Record 44,000 People. ICE Is Sending Separated Children Home With No One To Pick Them Up.
* Swedish student who stopped deportation flight of Afghan asylum seeker to be prosecuted.
* The President personally and directly violating election law is like a page 6 story. And this one. And this one!
* I know the vast amount of focus is on the immediate future of the Mueller probe, but it’s also wild that Whitaker, with this resume, is now the chief law enforcement officer in the country. ‘He’s a F*cking Fool.’
* The political theology of Trump.
* Florida. Why is it always Florida?
* The Gerontocracy is Driving America into the Ditch. The rigging of American politics.
* What would you say about abolishing the Supreme Court? It’s a start. Resisting the Justocracy.
* Rule of law watch: Promise not to kill anyone? After losing election, TX judge wholesale releases juvenile defendants.
* Elsewhere in Texas: Now we see the violence inherent in the system.
* Periodic unhappy reminder that stochastic terrorism is a term you’re going to want to familiarize yourself with.
* Pittsburgh Shooting Was Straight Out of White Power Movement. Law enforcement can’t and won’t fight them. More on that won’t.
* Fascism Is Not an Idea to Be Debated, It’s a Set of Actions to Fight.
* Brazil. One key lesson from Brazil’s lapse into fascism: Don’t trust liberals. This Is How We Radicalized The World.
* Classic Obama move to punish a bank for its crimes and make sure not to tell anyone.
* There are so many constitutional crises going on right now that it’s hard to remember where they all are. This from West Virginia was less than a month ago.
* Three Months Inside Alt-Right New York.
* Five Principles for Left Foreign Policy.
* Why are we in the Middle East?
* The Senate is a huge problem for Democrats. America needs a bigger House. The Democrats’ Existential Battle: Achieving Real Democracy.
* Trans rights are human rights.
* Victims of School Shootings From 1946–2018, in Their Own Words.
* Death or Debt? National Estimates of Financial Toxicity in Persons with Newly-Diagnosed Cancer.
* But Neel makes the unifying, underlying dynamics hard to deny — dynamics of dwindling state resources, growing demands stemming from unfolding climate catastrophe and rising superfluity, and deepening threats to government capacity and legitimacy. This is stark terrain that too few scholars glimpse with any clarity. Its implications are massive.
* Tell Me It’s Going to be OK.
* What is the evolutionary advantage of death?
* Training our self-driving cars to be fascists.
* If #Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear – which would cover one year’s worth of the carbon emission cuts required to limit temperature rises this century to 2C.
* Miscarrying at Work: The Physical Toll of Pregnancy Discrimination.
* A $21,634 bill? How a homeless woman fought her way out of tow-company hell.
* I want to believe! Welcome ‘Oumuamua.
* How Jennifer’s Body went from a flop in 2009 to a feminist cult classic today.
* Maryse Condé Wins an Alternative to the Literature Nobel in a Scandal-Plagued Year.
* The Singularity. Rebelling. By the time he realizes he’s agreed to teach high school English, it’ll be too late. Kafkaesque. The Literary Turning Test. What I ought to want, what I actually want, what I behave like I want. Fermi problems. Fun facts. Autocomplete. Lifecycle of the academic. Mental health. Amalekites.
* “Do you want to turn your notifications off?” Twitter asked.
* Is There Such A Thing As Ballet That Doesn’t Hurt Women?
* The story of a serial SWATter.
* The idea that the ancients disdained bright color is the most common misconception about Western aesthetics in the history of Western art. “He started poking around the depots and was astonished to find that many statues had flecks of color: red pigment on lips, black pigment on coils of hair, mirrorlike gilding on limbs. For centuries, archeologists and museum curators had been scrubbing away these traces of color before presenting statues and architectural reliefs to the public.”
* So many people have had their DNA sequenced that they’ve put other people’s privacy in jeopardy.
* In defense of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
* The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.
* The Sears catalog and Jim Crow. How vulture capitalists ate Sears. Eddie Lampert not only ran the company; he was also its largest creditor and the guy who sold major Sears assets to … Eddie Lampert.
* I’m sorry my parrot is so racist.
* Friction-free racism: Surveillance capitalism turns a profit by making people more comfortable with discrimination. An AI lie detector will interrogate travellers at some EU borders. Twilight of the Racist Uncles. We Are All Research Subjects Now.
* Looking for the helpers: Turning the reassuring line for children into a meme for adults should make everyone uncomfortable.
* The Possessed: Dispatches from the Third Trimester.
* A British baby who was born at exactly 11 a.m. on the great day was christened Pax. At the age of twenty-one, he would be killed in the next war. The obligatory Vonnegut.
* 2018 in headlines: Man run over by lawn mower while trying to kill son with a chainsaw, police say. Loggers Accidentally Cut Down World’s Oldest Tree in Amazon Forest. Was Tony The Tiger Driven Off Twitter By Unbelievably Horny Furries?
* Nothing gold can stay: Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch puppeteer Caroll Spinney announces retirement.
* And if you want a vision of the future, imagine increasingly unnecessary sequels to any cultural production that strikes any sort of chord in anyone, forever. I don’t know how I’m managing to maintain a good attitude about the Picard show given that every piece of available evidence demonstrates it’ll be just another cynical cash grab.
* Same exact joke but about people trying to adapt Foundation.
Happy Day after My Birthday to Me Links
* I’ve had a few pieces come out in the last couple weeks, including a short rumination on memory in the Anthropocene (and Richard McGuire’s Here) for the online journal Deletion. I’m also batting cleanup in a beautiful new volume called Science Fiction: A Literary History, with a piece on “New Paradigms, After 2001.”
* The Syllabus: A tribute to the late, great Jim Clark. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anyone singlehandedly hold a thing together the way Jim held together the UNCG MFA Program.
* The C21 conference for 2018 has a theme: Ends of Cinema. There’s also a promising looking conference happening at McMaster University on Embodiment in Science Fiction and Fantasy. CfP: Fandom—Past, Present, Future, DePaul University, Chicago, IL. And a cool postdoc at Madison: Postdoctoral Fellowship on the Plantationocene.
* I loved this episode of The Lit Review podcast on Octavia Butler’s Earthseed books, with Adrienne Maree Brown. Highly recommend!
* Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson.
The Anthropocene is that moment in which capitalist expansion can no longer expand, and you get a crush of the biophysical system – that’s climate change – and then you get a crush of the political economy.
* 31 Essential Science Fiction Terms And Where They Came From.
* A Timeline for Humanity’s Colonization of Space.
* If China Makes First Contact.
* Science Fiction and the Arab Spring.
* 8 Sci-Fi Writers on Where Star Trek Should Go Next.
* The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons and Dragons.
* Critical Perspectives on Waluigi.
* Welcome to the future, time traveler!
* The House Just Voted to Bankrupt Graduate Students. The GOP Tax Plan Will Destroy Graduate Education. Grad Students Are Freaking Out About the GOP Tax Plan. They Should Be. I would expect a massive wave of college closures in 2018 and 2019 if this goes through.
* I’m very excited to read Malcolm Harris’s book on millennials, which is getting rave reviews. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times.
Unions aren’t just good for wage workers. Students can use collective bargaining, too. The idea of organizing student labor when even auto factory workers are having trouble holding onto their unions may sound outlandish, but young people have been at the forefront of conflicts over police brutality, immigrant rights and sexual violence. In terms of politics, they are as tightly clustered as just about any demographic in America. They are an important social force in this country, one we need right now.
It’s in students’ shared interest to seek later start times for the school day to combat the epidemic of insufficient sleep among high schoolers. It’s in their shared interest to improve their mental health by reducing competition. They could start by demanding an end to class rank or a cap on the number of Advanced Placement courses each student can take per year. It’s in their shared interest to make life easier and lower the stakes of childhood in general. Only young people, united, can improve their working conditions and end the academic arms race.
The excerpt from Harper’s was really good, too!
By looking at children as investments, it’s possible to see where the product of children’s labor is stored: in their human capital. It’s a kid’s job to stay eligible for the labor market (and not in jail, insane, or dead). Any work beyond that adds to their résumé. If more human capital automatically led to a higher standard of living, this model could be the foundation for an American meritocracy. But millennials’ extra work hasn’t earned them the promised higher standard of living. By every metric, this generation is the most educated in American history, yet its members are worse off economically than their parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. Every authority from moms to presidents told millennials to accumulate as much human capital as they could; they did, but the market hasn’t held up its end of the bargain. What gives?
* Documenting bias against married women in junior faculty searches. What It Looks Like When a University Tries to Revoke a Professor’s Tenure. The University and Debt: Thinking About Neocolonialism in the United States. The Great College Loan Swindle. The Finger-Pointing at the Finance Firm TIAA. Public Higher Ed Skews Wealthy. University History Departments Have a Race Problem. Public engagement is a two-way street.
* What Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal Reveals.
* It’s Official: ‘Lord of the Rings’ TV Series Gets Multiple-Season Commitment at Amazon. With Christopher Tolkien stepping down as executor of the estate I really think they should have waited to try to get the rights to The Silmarillion (which would work much better on television than in cinema). Trying to do the Jackson trilogy on a shoestring is just not going to hold up. Elsewhere in Tolkien news: an earnest effort to see him named a saint in the Catholic Church.
* Honestly Amazon just should have done Prydain.
* I’ve been saying it since the 1990s: Bill Clinton should have resigned. And Al Franken, who I thought better of, should now.
* My dream of one day being a federal judge remains alive.
* Almost all the US jobs created since 2005 are temporary. Americans Are Retiring Later, Dying Sooner and Sicker In-Between. World’s witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn. Weaponizing the tax code. The coming retail apocalypse.
* This is one of the sickest deportation stories yet.
* Two murder convictions for the same shot.
* Sexual Harassment Will Change Your Career Forever. Someone is editing all the bullshit out of celebrity sexual assault apologies. The Myth of the Male Bumbler. Let this flood of women’s stories never cease.
* Why Are There No Great Female Werewolves?
* Portrait Of An American Mass Shooting.
* Scientist recalls training Laika for space.
* Oh No, I Got Sucked Into the X-Wing Tabletop Game.
* The nightmare that is children’s YouTube culture.
* In a historic move I’m limiting myself to just one “we’re all going to die” link: Democrats Are Shockingly Unprepared to Fight Climate Change.
* The truth about Easter Island: a sustainable society has been falsely blamed for its own demise.
* Japan, are you okay? I was worried and wanted to reach out.
* And I’ve been on the record saying this for years! Universe shouldn’t exist, CERN physicists conclude.
Sunday Morning!
* Early career advice you can use: The Hiring Process at Teaching Colleges. How Your Journal Editor Works.
* So what do I mean by claiming that there is no future to the study of culture in the 21st Century? My thesis is that we are (or should be) nearing the end of the study of culture, and that to continue to study it as we have will run the risk of irrelevance, or worse. In this talk I maintain that there is no future for the study of culture if it does not include the study of key concerns of the 21st century, including especially those ecological, geopolitical, and economic issues which threaten the existence of culture as we know it.
* Kim Stanley Robinson on Generation Anthropocene.
* I thought the first episode of Harmonquest was pretty promising. I’ve also been enjoying The Union of “The State” for the full 90s flashback experience. And why not wash it down with Dana Carvey’s Nano-Impressions?
* Bad news: 2016 will get one last extra second to make us all suffer.
* There’s a Secret Message Written Into the Sands of Mars.
* “I’m a black ex-cop, and this is the real truth about race and policing.” A bit more from Kottke on what happens when you turn police agencies into a revenue stream.
* Pokémon Go and Race in America.
* Hillary Clinton’s Poll Numbers Look Nearly Unbeatable.
* The Leftist’s Guide to Actually Existing Welfare.
* When a physician is the perpetrator, the AJC found, the nation often looks the other way.
* An interactive self-care guide.
* Millennials and class identity.
* The parental misery index. Whenever I see this studies I really think that “happiness” is the wrong value to be trying to measure; being a parent is unquestionably the best thing I’ve ever done, whether it makes me quantifiably “happier” moment-to-moment or not.
* No more half measures: only the total elimination of the university can protect students and teachers from each other.
* The Trusted Grown-Ups Who Steal Millions From Youth Sports.
* On playing the LAPD in your local pickup league.
* And truly we are all guilty before the law.
Wednesday Links!
* CFP: Postcoloniality Animality. CFP: Critical Essays on American Horror Story.
* 10 Cities Where Crime Is Soaring. But there’s a solution, and I call it MONORAIL! STREETCAR! Goddamnit Milwaukee.
* Mount St. Mary’s Ableist Plan To Push Out Vulnerable Students. Also from David Perry: Adventures in Universal Design: That Viral Picture of Ramps Set in Stairs.
* During question time at the Salem Rotary, Stone was asked what happened to Sweet Briar. His theory is the old board simply gave up. He had been on accrediting teams that had looked at the school’s finances in the recent past — and never found a hint of trouble. Amazing.
* Magic Money and the Partially Funded Sabbatical.
* Union-busting at Duke: a brief history.
* What Should We Say About David Bowie and Lori Maddox? A little more analysis of the situation from Adam Kotsko.
* Is ISIS No Longer a Good Place to Work?
* Was Justice Scalia a Good Legal Writer? The Supreme Court After Scalia.
* The last time there has been a vacancy of the length the GOP now proposes was more than 170 years ago. Supreme Court Nominees Considered in Election Years Are Usually Confirmed.
* Hillary Clinton is losing faith in her “Latino firewall” in Nevada. Is Nevada Feeling the Bern? Polls predict a tie.
* The U.S. government wants a backdoor into every iPhone.
* After years in solitary, a woman struggles to carry on.
* The Uncertain Path to Full Professor.
* Undiscovered J R R Tolkien poems found in 1936 school magazine.
* No Man’s Sky: the game where you can explore 18 quintillion planets.
* Exotic Cosmic Locales Available as Space Tourism Posters.
* And finally someone has taken Judge Judy to task.
Wednesday Links! No Fooling.
* Keywords for the Age of Austerity 17: Brand/Branding/Rebrand.
* Jackson was paid $7.1 million in 2012, more than any other college president in the nation, and continues to be paid at that level. Just in case you don’t click through, the headline to that piece reads “Report: R.P.I. facing $1 billion in debts, liabilities.” So you know she’s worth every penny of that salary.
* But did you know the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee gets less than half the public money per student that Madison Area Technical College gets and less than a third of what goes to Milwaukee Area Technical College?
* And speaking of UWM: After Extinction, at UWM April 30-May 2.
* Meanwhile, at Duke: Response to President Brodhead and Provost Kornbluth. The original incident is described here.
* Unsettling the University, at UCR April 2-3.
* But what also became clear was that she and I have radically different visions of what constitutes the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System and how it might be preserved and protected. Through the course of our conversation it became increasingly clear to me that in the current situation in Wisconsin we find ourselves in what French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard called “a differend,” a case of conflict between parties that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgement applicable to both. In the case of a differend, the parties cannot agree on a rule or criterion by which their dispute might be decided. A differend is opposed to a litigation – a dispute which can be equitably resolved because the parties involved can agree on a rule of judgement.” Despite all parties–Regents, chancellors, faculty, staff, students, and alumni–being committed to the well-being of the University of Wisconsin System, it seems impossible to agree upon a rule of judgment or any set of criteria by which to adjudicate our different visions of what that well-being would look like.
* Dept. Names More Than 550 Colleges It Has Put Under Extra Financial Scrutiny.
* Salaita lawyers: ‘No doubt’ that UI, prof had agreement for employment.
* Over time, however, more and more departments failed to meet that standard; last year some 60 units were out of compliance, according to information gathered by the union. At Bridgewater State University, one of the worst offenders, for example, adjuncts taught more than 15 percent of courses in 16 large departments in 2014-15. Some 50 percent of classes in the English department were taught by part-time faculty, along with 40 percent in math and computer science. In philosophy, it was 63 percent of classes. Bridgewater officials did not respond to a request for comment.
* Google Maps turned your streets into Pac-Man yesterday, though I can’t imagine how anyone could have missed this news.
* The Entire History of ‘Doctor Who’ Illustrated as a Tapestry.
* 24 Rare Historical Photos That Will Leave You Speechless.
* California Snowpack Hits All-Time Low, 8 Percent Of Average.
* Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men.
* Chomsky: The Death of American Universities.
* There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
* The Trevor Noah train wreck.
* “Lutheran pastor resigns after being linked to threatening email.” That’s… something.
* Italian grandmother causes illness with cocoa expired in 1990.
* Why You Should Really Be Afraid of the Zombie Apocalypse.
* Gas Siphoning Coverup May Have Caused East Village Explosion. Jesus Christ.
* But there’s at least one unforeseen upside when all episodes are released at once: The writers don’t get the chance to self-correct in the middle of the season.
* The Long And Terrible History Of DC Comics Mistreating Batgirl.
* The Americans renewed for season four. Hooray!
* Study: Not Many Disco Songs About Daytime. But of course more work is required.
* Oh my God, Becky, look at this vigorous debate among scholars about the true origin of the straight male preference for a curvier backside.
* I can”t believe they’re bringing this thing back: The X-Files Could Have Ended With a West Wing Crossover.
* And Paul F. Tompkins picks his best episodes from a prolific podcasting career. My tragedy is I’ve heard all these. Perhaps you’ve heard he’s got a new one out today…
Cultural Preservation Today! (And Tomorrow!)
The actual “Cultural Preservation Today” symposium is tomorrow, Friday, March 27, in Raynor Library BC at Marquette — but two of my speakers will be speaking at UWM today if you have the time to check them out:
* Stephen A. Small will deliver a lecture titled “Public History and Reparations: Social Mobilization and the Legacy of Slavery in the African Diaspora today” on March 26, 2015 from 2:30 – 4:00pm in the American Geographical Society Library, UWM Libraries, Third Floor, East Wing.
* And John Patrick Leary will be speaking at the Center for 21st Century Studies today at 2 PM, delivering a lecture titled “Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Austerity: The Moral Economy of Branding and Entrepreneurship.”
Richard Grusin on the End of UW
Although all of the details are not filled in, it looks like Scott Walker’s bold presidential campaign move for 2016 will be the transformation of the university system from a state agency dependent on taxpayer funding to a quasi-independent “public-service corporation,” thus legalizing in practice what has already been happening in theory, the corporatization of the University of Wisconsin System. By granting the System autonomy and freedom to make its own administrative/business decisions and therefore, or so the neoliberalism of the ALEC playbook goes, Walker and his Republican allies will enable the System to find “efficiencies” and raise revenues that will compensate for the cuts in state funding, which according to an announcement on January 27, will return to their 1998 levels with a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System in the upcoming biennial. In addition to these devastating cuts, the first year of which for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would be equivalent to the entire budget of the Lubar School of Business, the danger of this transformation to semi-private corporation is that System employees and faculty would lose their statutory protections (things like tenure, faculty governance, job security, and academic freedom are currently protected by state statutes) in favor of the contractual protections offered by the Board of Regents, who will now have almost complete authority over the UW System.
The problem with this change, of course, is that 16 of the 18 Regents are political appointees (appointed by the governor)—two ex-officio and 14 on staggered seven-year terms—as opposed to being elected, say, as they are (on a campus-by-campus basis) in Michigan, where I formerly taught. That means, four years into the Walker administration, that more than half of the governor-appointed Regents are Walker appointees; before the end of Scott Walker’s second term all of them will be. So by the end of this next biennial budget (2017), tenure and faculty governance, as well as such decisions like the appropriate number of campuses needed for the System, will be at the whims of a board made up entirely of Scott Walker appointees. The political brilliance of this move (make no mistake, Walker and his handlers are brilliant electoral politicians) is that if and when these protections are stripped in the next couple of years, the blame will not go to the Governor or the legislature but to the Walker-appointed Board of Regents, who will claim to have acted responsibly and in the system’s interests to make changes to deal with the terrible crisis caused by the Republican tax cuts. When tuition is raised and campuses closed, it will not be the state government that did it, but those egg-headed academics and their Board of Regents.
Lots more important context at the link.
