Who remembers that stupid tourism slogan, “Honestly, Nebraska is not for Everyone?” Today we are going to play UNL, It’s honestly not for everyone. BOR members might have said “yes” to cutting academic programs at UNL with 541 students and 52 faculty members, but what we heard loud and clear was
UNL is not for…
- People who study groundwater in a state where agriculture is dependent on the Ogallala Aquifer
- People who have won NSF CAREER awards
- People who develop new products from corn
- People who train commissioners of education, superintendents, and principals
- People who study and train higher education leaders
- People who train meteorlogists and chase tornadoes
- People who train clothing designers, producers, and sellers
- Scholars who are in the 99th percentile in their field in Academic Analytics
- Rural entrepreneurship development
- Scholars with millions of dollars in external funding
- Quilt studies
- Geologists and paleontologists
- Award-winning faculty members
- Graduate education
- Beloved instructors
- Students who want to study important issues in Nebraska, while staying near their families in, you guessed it, Nebraska
- Basic accounting
- Appropriate use of data and statistics
- Shared governance
- Tenure
- Respect for hard work and expertise
- Honesty from leaders
- Common decency
Instead, we learned that our systems leaders are honestly for…
- The Department of War
- The Med Center and only the Med Center
- Life-sized, AI holograms of President Gold and the governor
- Cutting off their nose to spite their face
- Magical thinking about how high schoolers choose colleges and how adults choose graduate programs
- Shooting themselves in the foot
- Blaming others for their failings
- Insisting that faculty do administrators’ jobs and, frankly, the BOR’s job too
- Democrats who have abandoned public education
