The third week of June was a busy one here in NU-land. A quick round-up of NU-news includes:
CEHS Left Twisting in the Wind, Again
CEHS Dean Reese announced that having two of his seven departments cut this year was just so stressful that he had to retire. I wish him all the best in spending more time with his grandchildren. No interim has been announced. The internal associate dean position search, rushed through at the end of the spring term, has not yielded an announcement yet.
I hope that poor dupe is not about to find themselves as interim dean, but as Dean Jones cut associate dean positions several years ago, there aren’t folks in those positions waiting in the wings, so to speak. Once again, CEHS, the People’s College, has been left to twist in the wind without any real leadership. They took Marjorie Kostelnik to Varner Hall to cut the budget in 2017. They moved Dean Sherri Jones to head up ORED in 2024. They didn’t elevate interim dean Nick Pace to Dean last spring (even though making interim permanent without a real search is now the MO for admin positions: see Mark Button, see Tiffany Heng-Moss, see Chancellor Davies at UNMC). It is almost like they don’t want the College of Education and Human Sciences to have strong leadership. Our best AAUP guess is that having strong, consistent leadership in CEHS would make it harder to destroy.
While Ronnie Green said in a Faculty Senate Exec meeting, just before he retired, that there had been talks to move all of the education programs to Kearney, I stupidly assumed that such a move would require faculty input to negotiate what it would look like to move R1 programs and faculty to a regional comprehensive college located 2+ hours from the nearest large city and most of the largest school districts. As I have previously pointed out, different universities and different programs serve different purposes. Having all of the educational programs in one place reduces the likelihood that they will be able to serve the varied needs of school districts across the state. But as I have also stated previously, destroying public education is not a bug; it is a feature of Republican politics going back to Brown vs. Board of Education.
I told Ronnie Green that I had not moved 1,200 miles away from family and friends to work at UNK and that if the merged education programs were housed there, I would quit. No shade to UNK, but when I started my career, I only applied to R1 universities because I wanted to work at an R1 university. I guess NU/UNL administrators saved me that trouble by having my department canned and me fired.
Board of Regents Gets Busy in the Summertime
On Thursday, June 18th, the BOR met. As always, you can preview meeting agendas on their website, stream meetings, and attend in person. Some other AAUP chapters have rounded up folks to do just that at every BOR meeting. We urge everyone to keep an eye on what happens at BOR, especially over the summer.
Our friends at Nebraska Examiner and the Lincoln Journal Star reported some of the big news out of that meeting:
NU Regents voted to increase tuition by 4.25%. About time, frankly. While it unfortunately shifts more of the burden to students and families, UNL remains the least expensive R1. You cannot squeeze money from the Nebraska budget any more than you can water from a stone.
However, despite the tuition increase and a move to peg future increases to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which tracks inflation, there remains an $8 million hole. Gold apparently said that the cut has already been achieved. Nothing like cutting next year’s budget this year, I guess.
NU Regents are in talks with the Omaha Community Foundation to take over the non-profit partnership part of Nebraska Medicine, raising questions about why NU paid a butt-ton of money to Clarkson to let them out instead of Omaha Community Foundation paying a butt-ton of money to Clarkson. It was also reported that the $200 million of that butt-ton of money set to come back to the NU Foundation has now been handled as an ‘in-kind’ donation, meaning that money won’t go to Clarkson and then back. Sorry, NU Foundation, I guess.
NU Regents voted to embark on a nearly $400 million renovation project of the Selleck Quad. According to Chris Dunker of LJS, “The $368 million project, which will be paid for through room and board charged to students as well as some internal funds, would tear down all five buildings and rebuild the Selleck Quad in two phases.” Some internal funds? Didn’t we just cut four departments because we didn’t have any, checks notes, internal funds?
This brings the capital projects spending up to $4 billion with a B, which warrants a whole separate post, frankly.
There is Always Money in the Banana Stand
As President Jeff Gold stated in March to fired faculty members’ faces, their salaries have been reallocated to a 3% merit raise pool. We reported last week that CEHS departments, but we have also had reports from CAS about this as well. Providing a pay increase is, strangely, a technique to prevent worker solidarity by giving faculty a little of what they want in hopes they don’t band together to push a real agenda for better working conditions and better protections for the willy-nilly firing of tenured faculty, and PoPs with multiyear contracts, through unwarranted department cuts.
And let’s not forget the plan for strategic cluster hires next year.
It gets even better, BugEater friends, Jeff Gold is getting a 15% bonus, which Nebraska Public Media reports equates to $159,000. That would pay for two EDAD faculty members. I’m honestly just so mad about it, I can’t come up with a funny quip about this bullshit.
Keep Your Eyes Peeled
Last summer saw some changes to the BOR Bylaws that made it easier to just call something a bona fide program cut and make it so. It’s not surprising that they do these things while most of us are off contract. As an AAUP chapter, we’ve committed to keeping our eye on agendas and meetings, but it is also important to show up and speak at meetings to let them know that, actually, they haven’t buried us so far in travel-reimbursement-make-work that we cannot pay attention to their shenanigans. So keep your eyes peeled for the remaining summer meetings and make a plan to show up if something looks hinky (Thursday, August 13th, Varner Hall).
