The Management Model Driving UW System Governance

Michael Meranze & Christopher Newfield:

Regent Behling should be saying, “quality, quality, quality,” to keep himself and other Wisconsin leaders from steadily slashing the infrastructure that would allow the state to regain its lost leadership status. Instead, he and the board majority went with the capacity to override tenure. Some large portion of Wisconsin leadership has spent years obsessing about UW tenure as a main roadblock to economic greatness. No evidence has ever been presented for this–no calculation of how expensive sociology professors are impeding the growth of contract manufacturing. It’s a political goal and a cultural belief–in much of U.S. business culture, the power to fire people makes everything fixable. “Flexibility” started out in the 1970s as a desperation move as US industry lost its postwar lead over Germany, Japan, and other rebuilt industrial powers. In the 1980s, management theorists like Tom Peters and Rosabeth Moss Kanter showed that mass layoffs destroyed company value rather than created it, but short-term executive rewards ran against them, and mass layoffs became a routine practice and sure-fire way of doping the stock price. “Flexibility” has nothing to do with improving education. It’s imposition has already damaged education, and its practice will continue to.