The Galveston County Daily News published a list of laid off faculty in today's on-line edition (see also "UTMB Layoffs Included 127 Faculty"). Three features of that list jumped right off the page at the Blogmeister:
1) Of the 127 names listed, a mere 44 were non-tenure track. That means, gentle readers, that UTMB used Ike to further weaken tenure by running off tenured and tenure track faculty at a rate of almost twice that of non-tenure track faculty. Allowing for the occasional exception to the rule, on the whole, nobody can tell me that all of these tenured and tenure-track profs were less qualified than their non-tenure track colleagues. Of course, UT has a long history of attacking tenure.
2) Both the current president (Dr. S. Hudnall) and last year's president (Dr. Tom Albrecht) of the Faculty Senate are on the list. So much for even the veneer of shared governance at UTMB. If a faculty leader turns out to be more than a bobble-head, that leader is in trouble. Tom Albrecht is also the chair-elect for the UT System Faculty Advisory Committee. It will be interesting to see if he is allowed to serve on the council while he remains on the UT payroll until August 31, 2009. Maybe UT administrators figure they delivered two blows to shared governance when they cut Albrecht. We'll see.
3) Although I won't get into the specific names of faculty here, I see agendas lurking like career-killing assassins on that list. In one case I handled a couple of years back, I became aware of a highly-productive physician and well-regarded, clinical faculty member, a colleague of my grievant, who was running circles around just about everybody. He did, however, ask questions now and then. He wasn't abrasive; he wasn't hostile. He just asked them. I would stack this faculty member's clinical productivity reports against anyone's. Now he's gone. Many of the faculty members I recognize on that list have a similar story. I can only imagine the Machiavellian manipulation of data (assuming they bothered to use any data) these people's chairs had to perform to even come close to justifying their ouster.
Now, the ol' Blogmeister is no lawyer, but while I understand objective RIF criteria to be fairer and much harder to beat legally, I would imagine that agendas, on the other hand, would be full of legal holes and opportunities to fight back. Heck, agendas have the potential to be downright illegal.
