Governance Gaffes

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Protecting autocratic snowflakes from freedom of speech

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UPDATE, 2 November 17: There have been several changes to the Board of Governors (BoG) proposed policy (which has now been approved in committee and forward to the full Board for a vote tomorrow). These incorporate some of the concerns raised by the Association of Student Governments, the UNC Staff Assembly, and the UNC Faculty Assembly. The legal staff at General Administration is likely to be responsible for rolling back some of the really bad language and ideas. While some of those changes have mitigated problematic features of the legislation and the Board's interventions in the management of campus affairs, several very troubling issues were made manifest during the BoG Governance Committee meeting, viz: -- Steve Long, the Chair of the Committee, openly conceded that the policy did little more than recapitulate existing legislation protecting freedom of speech. As noted below, laws to enforce laws are almost always an indication that something pernicious is at stake. ...
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No good work goes unpunished

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NC has what is arguably the best system of public higher education in the country, yet (for the fifth year running) there wasn't a single NC public university on the Chronicle of Higher Education's 2015 " Great Colleges to Work For ." (Kudos to Wake Tech for making some of the earlier lists for 2 year institutions, but the absence of NCCC system schools in recent rankings only reinforces the concerns raised here). This of course stands in sharp contrast with the great work that NC staff and faculty have done to make many UNC schools among the most highly ranked institutions -- from a student's perspective. What drives this gap? As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, there is a sense in which the UNC system is (one of) the best in the country despite the problematic policies and laws of the NC legislature and the UNC Board of Governors. There is a sense in which UNC staff, faculty, and administrators have insulated the University from the destructive effec...
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Cecil Staton (and ECU) discover Governance Chaos Theory

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LINKS AND FURTHER EDITING FORTHCOMING. This is a first cut on this one. Inside Higher Ed (and Rick Seltzer in particular) caught up with the Executive leadership mess now unfolding in Greenville . Cecil Staton has had one foot out the door for at least 9 months. (It was very interesting watching the Board of Governors, and Staton, struggle to respond when some of the BoG radicals tried to savage Staton and ECU several months ago). Now Staton is going -- and (like Tom Ross, and probably Margaret Spellings) he has a 'non-disparagement' clause for his severance contract.  (Hell, if they had given me one of those payouts, I probably never would have considered writing these things. Then again, that would have meant nightly and nasty visits from Cato's Ghost, so I probably would have been shamed into backing out of any payout deal. Sometimes cowardice protects you from being stupid, too.) 
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