This was the acceptance speech that this year’s winner of the University of New Mexico teaching award gave yesterday.
Non-acceptance speech, I guess. Must have been pretty embarrassing for the president, Dave Schmidly, to present the award, and then sit down and hear what the recipient had to say about him.
President Schmidly presented the “Presidential Teaching Fellow” award to Dr. Howard Waitzkin, a distinguished professor in family and community medicine, sociology, and internal medicine at UNM. Upon accepting the award, Waitzkin unexpectedly gave a speech about the UNM administration’s poor performance supporting faculty and students.
“The values that most of us on the faculty and most of the student body think need to be preserved are those that focus on the advancement of education and the advancement of knowledge,” he said. “The priorities here have been on buildings, athletics and other areas that are not core to the University’s mission.”
… In his speech, Waitzkin talked about the resignation of Faculty President Doug Fields on Monday due to the unwillingness of administration to listen to faculty’s ideas on governance and budget planning. He also cited the faculty’s no-confidence vote in President David Schmidly last spring.
“Because of the deterioration of UNM’s educational mission, last year the faculty gave President Schmidly a strong vote of no confidence,” Waitzkin said. “Rather than resigning, the president has continued much of the same practices, which have provoked several scandals and reduced morale for many faculty members and students.”
Waitzkin cited financial changes, cutbacks in key programs and utter lack of support for faculty as the reasons why he decided to speak out at the awards ceremony. He said lack of support for teachers from the administration has led many faculty to teach in a “sad, alienated way,” and others to leave the University…
Tenure is controversial, and I guess it should be. But you have to admit that this is a story not only about courage, but about tenure.
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And — Schmidly? He’s going the way of Ceausescu. It’s going to become increasingly difficult for him to be seen in public.
May 7th, 2010 at 3:57PM
Wow. Professor Waitzkin’s gesture was brave. Do keep us posted on this saga!
May 7th, 2010 at 4:33PM
Will do, Trudy.
May 7th, 2010 at 5:07PM
And if you go the Lobo article link Margaret Soltan provided, there are some very interesting comments, including some that explain Schmidly’s role in the fiasco Soltan wrote about quite a few times, regarding sexworking prof. Lisa Chavez. Here’s one comment:
Thank you Prof. Waitzkin – for your brave action and for speaking the truth! The English Dept. is the most full of “sad and alienated” professors – after Schmidly got done with it.
A comment the other day on no shared governance at UNM under Schmidly had it right:
The deeper problem in the English Dept. also has to do with another major instance of Schmidly’s ignoring of shared governance. After over 17 English faculty wrote letters to the administration asking for a faculty ethics investigation and/or protesting the flawed and cut-off Schmidly-run investigation of sadomasochistic sex-working professor Lisa Chavez – the prof who did all the public sex work for money with her student, posting all those photos posing sexual violence on student – Schmidly ignored faculty, and created a massive continuing problem in the English dept. – three resignations, two or more current lawsuits. Several other faculty and students have left.
The one professor who wrote in support of Schmidly’s ridiculous “investigation” is now Chair of English. Hmnnnn.
That was, and still is an issue of denying shared governance – Big Time.
May 7th, 2010 at 6:06PM
layers: Many thanks for that background. I had meant to check the comments on the article — thanks for excerpting some of them.
UD
May 13th, 2015 at 8:15AM
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