Four Union Ad

In case you missed it, I embed below the ad the IEA unions have placed in the DE, hoping to reach new students and their parents.

Four Union Ad

On Bike Racks

[Note: I've spent too much time in the last couple of days responding to a spirited attack on the FA's position on the tenure debate in the comment stream for the last post.  As usual, much of the value of this blog lies in in the comments.  Do check them out.] 

I bike to campus most days. The DE today ran a story on our new bike racks that has gotten me to scratching my head. It nicely summarizes much of what I'm feeling about campus these days.

My take on the new bike racks when I saw them a few weeks ago was, well, (surprise!)  negative. This for a rather simple reason. In the area I lock up my bike, near the student center end of Faner, the old bike racks were often pretty full. The new bikes have less than one half of the capacity of the old racks. The old racks were efficient and effective. I'm not talking about the gadgety relics near the Museum end of Faner, which were hardly recognizable as bike racks at all and were almost never used, but the humble effective racks at the other end of Faner, and elsewhere on campus.  The new racks are, however, prettier. And they are painted Saluki Maroon, aiding our campus branding. But the story gets more complicated, after the break.  

Monday roundup

A couple of--surprise!--troubling news stories.

The Chronicle has a story on a professor of "Justice Studies" at Northeastern Illinois, Loretta Capeheart, who argues that she has been retaliated against for public criticism of the university.  Capeheart is now appealing a lower federal court ruling against her, which held that as her criticism was within her official duties, as the court saw them, the university could discipline her for speaking out. The AAUP has called the lower court decision "chilling", and rightly so, it seems to me.  While the professor wasn't fired or demoted (the retaliation consisted in denying her the chair's position in her department, despite gaining the support of department faculty, and denying her a faculty excellence award she was apparently entitled to), I don't see why the logic employed by the lower court couldn't justify firing. One moral: the courts may well not protect your free speech rights.  That's why contractual tenure protection is so vital.  Perhaps I have been too naive in not fearing retaliation. 

Another chilling story, flagged for me by Jonathan Bean, discusses how a Rhode Island city has to put its bond-holders ahead of its pensioners. That is, when declaring bankruptcy, it gutted pensions for retirees, while guaranteeing payments for bondholders. Plutocracy in a rather naked form, it seems to me. Scary quotes after the break.

A speech for the Chancellor

I've been asked, reasonably enough, whether I'd ever approve of something the Chancellor proposes. So here's a suggested speech. I hereby give Chancellor Cheng carte blanche to use it as she chooses.  Neither consultant's fee nor charges of plagiarism shall apply.

We all know that SIUC faces a difficult budgetary situation, and that SIUC faces a long-term enrollment decline. I'm convinced that we need to improve our campus athletics and administrative facilities; to upgrade our marketing by developing a new message and doubling our spending to communicate it to the world; to continue aggressively funding scholarships for our student athletes and other aspects of our athletics budget; to set up innovative Saluki First Year and Saluki Start Up programs; and to put greater resources into more effective enrollment management. And we need to get the best people we can to fill top administrative positions, and pay them competitive salaries.  None of these moves will be cheap: in fact I believe that we must increase our spending in these areas by X million dollars in the next Y years if we are to get ourselves where we need to be in these crucial priorities. But if we do not up our game in these ways we may well face a bleak future.

To fund these priorities we are going to have to hold the line on spending on faculty and staff. 

I thank my lucky stars for our brand new logo

I thought I was done for the day--or even, with luck, for the week.  But precisely at the moment when one wheels out bad news stories (didn't she ask her marketers about this?), our Chancellor has written a welcome back email that spends a good deal of time discussing her new marketing campaign but wastes not a single word on stalled negotiations between her administration and the unions representing thousands of the people receiving her email.

Even if you think the unions are full of it, that they don't represent you, that everyone in the FA is a complete jackass--don't you think she ought to have made at least some passing bland aside expressing her fond hopes to resolve these issues amicably?  Isn't it, well, contemptuous to pretend that there's no problem?

Our brave new branding campaign has its own website, and of course there is a brand new logo, which is "both sophisticated yet familiar" and which is, I believe, the third we've had since I joined SIUC in the late nineties (though I may have missed one or two).

In with the new.

Out with the old.

  

Apparently "Southern" reeked too much of Walter Wendler to be left as is, and clearly Carbondale has been demoted.  I think our counterparts at the flourishing SIU campus, SIUE, will be pleased as punch to see that we're claiming the shorter SIU solely for ourselves (as the Chancellor repeatedly says she is speaking for SIU, not SIUC).  Apparently those little white shadows in the SIU tell our new story. And the bell tower, which reminded people of stodgy old academic stuff, had to go.

And can't someone fix her damn apostrophes?

Just one more observation. I find it particularly rich that we are all encouraged to join in "critical conversations" about our strategic plan (the effort to revamp or replace Southern at 150), which is obviously still underway.  But our marketers are ready to tell our story even before we've decided what our story is. (Not that I take the strategic planning to be any more valuable than the marketing, but still.)

Okay, enjoy your new logo.