Anyone paying attention to the last few months of UA’s cover-our-ass, Kabuki play with upset faculty–has got to be shaking their heads.
If ever there was a ‘Sunday-school object lesson’, re: this soap opera of Tucson’s “high-IQ stupid people” (HISP) (vastly overpaid, too) that has made it such an urban dystopia, it’s got to be the recent, before-and-after saga surrounding the on-campus, broad daylight murder of UA Prof. Tom Meixner. You’ll recall Meixner was gunned-down by an identified & clearly disaffected grad student, Murad Dervish, on October 5th, outside his offices in the UA hydrology building.
Since then what has transpired between the UA Administration, the Meixner Family, and the Weenie Patrol over at the Faculty Senate, is starting to look like an episode of SouthPark.
And just when it appeared the Faculty was about to punt, …as the morbidly obese Monster-What-Ate-Tucson growled disapprovingly and pointed at their academic sinecures, they had a collective psychic-moment and voted no-confidence in the UA Administration. “Take that! You Big (Overpaid) Meanies!” (Oh, the drama!)
It is a big Kabuki-play, folks…. Just a total Kabuki-play. Everybody’s lawyers are licking their chops. Arizona taxpayers, voters, and young people get hosed again. Schitzo-Tucson just suckles-onward from its primary teat at the state’s #1 budget-item (UA) trough.
OR THE ARIZONA LEGISLATURE COULD USE THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO REALLY FIX THE UNIVERSITY (so how, Mr. Wizard?) Two simple ways; cheap & easy to implement and once put in place, effective to oversee.
Action Item #1. The Arizona Legislature should have a permanent presence at UA by way of an Office of Legislative Inspector General, staffed by trained forensic auditors who have carte-blanche EVERYWHERE, to investigate and [ONLY] report back to the relevant committees, the Governor & Regents, and Office of the AZ State Auditor.
Action Item #2. The Arizona Legislature should repeal Arizona ARS § 15-1601B, the specious 1992 ‘Shared Governance Law’ that has allowed UA’s kind of vast, expensive mission-creep, and non-academic considerations (i.e. Woke, Cancel Culture, corrupt big $$$ athletics, et al) to infect & dominate the institution, and its management processes.
Action Item #2 is just perfunctory; time to end the Arizona law giving them any power. No doubt Gov. Katie Hobbesian, will veto …after all the Tucson HISP caterwauling subsides.
Action Item #1, an Office of UA Inspector General, is where the rubber meets the road; it can pay for itself the first month. Make it statutory; give it some teeth; give it final budgetary approval over key metrics; treat it like a US government Go-Co lab (government owned, contractor operated); the problem has become a ‘Cognitive Trifecta’, one where these people see themselves as either state government bureaucrats on one UA level, prima-donna intelligentsias, or Bill Lumberghs (movie: Office Space) on another.
It’s way past time to cull-the-UA-herd, and convey some higher expectations & metrics for everyone:
You can hear ‘em now…. “but I work FOR the University!”
Answer: “Then stop thinking and acting like _____________________.”
Related pieces on the UA and Tucson:
UA’s “Institutional Capture” of Tucson: Vast Bloat Hiding in Plain Sight
UA: The Tucson Beast Eating Arizona’s Budget
Writ Large: UA Is The Tucson Left’s “Milkcow”
Sellers is a Southpark Republican living in incorporated Oro Valley; his background is federal technology commercialization