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initiatives. He
agreed to two historic changes: one establishing a salary policy, another
acknowledging faculty collective bargaining rights.
The salary policy commits the university to a regular program of merit
increases and to annual negotiations with faculty representatives over
the distribution of other salary monies. The salary policy almost broke
down in 2001 but it was honored last year and strengthened in further
negotiations with the Senate leadership. Two percent merit raises may
seem like a small matter, but the commitment to negotiate money issues is
anything but small.
McCormick also worked with the Senate in setting gender equality and
racial diversity as priorities. Beyond these specifics, McCormick's
openness and willingness to compromise was an important asset at a time
when budget limitations put enormous strains on the institution.
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The
McCormick-Huntsman administration also made a number of policy mistakes.
The three most important follow:
Outreach
Strategy: The Government Relations team
fell far short in efforts to persuade the public and lawmakers to
maintain state funding, and while it is true that the obstacles to
success were enormous, it is also true that the administration missed
some opportunities. The failure to mobilize the faculty, staff, and
students and the failure to encourage the hundreds of thousands of UW
alumni to join in the task of promoting the university stand out.
Budget
Strategy:.
There has been no budget strategy; that much is clear after two
years of fiscal contraction. The administration has failed to make
reasoned and deliberate cuts, opting instead for a dangerous practice of
across-the-board budget reduction and opportunistic cuts based on
resignations and retirements. This course-of-least-resistance has
resulted in unplanned damage to valuable programs. The
unwillingness to begin the process of prioritizing and careful downsizing
using the procedures that were approved by the Faculty Senate has been a
significant mistake.
Balkanization: The most alarming of the
policy moves involves the decision to disaggregate the university as a
fiscal unit. This policy goes under the name of entrepreneurial
initiatives. Units have been told to find ways to pay for themselves and
those that are able to do so have been given enhanced control over
revenues. Already we begin to see the colleges pulling apart, going their
separate ways. Fund raising has been disaggregated. Tuition rates have
been disaggregated. Faculty salaries and college hiring practices are
being disaggregated. If we are not careful the university will
disassemble into a collection of privileged fiefdoms and poor service
units. There are many things wrong with this pay-your-own-way policy. It
threatens to starve programs that are critical to the intellectual life
and educational mission of the university but lack commercial or
political value. It takes resources away from undergraduate programs, the
very core of the university. It violates one of the age-old commitments
of academia, that learning and knowledge should not be entirely driven by
the instrumental demands of the marketplace.
Leadership
Vacuum? We
are now moving into our second year without a permanent President. Why
the Board of Regents has allowed the search to drag on is a mystery.
Indeed the secrecy surrounding the process is unhealthy and alarming. In
the meantime it is not clear whether Interim President Huntsman has the
authority to move forward on the major challenges facing the
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