Who Runs This Place, Under What Authority?

There's a lot of discussion at Jeremy's blog about how to turn GFC into a body that actually exerts some influence on how the University is run.  This prompted me to re-read the Post-Secondary Learning Act to try to decipher which body or person has what authority (e.g., BoG, GFC, Senate, President, Chancellor, etc.).  Unfortunately, I could not make much sense of it.  Perhaps I just have not had enough coffee today, but this document seems deliberately vague, almost as if it were designed to fit whatever situation certain people needed it to do.

Airing of the Grievances

I'm still not sure what to make of this grievance filed by the BoG against AASUA.  According to the Post-Secondary Learning Act, "Each academic staff association shall have the exclusive authority, on behalf of the academic staff members, to negotiate and enter into an agreement with the board of the public post-secondary institution."  Apparently, the BoG believe that by talking to CAUT, AASUA has violated that exclusivity requirement.  AASUA does not agree, and really I can't see this grievance being taken seriously by anyone who can read.  More likely, it's a shot across the bow in order to cow a historically passive organization, which may be showing signs of coming to life.

Bloggered

Wow, that was quite the outage.  Still not sure if all the posts survived.

Faculty Positions for Sale

There's been a lot of discussion on Jeremy's site on the question of a proposed new institute, to potentially be sited at South Campus, that would focus on technology commercialization and whose "professors" would not hold tenure.  This is another example of the creeping corporatism that continues to invade academia.

As usual, our neighbours to the south are ahead of us.  A particularly egregious example is this apparently successful effort by a foundation controlled by one of the Koch brothers to completely control the hiring of a position they have funded.  Are similar things in store for the U of A?  Are they already underway, and we just don't know about them?

Hey Everybody: Sustainable Teaching Is Here!

Sorry to bang on this drum again, but I just found this ridiculous.  The U of A's Centre for Teaching and Learning has sent out a memo advertising "Sustainability Curriculum and Teaching Workshops."  These include a "big picture" workshop, one to tie sustainability teaching to the academic plan, and one on pedagogies associated with sustainability.  I'm sorry, but organizing workshops about how sustainability fits into the curriculum or the academic plan is pathetically far removed from actually moving towards a sustainable campus.

More than anything else, it reminds me of a scene in the old "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" series, where the Golgafringans from the B-ark (the useless third of the population, consisting of haridressers, insurance salesmen, management consultants, telephone sanitizers, etc.) have crash-landed on the prehistoric planet Earth, and rather than dealing with their predicament, are filming a documentary about themselves.