Rep. Mike Stevens (R-18/Yankton) told the Yankton school board last night that the 2018 Legislature may consider 150 more bills than last year. That would be a 38% increase over 2017’s 390 bills.
Among that surge of bills will be further Republican efforts to dismantle higher education, that noble bastion of rigorous intellectual inquiry and liberty that Republicans mistake for leftist treachery. Speaker G. Mark Mickelson (who for a non-candidate is sure out making a lot of headlines) has said he plans to drive unions out of our public universities just as the 2017 Session banned unions from our vo-techs. In addition to banning collective bargaining, Mickelson is signaling he might try to take tenure away from our professors:
It’s the Board of Regents’ job to manage tenure. Not all—I don’t think—all states have tenure, I don’t know, but the Board of Regents has that responsibility. We’ll see how they’re doing [Speaker G. Mark Mickelson, audio transcribed from “SD House Speaker Mark Mickelson Wants to Do Away with University Collective Bargaining,” WNAX, 2017.12.11].
Good grief! Republicans at the national level are threatening to tax graduate students into bankruptcy. If I weren’t so averse to conspiracy theories, I’d think Speaker Mickelson’s war on professors was part of a larger Republican war on college.
If those 150 extra bills are all as bad as the higher education proposals Speaker Mickelson is signaling, those of us South Dakotans who believe in education nd worker rights are in for a long, hard 2018 Session.
Tenure is originally there so very intelligent people would not be intimidated to have their research come to predetermined conclusions. Research should follow the facts, not follow someone elses assumptions. If you end tenure, we definitely will not attract the best professors. But if we want cheap professors to cut our budget, we will get them for sure. Why have higher education at all if it is programed to be low quality.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Universities have squelched conservative viewpoints & discussions, and we know there are few conservative professors, even at SD institutions. These institutions lack a diversity of perspective. Why enshrine protections for institutions which don’t reflect its populace? More pragmatically, if these professors don’t spend their time cultivating relationships with our state legislators, it’s hard to see the value in such protections.
I’m not saying I agree, but I can understand the sentiment.
Wayne writes: “More pragmatically, if these professors don’t spend their time cultivating relationships with our state legislators, it’s hard to see the value in such protections.”
The protections are put in place precisely so that professors don’t have to spend their time cozying up to state legislators. You are proposing that politics should be an important focus in the academic arena. I strongly disagree. Certainly, state university presidents are engaged in a fair bit of politics to keep their university funding in place. However, the average professor should be thinking about teaching–not whose butt they need to kiss or how they can adapt their teaching to meet the wishes of a partisan political party.
We have enough political fighting invading every aspect of our lives to let one more area become a political battleground. Trump wants to make churches a political battleground and now you and Mickelson want to make academia a political battleground. This is not for the good of our state or the country.
Sounds eerily like koch bros legislation in Wisconsin, trying to turn the U of W into a job training school for the koch bros and other big time wingnut contributors.
Roypublican Mickelson proves he is a fascist with his continual anti-American blather. Put a muzzle on the boy. He is part of the reason why we are 25th in the world. https://goodcountry.org/index/results
Cheaper professors would mean cheaper tuition for those kids. Mr. Mickelson might be onto something again.
We are regressing back to what a staff employee of the Regents told me my first year here: the South Dakota idea of economic development and right-to-work is the repeal of the 13th Amendment and the Emancipation Proclamation.
The contention that universities squelch conservative viewpoints is a Trumpian claim, particularly in South Dakota. They do squelch factual errors and faulty reasoning.
If South Dakota banned collective bargaining and eliminated tenure, it may as well start closing the universities. No one intelligent enough to understand what higher education is would choose to attend them, and the degrees would be worthless.
We need to dedicate one university to Common Sense Conservatism. We could have State by the Red Campus and the U be the Blue Campus. Sort out the professors as they see fit but split the pay in half for each campus. If 90% of the professors are libbies, then get half the pot to spread between then. The other 10% of the professors will be conservatives and get half the pot. The conservative professors will have to Work Harder, but they will get 9 times the salary.
Grudz- that red campus would be a vast empty place like that found between most wingnut’s ears. Who needs space exploration worse than wingnuts?
MFI … I once attended a Conservative College. Then they discovered I could read.
How many conservative arts schools does the world need? Funny, Porter.
Perhaps grudznick should go back to school to learn conservative art.
Sort of like Falwell’s Lib U ?? Hell (oops) they only need one book, eh ?
What we have here is a Hah-vad grad, and this is the quote he gives that is the tell: “I don’t think….” and “I don’t know….” Yes, G. Marky Mick, you don’t think and you don’t know. and that’s about the only thing we will ever hear from you that is the absolute truth. Why don’t you use that expensive education of yours to start thinking and start knowing something about what the hell you’re talking about before you open up your lyin’ yapper.
Yes, let’s take that little place up the hill in Sioux Falls and convert it into the University of Stupid Republicans, and throw away the keys.
Doug Jones wins Alabama!
jerry, my faith in humanity has been buoyed by Alabama choosing Jones over Moore. Roy Moore would have been the gift that keeps on giving all year long for Democrats in next year’s elections, but I contend it was better for the country to have Jones elected. Steve Bannon needs to be shoved back into the Breitbart hole that he popped out of with all the fringe types that he attracts.
I can’t wait to hear what Trumpy has to say!
Maybe grudge should look at what happened in Bama yesterday.
If conservative professors face political threats to their job security, isn’t that all the more reason to preserve tenure?
Jon Schaff, Ken Blanchard, and Art Marmorstein are the most vocal professors on the NSU campus. They are all strong conservatives. They all deserve tenure.
If you minus the sex assaults, how is Roypublican Mickelson any different than his namesake, Roy Moore? There are more similarities than differences between the two.
It is pretty clear to me anyway, that Mick is the typical I got mine, to hell with yours in all what he does. He got this, 1993 Magna Cum Laude, at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from out of state union and tenured professors. Then in 1988 Highest Honors, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, South Dakota (BS in Accounting and Business Administration), he gets the same high quality education from union and tenured professors right here in South Dakota. What gives Mick? Clearly Mick has a vendetta against professors and unions so he is just like the head Roypublican, trump in his vindictiveness. That boy is unfit for office showing he cares little about the environment and the education of South Dakotan’s. So who is lining his pockets?
Darin, perhaps I can explain. I think you read way more partisanship into my assertion than I intended.
I contend we all need to know our state representatives – I’ve got the contact information for all of mine and let them know my thoughts on key issues regularly. I don’t think professors should have to become sycophants to state legislators, but I do think state legislators would gain value by putting names and faces to an otherwise faceless group. Having personal experience prevents the labeling of the “other” and insulates against the ideas proposed.
Politics is the means by which the allocation of scarce resources is conducted. If you’re not just a line item, but a human being with a personal story, then even if you don’t agree with everything a person does, it’s a lot easier to see the inherent value.
That said, I don’t know if much needs be done about the tenure track; it’s already on the decline nationwide. 70% of academic positions are held by adjuncts operating on short-term contracts.
However, if I can change the subject slightly, I think a much better means of working on our scarce resources is to focus on the goals. Darin, you mentioned a professor should be focused on teaching. I agree (with the caveat of the above). However, we don’t actually hold our regental system accountable for academic excellence; we distribute funds based upon enrollment rather than graduation.
I remember how appalled I was to discover only 1/3 of freshmen & sophomores would go on to graduate at my alma mater. Granted, some of those who left went to other institutions, but many dropped out without a degree. Our regental system failed those students, and our tax dollars supported it. I would argue (perhaps radically) that if we’re in the business of helping students get high-quality educations, that that’s the metric we use for funding. Universities which are successful at helping students get to the finish line should be rewarded, and that’s where our funds should go.
At that point, it’s up to the universities to decide how that happens. It may be that tenure is an anachronism which inhibits the meeting of that goal. Or it may be the heavy reliance on adjuncts which needs to be abandoned.
“”At that point, it’s up to the universities to decide how that happens. It may be that tenure is an anachronism which inhibits the meeting of that goal. Or it may be the heavy reliance on adjuncts which needs to be abandoned””
Wow, I don’t suppose crushing the crushing debt of student loans has anything to do with not graduating. Here is a thought, free public education. Here is how Canada and 4 other countries do higher education https://www.thenation.com/article/five-countries-that-know-how-to-handle-student-debt/ Now, keep in mind that these countries have union and tenured professors. Why can’t we have nice things Mick? Why does it all have to go into wealthy pockets that do nothing with the money?
Death of even moderate tenure protections, at least at NSU where we could be “non-renewed” fairly easily as an assistant professor, would make recruitment basically impossible in my field. I’m already making $20,000 less a year than the average new assistant professor salary (2016 numbers from the American Sociological Association: http://www.asanet.org/file/3247/download?token=X7iE03Wu). I came here because I wanted a teaching-focused job, enjoyed the campus climate, and NSU still offered at least some tenure-track job security. If tenure went away that very significant dip wouldn’t make the job very attractive (either as a prospective employee or to stay).
On the other hand, it would be absolutely amazing to see the state try to bargain with all BOR faculty individually especially when in every field we can probably point out how far under the national average we are. Frankly, they’re getting a better deal right now.
Kristi, I dread the thought of losing good talent. But when it comes to higher education, do you think the Republican leadership would mind if 50% of the profs left, we replaced only 3 out of 5 of them, and we ended up with lower-skilled profs who would be either so relieved to land a job or so impoverished by their forever untenured status that they would make no political waves?
But then again, how many South Dakota professors make counter-hierarchical political waves now? (Let’s see: Reynold Nesiba, Ray Ring….)
I suspect they probably wouldn’t mind a strong adjunctification which, as much as I hate the trend, follows national norms — especially for teaching-focused jobs. At least in Sociology, the ratio is about 3:1 in terms of research vs. teaching tenure-track jobs. Given the extremely anti-science climate right now (when scientists have to march on Washington you know you’re in trouble), I suspect we’re going to see a shrinking of research tenure track jobs too, barring perhaps non-climate/environment related STEM fields (which definitely doesn’t include social sciences). I know Soc tends to be on the chopping block a lot — not because we swing liberal (though we do) — but because we have a tendency as a discipline not to tell lawmakers what they want to hear about social problems and social policy when we talk about institutional problems (i.e., you can’t “bootstraps” yourself out of most problems so, no, you can’t solely blame the individual). There was a Chronicle of Higher Ed article sometime in the last month about the whole “liberal bias” perception about college campuses that provided some studies that basically said that political beliefs largely don’t change before vs. after college, so if there is “liberal indoctrination” even in fairly left fields like Sociology, it’s pretty ineffective. This article (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-Conservative-Fears-of/240804) provides some research but isn’t the more recent one I was thinking of (it actually looks at partisan bias by region and in the midwest I think the ratio was something like 3 liberal: 1 conservative) which I can’t find. In essence, the legislature has nothing to worry about other than, potentially, cost — and at least at NSU most of us are going cheap.
Lordy, if you want people to learn not to make waves, send them to obedience schools with their dogs.
Maybe humans were educated into not making waves through concentration camps. Is that where wingnuts are heading us?