We interrupt your regularly scheduled Friday morning with breaking news. Yesterday, the Bugeater received reports from the College of Arts and Sciences chairs and directors’ meeting that the interim dean, on behalf of EVC Mark Button, stated there was sufficient money returned from the VSIPs that strategic hiring will resume next year. Departments will be asked to propose strategic cluster hires. We have some suggestions for strategic cluster hires:
- Math and Physics could propose a cluster hire in statistics. There are some very excellent, very generous, and very funny statisticians looking for work right now.
- TLTE could propose a cluster hire in educational leadership. Specifically, they could cluster hire the people who actually teach in the online MA program, as well as the faculty who have taught in the principal and district leader certification programs, which they claim they wanted to retain.
- The School of Natural Resources could propose a cluster hire of people who study an incredibly important natural resource: groundwater. While they are at it, they should go ahead and hire a bunch of geologists, who we are reliably informed have their own rocks, and of course meteorologists because duh, Nebraska weather.
- Architecture could propose a cluster hire of people who study textiles, make super cool new age-y fabrics out of corn, and engage in the kinds of outreach they are already known for.
You get the drift, of course. If there was this much money coming in, then four departments did not need to be cut. In fact, UNK waited until after their VSIPs came in to walk back their final cuts, which will be heard at BOR today (Feb 6th). Other cuts being heard at BOR today include the Art History program. However, no faculty are slated to be eliminated. Make that make sense. And make it make sense that the BOR is also hearing about creating new programs at the Business College at UNO that already exist at UNL. So much for non-duplication.
We digress.
Of course, it is UNL AAUP’s position that none of this was financially necessary, which is why they beat the drum of their bullsh*t metrics as hard as they did.
If you haven’t seen the draft system metrics, you should really take a look. Because I imagine that these cluster hires will be driven largely by this AI-generated, unending list of numbers that ask for 100% of 0 followed by 500% of again, that would be 0. Much like other metrics that were used to fire without cause, what we now know to be 33 and not 52 faculty members. The draft is posted below. The Faculty Senate created an emergency committee this week to provide feedback on that hot mess. If you have concerns, please contact your Senator. It is good to have goals, but these are exactly the kind of thing that faculty should be weighing in on based on what is realistic and feasible in their field, and they should recognize that not everything a university does is easily quantifiable and certainly not in the dollars and cents way they have boiled down all of the university’s teaching and research.
Some of them also look to be related to new Dept of Ed metrics, including debt-to-earnings performance. Which is perhaps why the legislature heard a bill this week that would require the CCPE to close any “low-earning” program. Among the lowest earning BA-requiring fields is teaching. But you knew that already, because as we have already learned, killing education, especially public education, is the point.
From what we have heard at the Bugeater, the amount of say the faculty will have is likely to be minimal. And if past performance is any indication of future performance, these decisions will be made at the top, by Mark Button, perhaps, but much more likely Jeff Gold and the BOR.
There is absolutely no end to this pile of shit, especially for the 33 faculty who received termination notices last week. And probably also for the faculty members who got retention offers. One can only imagine the survivor’s guilt while having to continue to work alongside colleagues who have been terminated in this appallingly absurd and inhumane way to teach out programs.
