Faculty Votes to Unionize at U. of Wisconsin-River Falls

March 25, 2011, 11:38 am

Faculty members at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls voted overwhelmingly on Thursday to unionize, despite state lawmakers’ recent approval of a measure denying collective-bargaining rights to the faculty of the University of Wisconsin system. The American Federation of Teachers, which through its Wisconsin affiliate is leading efforts to organize the system’s faculty members, said those at River Falls had voted, 148 to 16, in favor of union representation. It was the third successful faculty-union election on a system campus since Gov. Scott Walker proposed the collective-bargaining ban, which is being challenged in state courts.

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akprof

Sounds to me as though Governor Walker is an impetus to unionization of public employees. Good going Scott!
landrumkelly

Unless one side or the other backs down–and that seems unlikely–this will surely wind up on the Supreme Court docket sooner or later. This could all be very interesting for the future of public sector unionization, to say the very least.

Landrum Kelly
mpm2x

With more Unions the only “true” victims are the students!
tookt

At our college, mpm2x, it’s the unionized faculty who DO care about students. The administration has pushed policies again and again that seek to make classrooms more crowded, to water-down degrees, to hike tuition and other costs to line their OWN pockets, often giving themselves big raises while bemoaning the (below-state average) given to the faculty. Don’t be deluded that unions are the problem. Look much more at management. This is all true and can be supported by public record.
tdr75

I agree with tookt (below) to an extent. My previous institution was in a state where collective bargaining is not banned, but it’s non-existent in the public sector. Often…VERY often in fact, the ability to deliver quality education was hampered not by the faculty, but by state legislators who thought they were education experts OR by an administration that seemed more concerned with maintaining their very high salaries and those of their friends in the administration. We were getting it from both barrels of the shotgun.

Budget cuts came down the pipe and the university went through a long, laborious, and thorough “institutional priorities” process to identify those areas that were the most ripe to be cut. The administration completely ignored the results of the institutional priorities process and just made the cuts they saw fit. And just so you know, the IP committee was made up of staff, faculty, and administration employees. The cuts proposed included some entire academic departments as well as cuts on staff side…it was not a one-sided document in any way.

Of course, the committee was told that the upper level administrative positions were off the table. And there were other expensive programs that they were told could not be touched as well (mostly pet projects of administrators). Overall what came out was quite balanced despite that. yet it was ignored.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Thomas-Polaczek/100000687613004 Thomas Polaczek

administrators want more money
drj50

This seems to reflect ignorance of the way in which the internet developed as a research tool. There may be legitimate issues to discuss: moving more internet services into private hands, much as the U.S. is “privatizing” important aspects of space exploration now that the initial technology challenges have been addressed. But to terminate UW’s links to other research institutions without first developing a long-term strategy to provide adequate connectivity displays either ignorance of the way the internet works or a deliberate attempt to seriously diminish the university. Neither is good.
walkerst

This is absolutely insane! This would decimate the university’s ability to do research and coordinate with colleagues, it would absolutely kill the library collections, and for what? So the telecommunications companies can become even more profitable?
rt_firefly

So this was a fed government subsidy going to a state/university entity to support “community” broadband. (I’m using community as an omnibus nonprofit sort of term.)Let me speculate what will happen.
Those schools, community orgs, etc., won’t be able to afford the “going rate” in the now much-condensed “free market” telecom playing field, so they will need support subsidies from things like e-rate and other fed handouts to be able to buy it. Punch line: SO instead of the gov’t subsidy going to support higher education in myriad forms, it will go into the bottom line profits of the telcos.
Incredibly sad.
Watch “Inside Job” if you haven’t already – the govt is asleep at the wheel. Once again, the risk (in this case, building the network) was public, and the profit is to be private. How is this different from shovelling my tax dollars right into the mouths of the telcos?
AustinExpat

So, they’re going to cut $250 million from the university’s budget, then force them to give back federal dollars, all so they can pay more for a service than they have to?

I suspect the only “free market” going on here is bribery, in the form of campaign contributions.
bfscr

This isn’t even *eating* the seed corn- they’ve decided to burn it
proftowanda

Why ask Tim Pawlenty?

I hope that on this forum of highly educated folk, you wouldn’t be making the common mistake, a la the New York Times, of placing Milwaukee on the map where Minneapolis ought to be.
hawkeye515

Also, interstate highways have an unfair competitive advantage over privately operated toll roads. The Wisconsin legislature should bar any University of Wisconsin campus from participating in advanced road networks connecting Wisconsin to other states.
proftowanda

No need to only suspect; there is substantive evidence of corruption in Walker’s administration and in his state legislature.

The useful thing about such flagrant actions as these, and the CHE’s coverage, is that academics are warned to stay away from Wisconsin. The UW is going down in flames in so many ways; this is only the latest in a series of actions against a once-great university system.
http://scarydevil.com/~peter/ Resuna

Carrying on the fine traditions of Senator Proxmire, I see.
panthernation

I asked because of Pawlenty’s comment that if you can find something by using a Google search, the government should not be providing it. I did not make the Milwaukee/Minneapolis mistake. :)