A new proposal protecting the UW-Madison faculty's freedom to criticize UW-Madison administrators and policies was presented at the Faculty Senate meeting Wednesday.
According to the proposal's lead sponsor, UW-Madison law professor Donald Downs, the amendment is a necessary precaution, despite the university's good track record for handling dissent, because a recent Supreme Court case decided government employees, including faculty members, can be punished or fired for any speech ""pursuant to their official duties.""
""This university should have a wider range of free speech than most other institutions … because our special intellectual and moral charter to pursue truth in a robust and fearless fashion, and also because of shared governance,"" Downs said.
Proposal cosigner John Sharpless agreed the decision was especially ominous for university professors.
""Things like defense spending, decisions on athletic apparel and decisions on public policy that affect campus funding. … It's important that we be able to speak on those issues as citizens and not run the risk of losing our position as faculty,"" Sharpless said.
The proposed amendment to faculty policies and procedures would insert the right to speak ""on matters related to professional duties, the functioning of the university and university positions and policies,"" provided those speech acts do not ""constitute misconduct,"" Downs said.
UW-Madison professor and sponsor Eric Schatzberg said the current policy could create perverse incentives to air all internal complaints publicly.
""If you sent letters to the press about what you thought was going wrong, there you might be acting as a citizen … so it's quite possible that it encourages people not to try to work things out within their organization,"" he said.
The Senate's University Committee Chair Bill Tracy also provided an update on the UC's ad hoc committee report on UW-Madison's graduate school. Chancellor Biddy Martin applauded much of the report but expressed concerns about moving grants management and compliance issues to the vice chancellor of administration's office because that may ""move those operations too far from the faculty."" She also said she worried about assigning one administrator the duties of the vice chancellor for research and the dean of the graduate school, as done under the current structure and supported by the new report.
