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very good @TeresaWatanabe coverage of UC Regents' power grab over chancellorial appointments, in which they propose to replace faculty evaluation with an outside search firm. https://lat.ms/3jSBQWj
because there are no real problems for regents @JohnAPerez @EloyOakley et al to solve, so they have time to make up fake problems, like faculty imposing excessive academic quality standards on the heads of research universities
that is what the underlying report says: "faculty search committee members are primarily focused on the academic qualifications of prospective candidates, which leaves less opportunity to explore other experience and expertise" useful to chancellors. https://bit.ly/2P88QvO
faculty are stereotyped here as people who can ONLY think of numbers of publications or prizes, when in fact most at R1s have more management experience (research labs etc) than many regents, and are always trying to pool complementary expertise
this is a stereotype from people who don't know many faculty members. They have also asked other non faculty about faculty and piled up the stereotypes of faculty, anonymously, so the empirical base are a set of unattributed statements from lord knows who.
these anonymous people are opposed to the “privilege of the faculty view”--another stereotype, equally false, that faculty run universities with enormous unaccountable power. This from a Board that completely excluded any faculty voice from this year's presidential search.
another faculty fault is that they "tend to define quality and excellence in terms of academic achievement and prefer candidates from Research I institutions"-- at these R1 academic institutions. An obvious problem best solved by hiring people who distrust academic expertise
who would the regents rather have run R1 campuses? People who are answerable to regents and not to the faculty and their standards of academic achievement. Hence the need to replace faculty with the search firm.
"The recruiters’ role (search firms) is, first and foremost, to work on behalf of their clients" -- who are management, in this case, the Board, and not faculty, students, staff, et al.
boards and senior admin have come to prefer search firms because they lack three big things faculty have: 1. connection to the university community; 2. standing within it, meaning potential power; 3. a professional knowledge base that is independent of board authority
let there not be independent expertise at research universities!--expertise that might affect the major decisions that affect the overall university and its people. The regents' attack on faculty participation is an attack on democracy. Even the very limited faculty Senate kind.
the low point in this part of the regents's report is this assertion: "this almost exclusive focus on academics by faculty may prevent the University from identifying and attracting diverse leaders." Lark Park et al assume excellence and diversity are in conflict. This is racist
This may be why the regents are spending time trying to push faculty further out of university governance *rather than* finding the money that will allow faculty to serve minority-majority UC as well as they served white UC.
because at least some regents tacitly believe that diversifying UC requires lowering standards and *also* not needing to spend as much money per student. I wrote about this structural racism via underfunding. https://bit.ly/2BMyMtg
I hope a Board of Regents that is genuinely concerned with inclusion would also be concerned with funding it properly, and doing the political work involved. They would need to bring the university together rather than dividing it as they are now--and make diverse UC=white UC
