UW: Should I stay or should I go?

There’s a lot of talk now about UW faculty being poached or just looking to flee the state. The following is a real letter from a senior faculty member at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. I have been saying that the first real question for faculty now is whether to run or to fight. Below is that person’s decision. With all the talk of people leaving under present circumstances, it’s a reminder that there’s another option.

This faculty member had been repeatedly invited last year to apply for a position that was pretty much ideal for them, a situation with serious new resources at an excellent institution with real chances to build something big and lasting. They had resisted but eventually decided that the opportunity to do something important for their field was very real and that the prospects for real innovation at Madison were deteriorating rapidly. So they applied. The application was moving to the very serious stages of the hiring process, but the person says “when the JFC omnibus came out, everything changed. I had to think about this anew, from the beginning”.  The letter went out a couple days ago.

Dear -----, dear ------, dear ------,
After two weeks of soul searching, I am writing now to tell you that I’ve decided that I must withdraw from consideration for appointment to the position of Chair in ---------- at ---------- University. Having served on many search committees, I know how much time and effort goes into scrutinizing candidates, and apologize for having put the committee through this extra work. 

As I said several times during the process, I have not applied for a job in many years, nor even seriously considered applying for one. The decision to apply for this position reflected the amazing possibilities the position represents.  It’s a set of opportunities and challenges I would dearly love to tackle. 

In ways I could not have expected when I applied or even when I spoke most recently with ----------, my professional circumstances have changed very suddenly and right now I simply cannot abandon the University of Wisconsin. Our budget has been slashed year after year and I knew that those cuts would continue apace this year and next. But the state legislature has now proposed to eliminate tenure protections and our tradition of shared governance. I had earlier reached a decision that I could continue to work with my graduate students and continue collaborations here from afar, but we now face a serious, long-term battle for the future of a great institution and the future of higher education in this state. I’ve invested too much in and owe too much to this institution, my students and people here at early career stages to simply walk away at this juncture. 

The position at ---------- is an exciting and important one for a set of areas in our field and I’m honored to have been considered so seriously for it. I know that there are outstanding candidates and I look forward to collaborating with the person who ultimately takes the position. 

With my apologies and wishes for a successful hire,
Yours,

This person has a message for faculty as well:

I struggled personally with this decision, but this is a national fight. If Wisconsin goes, you know that other states will follow. Way back when, I thought moving to Wisconsin meant moving to a politically stable, secure place. Nowhere is safe now. So whether you stay or go, you have to engage. As public higher education is being systematically destroyed, tenured and tenure-track faculty are still among the most privileged and best protected. You have to fight for your own interests, but you better also be fighting for the staff who make your job possible and the students up to their eyeballs in debt. We’re in this together and we win together or lose together.

Just fyi.
Mr. Verb

Open attack on academic freedom and free speech

Look at this clip of an interview with Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald. The host, Mike Gousha, asks specifically about tenure, "why do changes need to be made?" Starting around 2:00, Fitzgerald responds with this:

The idea that anybody should be protected from any kind of criticism when they make public comments or even the way they handle themselves on campus is just not sitting well with many of us. 

He shortly thereafter comes back around to talk about professors being "completely protected", in case you found "anybody" ambiguous.

Now, tenure is not about criticism that I can see and faculty are hardly protected from criticism (see below or, my god, read a newspaper). What we are protected from is being fired for doing legitimate research or speaking our minds. That's surely what he means.

And you do know that there's already political consequences for people doing normal research, including firing and public calls for firing: (1) firing a bunch of scientists from the Department of Natural Resources who had worked on politically charged issues and (2) a sitting state senator making scathing attacks on a professor because of his research.

The house is on fire, folks.


Image in recognition of Donald Trump announcement that he's running for president. In case the news wasn't insane enough for you yet.

The real misperception about the politics surrounding the University of Wisconsin

This blog has been silent about recent developments aimed at destroying the University of Wisconsin by more rapid defunding, by dismantling tenure and by forbidding shared governance.

We've seen the Board of Regents decline to step up and urge the state not to do these things. We've seen the System president and Madison chancellor reassure us repeatedly that there's really no problem here and then that it's not as bad as it seems and now that they're doing all they can to lessen the damage.

The latest message from our chancellor (here) is intended, among other things, to "help clarify some misperceptions".

The only real misperception here is any failure to understand and to say clearly and directly that the state government — the governor and the assembly and the senate — intends to defund UW, dismantle tenure and destroy shared governance and this is a huge step toward accomplishing those goals. They have been very open about this (e.g. here) and to pretend like things aren't heading that way is maddening.

What do we do? Well, you can run or you can stand and fight. If you choose the latter or have no choice but to stay, there's only one way to go: Organized action. A member of Team Verb posted this list on fb last week; consider it a suggestion to join and be active in the relevant groups:

• TAA
• AAUP
• PROFS 
• WUU
• UFAS

The TAA has fought more effectively than anybody for UW in a broad sense, and even if you can't join, you should support them. AAUP is our big national ally and word on the street is that the long moribund local chapter is getting going again. PROFS is the key group working with state government (to the extent that is possible at present) and their website is a good source of information about what's happening. There are two small unions on campus for faculty and academic staff, the Wisconsin University Union and United Faculty and Academic Staff. My real hope is that these groups will now all work together ... the stakes could not be higher. 

Stumbling over and through Drink Wisconsinbly

Earlier this year, I started noticing t-shirts and hoodies bearing the phrase 'Drink Wisconsinbly', like in the image here. (And, yeah, it comes in green and gold as well as red and white.) Clever, right? But I don't read t-shirts all that closely and I saw it a few times before I realized that it doesn't work at all for me phonologically ... Wisconsably, yes, and Wisconsinably, I suppose, but not Wisconsinbly. I stumble over it every time, dead cold sober.

I'm seeing more and more of these shirts and hats (including the obligatory camo hat) and it now turn out that there's, of course, a website, http://drinkwisconsinbly.com/. "Proud home of the greatest drinking culture this fine nation has ever known." Cute, but I'm not sure that "We lacked an official call to arms" when it comes to drinking.

Looks like this thing is probably sponsored by the Tavern League of Wisconsin. If so, that may complicate the feel-good thing for some people ... among other things, the TLW is seen as keeping our drinking and driving laws lax, see here.

Big announcement from Mr. Verb -- Career change

Dear readers,
You should be the first to know. After literally decades of studying how language works and changes and what it tells us about the mind, I'm moving on. From this day forward, I'll be studying ancient mating habits.

Yes, linguistics has allowed me tremendous opportunities to help understand our state's and nation's past and present and to serve communities around the state. And our students often go on to work for businesses outside of the academy that help grow the economy.

But from this day forward, it's ancient mating habits. Mating habits of what, you ask? Whatever, I say.

Yours verbally,

Mr. V

PS: Read this.

Wisconsin Talk at the Wisconsin Book Festival …

And here's the actual link, with location, etc. Be there or be square.

Sprachatlas update

Our contributor Joe had posted earlier about the lengths that the UW Libraries were going to to restore our copy of the amazing Deutscher Sprachatlas* (here).  They're now holding a Friends of the Library event to celebrate its reintegration into the collection:

Wednesday, October 9, 2013, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Rathskeller of the Memorial Union, 800 Langdon Street, to celebrate the preservation of this important work. The evening will feature music, refreshments, brief remarks, and the atlas itself. Further information is available in this newsletter’s Calendar of Events and on the Friends’ website (http://library.wisc.edu/friends/).

Even as a pretty serious book lover, I'm seriously impressed by the work they've done and the joy about the preservation of the book.

If you want to read more, check out the latest Friends newsletter, here, pp. 8-10.

*German has adjective agreement that varies by the structure of the noun phrase. In German, for a masculine singular in the nominative, you'd have just -e after the definite article but the -er after an indefinite or no article. It seems like using such phrases in English often means keeping the 'strong' ending (here the -er). There's got to be some implication for theories of codeswitching in here.

Democrabeep!

Everybody in Wisconsin knows that the recalls are coming fast and hard. The primary is Tuesday to select the D who'll run against the R (Walker) with that election to be decided on June 5, 2012.

At noon that day, the twitter master known as Astrodex proposes that everybody should call -- by twitter, fb, email, semaphore -- for all Wisconsinites to get out and vote. It's a bipartisan (omnipartisan?) celebration of voter rights.

Wait, you ask, is there a language angle here? Hey, I tell you, just imagine democrabeep as a candidate for Word of the Year!

Let's make it happen.

Killing education in Wisconsin

If you live in the rapidly deteriorating state of Wisconsin, you know the latest news, namely:

Wisconsin is the only state in the nation that had "statistically significant" job losses over the past 12 months, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But now check out this story about the effects of Walker's Act 10 ... slashing teacher pay. Do you really want the pay of any teachers maxing out at 38K?

It's amazing just how wrong Walker's direction is on every count. John Nichols gives a quick summary here.

Walker turned down federal funding for transportation and expansion of broadband communications, effectively opting out of 21st century infrastructure development. He picked fights with public employees and teachers, rather than making them partners in a development push. Then he crafted a low-road budget that made deep cuts in education funding and services — effectively telling businesses that while they would have plenty of support in other states, they would be on their own in Wisconsin.

 Nationally it may be a weak recovery, but I'd prefer that to what we have in Wisconsin.

Crash blossom, political edition: "Wisconsin governor, indicted pol"

Various linguablogs have discussed lots of 'crash blossoms' (see here). A couple of years ago over at the Log, Geoffrey Pullum quoted Chris Waigl as defining crash blossom this way:

those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking.

Yesterday we took a break from linguistics to post on the current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, and a commenter noted quickly that Walker is under serious investigation and could be indicted before long. Over at Blue Cheddar, there was a crash blossom on exactly this topic, image from Blue Cheddar, of course.

Walker's weak but brazen spin

I've been following Governor Scott Walker on Twitter for a good while now and there are two clear trends. First, most stuff is unspeakably trivial (as discussed here). Second, when there is a tweet of any substance, it's often a sign that there's bad news on exactly the same topic that's just broken.

This has been his game on jobs. As Wisconsin has been to losing more jobs than any other state, every report is met by a 'look over there, not over here' tweet, like 'Our unemployment rate is lower than Illinois's rate'. In fact, now, when I see a tweet from the twit on economic news, I instantly check to see what bad news has come out about Wisconsin's continuing slide. Today, the tweet you see here came through and I went to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to see the headline pasted in below (screenshot from a later update, but text unchanged, I think).

15,600 jobs added in 2012 is not exactly impressive, but in fact, we've lost 23,900 jobs over the past year, so he had to pick a little uptick in the overall downward trend.

Are there Walker supporters who feel good about this approach to things?

Russ Feingold on the critical need for language learning

Russ Feingold is a Wisconsin icon. If you go around Madison, you can easily find bumper stickers that say "Russ Feingold will always be MY senator". He lost his last election to Ron Johnson (who's making news on his own, despite being generally invisible in the Senate) in the surge that brought Scott Walker to power, and he steadfastly refused to run for governor against Walker.

At any rate, I just finished reading his new book, While America Sleeps: A wake-up call for the post-9/11 era.* In the senate, Feingold worked hard on 'big picture' foreign policy issues, often on issues that the US has largely ignored, like, say, what's going on in Africa. The book reviews post-9/11 politics from his perspective and closes with a lot on what he thinks we need to be doing now. He writes (p. 258-259) about the skills and abilities we need as a nation:

To continue to play a leading role in the world, and to be safe at home, we have to develop these abilities in government, education, and the media.

Perhaps foremost among the abilities we Americans need to cultivate is the knowledge of foreign languages. I know only English and a smattering of French, so I have to admit my own failings in this area. They say that it's very hard to learn a language later in life, but if there's an experiment somewhere to see if someone approaching sixty can still become fluent in some foreign language, sign me up. A failure to learn other languages can be viewed as arrogant, possibly even rude. … But it is more urgent than that. I am convinced that it is actually a threat to our national security … .

Nicely said. He builds a really extended discussion around this and concludes, among other things (p. 261), that:

We simply need more American who are willing to make linguistic diversity an important part of their education and lives.

Yup. And, Senator, we'll be in touch the day we start looking for subjects for that experiment.

*The title plays on Churchill's While England Slept by way of JFK's senior thesis, published as "Why England Slept".

Rally for UW, Feb. 14

The anniversary of the event that started it all …

See you there.

Walkergate update

Sorry that we've been on a bit of a hiatus here ... beginning of the semester, etc. People especially from out of state are asking about where things stand with the burgeoning corruption scandal surrounding Governor Scott Walker, now mostly known as Walkergate. Blue Cheddar is generally a good source for grassroots and progressive news from our state and they posted a nice overview earlier today, here. I have no idea what will ultimately come from the investigation, but it certainly seems to be going strong.

Quick update, Jan. 29:  Jason Stein from the MJS has this additional historical context.

Uff da! Recall edition

The fight against the de-democraticization of Wisconsin has been filled with good, clean humor of the sort that our state is known for. Of all the buttons around (and the pics below are a few samples from the collection of one member of Team Verb who's been buying them up, like lots of people.)

But for all the regional character and humor of the protest buttons, I don't think I'd seen one with regional language on it. Thanks to D.D., though, the Mr. Verb Blogal Archives now include the specimen pictured here.

If you live in Wisconsin or the Upper Midwest generally, you know the exclamation Uff da!  (If not, Wikipedia gives the basics). It's traced to Norwegian (though there are some wrinkles there), and means (following Wikipedia) "used when something is unpleasant, uncomfortable, hurtful, annoying, sad, or irritating". Well, Governor, finally a list where you can check every box!

Full-time proofreader sought

Apply in the governor's office or at the state GOP hq, I guess … see 'lastest' tweet below, from the party's official website.

Can't make this stuff up, folks.

'are'/'our' confusion from Scott Walker

Scott Walker may be polishing up his resume, now that the recall signature effort has likely passed the halfway mark (here) less than two weeks after it started. If so, he should use grammar check and have some folks look it over before he sends it out.

He (or somebody on his staff on his behalf) tweets regularly. Most of the stuff is utterly mundane … see the middle one in the picture here, about him being damp from the Badgers game (it was raining). And sometimes they have political barbs ... see the third one, where he refers to the White House holiday tree as a Christmas tree, as he has consistently referred to the Wisconsin one, contrary to now-normal usage.

But whoever wrote today's tweet (top one in the pic) blew it. I've seen 'are'/'our' confusion in spelling before and hear people pronounce 'our' like 'are', basically [aɹ] or [aɻ].

Linguists are always quick to stress how trivial spelling is, even in a prescriptivist/standard context, but this kind of thing can stick and take on a life of its own if it seems to confirm a view people already are inclined to hold about somebody, I guess — remember Dan Quayle and 'potatoe'?

Recall Walker!

United Wisconsin is organizing the recall effort against the Koch Brothers' pawn in Wisconsin, "Governor" Scott Walker. Some of us are eager to take United's class on how to collect sigs for the recall effort, and have been visiting their website trying to get the schedule, etc. Apparently, a lot of us: Their website has been down all afternoon. Here's a screen shot of what they have up now:

If you're in-state, let's get to work. If you're out of state, please lend a hand if you can, say, financially. And if you don't think he should be recalled, wait, what?

Update, 8:30 pm. Looks like this was actually a distributed denial of service attack, see here. Wonder whose money is behind this?

University of Wisconsin – Madison pay: -25% in 10 years

There's been a ton of talk about how badly state employees, including UW-Madison workers, have fared in recent years. Here's a graphic from the Wisconsin University Union (WUU) showing the basic effects of the pay plan over the last decade. We've lost a quarter of our real income over the last decade. As always, click to embiggen.

This is the current state of affairs, before the huge cuts and lapses kick in.

Grad student workers, classified staff and increasingly academic staff are reaching crisis mode now, and I've heard faculty talk about struggling to cover basic expenses.

Time to stand up and work for the recall. While there's still a University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Dismantling education in Wisconsin, very quickly

Wisconsin readers of this blog probably almost all know about the new budget cuts the University of Wisconsin System is suddenly facing. After a $250,000,000 cut to the System over the biennium, it was announced last week that this would be upped by over $65,000,000 more. Now, that number has risen to more like $111,000,000. The numbers aren't final and official yet, but we're probably looking at cuts of over $360,000,000 to the System over two years. Here's a clear version of what we know at this point, and as usual Sifting & Winnowing is an excellent place to go for info.

At the same time, yesterday on Wisconsin Public Radio, we heard that the governor of this state is backing a proposal that would eliminate English and math requirements for high school graduation, allowing them to be replaced with vocational training. (Here's a good summary of that.) Many of us have long suspected that Walker's promises of job growth were based on the Texas model — minimum wage jobs without benefits, etc., rather than jobs that would truly move Wisconsin forward as an economic power — and this looks thoroughly consistent with that.

Image from here.