State of the University Address to the Faculty Senate

By Chancellor John D. Wiley

Sept. 26, 2005

I think it would be impossible right now [to deliver this report on the state of the university] without making some effort to comment on recent personnel cases that have been in the newspapers and that have brought a great deal of adverse publicity to the university, so I’m going to begin with that.

Regarding the personnel cases, I’ll start first with the Barrows case, which began last winter – or in November, actually. In November, it was brought to my attention that Vice Chancellor [Paul] Barrows had engaged in a relationship that raised a number of questions. This wasn’t a single revelation, but rather a series of reports that came to me over a period of a couple of weeks.

At first, the individual who is known in the Steingass report as Jane Doe was characterized to me as a former employee of one of the offices that reports to Paul. Subsequently, more detail was added. I learned that she was a graduate student, along with additional details about the relationship that made it especially problematic and some other allegations for which there was no evidence at the time and no way of getting any evidence.

Putting all that together, taking into account what Paul acknowledged, I concluded that it was impossible for him to continue as vice chancellor. One of the things that has been very confusing to the public and in the press has to do with the nature of what happened when he was removed as vice chancellor.

Vice chancellor positions are what we call limited appointments or, in the public parlance, at-will appointments. That means people who serve in limited appointments serve at the pleasure of the appointing authority. They can be removed at any time for any reason, including no reason at all. These are positions that are involved with – and have a significant role in – policy interpretation and policy enforcement. It’s the chancellor, the vice chancellors, most of the people who have modified chancellor titles such as associate vice chancellor and so on, the deans, most of the modified dean titles, the directors and many of the modified director titles.

There is no property right interest in either those titles or their associated salaries. In other words, they’re more like temporary assignments. In every case, there’s a concurrent appointment, which is the actual employment appointment. This is what has been confusingly referred to, even by ourselves, as backup appointments, and they’ve become very controversial in the press. But these are actually concurrent, zero-dollar appointments to which the person returns when the limited appointment ends or if it ends.

Obviously, this was quite a blow to Paul and there were a number of other things going on at the time in his life, and it was very clear to me and to him that he needed some time off. I also advised him that, in view of the strains that had been caused by this relationship and other things – strains among the offices, among and between faculty and staff and students – it would be better for him and for us if he sought employment elsewhere.

He asked for some time off and that was granted, and I told him to use it well to try to find another job, but that if that didn’t happen, he had a job back here, and if and when that occurred, we would find a place for him, but it would not be as vice chancellor.

I ascertained from the Human Resources office that he had enough vacation, accrued leave and sick leave that, if it were necessary, those three types of leave could last easily through June. There was no doubt in my mind that he was, in fact, sick in a sense that justified his leave and his use of sick leave, and so I didn’t think much more about it until about January, at which time I said, “This has gone on long enough that you really need to get a doctor’s excuse. You need to put something on file,” and he said yes, he would do that.

I was criticized in the Steingass report for not following up more aggressively and closely in verifying that he was, in fact, sick on all the days when he used sick leave, and that’s a fair criticism. I did not do that, and I should have.

The bottom line is, he did stay off on various forms of leave until June and the Steingass report concludes that the sick leave was justified only until early in the year, not after that.

Regarding the confusing series of different titles and appointments, my intention was to bring him back into another limited appointment if he did come back. Things were revealed during the time he was gone that made it impossible for me to do that, and so the only option left was for him to return to his concurrent appointment, which is in the provost’s office. I immediately then launched an investigation, put him on paid administrative leave. My view and I believe the common sense view is that all of his leave up to that point he paid for, because he was using valuable earned sick leave, vacation time and ALRA. At the point when I put him on paid administrative leave, we were paying for it.

The Steingass report characterizes the reason for his departure from the vice chancellor position as having been -I believe the phrase was “while not a lie, certainly not the whole truth.” That’s correct. It was not the whole truth. It was the truth and it was nothing but the truth, but it wasn’t the whole truth. And that’s quite common. We treated Paul no differently from anyone else. Many people who leave under difficult circumstances, we find it counter-productive to give all of the reasons and possibly hamper their ability to find another job or the rest of their career or, in this case, also to implicate innocent victims or other people who wish to remain anonymous. So we did not give the full details of his reason for encountering stress and so on.

I will value any feedback that any of you want to give me about how we should describe departures under circumstances such as this in the future, and I’ll refrain right now from telling you my opinion, but I’d be happy to hear any advice you have. I don’t know whether we should always give the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth or something less in some cases.

Let me comment now on what has come to be known in the press as the faculty felons. Over the last 10 years we’ve had about two dozen or so cases of faculty misconduct. Overwhelmingly they’ve been sexual – about 60 percent of them sexual misconduct, sexual harassment or other violations – some financial misconduct, some research misconduct, some abusive treatment of students.

We haven’t had very many in recent years, but all of a sudden we got a cluster of three in a very short period of time and this has raised a lot of public interest and demands that these three individuals be summarily fired.

The reason we can’t fire someone just because they were convicted of a crime is that crimes are dealt with in the criminal law and employment is dealt with and defined in the civil law. Those are two different sets of laws that have to be independently observed. There is a big difference between public employment and private employment. The difference is that public employees are, in effect, employed by the government and government employment implicates sections of the U.S. Constitution that simply are not implicated in private employment.

Public employees have a property right interest in their job and their title and their salary, and they cannot be deprived of property without due process. That’s the U.S. Constitution. So when someone is convicted of a crime, we need to show separately from that conviction that the crime they committed had implications for their ability to do their job on campus – that, for example, they violated a university rule or regulation or just the commission of that crime would make it unreasonable to the normal person that they could ever do that job again. For example, I think most reasonable people would find it OK to discriminate against people who have DUI convictions if the job is driving a school bus.

So in every case when someone is convicted of a crime, in order to dismiss them or discipline them in any way in the university, we have to follow our process for allegations, investigations and findings, and that is what we’ve been doing. I think the public also finds it difficult to understand -and many in the university find it difficult to understand – why it takes to long, why it’s possible for the criminal justice system to reach a verdict and a sentence and put someone in jail, and we’re still investigating whether or not there are any grounds for firing them.

With all this negative publicity – and there’s been plenty of it – I think this a good time for us to reflect on some of our processes and rules, and I would like to meet with the governance units. I’ll meet with the University Committee and ASEC and, in some instances, with the students of ASM. I’d like to ask that we re-examine our sexual harassment and consensual relations policies and the specific language that we have in FP&P [Faculty Policies & Procedures] and ASPP [Academic Staff Policies & Procedures]. I don’t say that with any preconceived notion about what the outcome will be. I just want it to be looked at again in light of recent cases and thought through again to see whether we would like to see any changes.

Similarly, I would like us to re-examine the language in FP&P Chapter 8 on professional integrity. There’s a section in there that very vaguely defines professional integrity. It would have been of great help in some of these cases if we had more guidance on what that means, how it’s to be interpreted, whether or not as pubic employees and as faculty of a great university we have any particular expectations about the sorts of behavior that we simply won’t tolerate.

I’d like to ask that we also reconsider whether we need to mandate sexual harassment or climate training for everyone having supervisory responsibilities. This has been debated before in the [Faculty] Senate – all of these things have. I’ve sat through the debates, I’ve listened to them. It’s probably very timely for us to think about that again independently of what we do in the end. and I also would like us to reconsider the processes and timelines for misconduct and disciplinary investigations and appeals that are outlined in Chapter 9 of FP&P.

I’ll have some specific things to suggest when I meet with the University Committee, but this is what I think we really need to do.

I’d also like your feedback and advice. This isn’t exactly a governance issue, but one of the great frustrations, especially in the Barrows case, was that many allegations were made and there were great expectations that we would do something about it. But they were made by people who said, “I will not file a complaint and I will not testify and I don’t want my name to be known.”

I can’t do anything with that. It would be outrageous for me to try to do something. Everyone has a right to confront their accuser. Now I’m told that they’re sad and they think it’s unfortunate that they cannot come forward and speak forthrightly and say what they feel has been done to them, but that the climate is such that they’re afraid to. And frankly, there is some evidence. They can cite examples around campus of people who have genuinely reported something they felt was wrong and then they suffered adverse consequences as a result. We need to do whatever we can to repair that impression that it’s not acceptable to come forward and report wrongdoing.

I’m an experimentalist. I’m more impressed with data and evidence and facts than I am with abstract theories and theoretical speculations about what should or should not be necessary, but when most of the people of color on campus tell me we have an unfavorable climate or a hostile climate in some parts of the campus, when most of the women tell me that it’s very difficult to report sexual harassment, that’s evidence and we need to address it in some way.

So I’d like any advice you have on how we can improve on the climate for safe, comfortable reporting of wrongdoing. There are a few things I can do without governance. I intend to promulgate tougher and very clearly communicated standards for the behavior of people holding limited appointments. I’m not prepared to say right now exactly what those will be, but they will go well beyond what we’ve imposed in the past.

I’m also going to require mandatory sexual harassment and climate training for everyone holding a limited appointment.

And, finally, I intend to circulate tighter, clearer rules for leave accounting. Many of you, I think, also sign leave reports, and if you do it the way I do it, we need to improve. I get big stacks of these things. You know what they look like – these little pink or yellow sheets with every day of the month listed and with columns for check marking how many hours of vacation and sick leave and floating holidays and so on were used. What I’ve done for the 20-plus years that I’ve been signing them is, I’ve said to myself there is no way I can verify what everyone was doing on every one of these days, so I won’t sign it. I will initial it. Now there’s a distinction without a difference, because those forms have my initials on it, which means that I saw it and, in effect, I approved it.

But we do have to watch for patterns and we do have to think about whether or not each particular form of leave that’s being certified is justifiable, and whether or not we can prove it.

Those are things I intend to do, and we’ll see where we go from there.

Professor Jim Donnelly asks about the serious difficulty the university faces in repairing the damage that has been done to the reputation of the university and its standing and the general confidence of the public “whose support we need so much.” Donnelly urges appointment of an administration/faculty/staff committee devoted to exactly that task. The chancellor responds:

Anything I say right now in direct response to some of the perceptions will be seen as defensive, and I don’t want to do that. We do have some damage to repair. I think it’s a shared governance task here. I think we need to show the public that we take these issues seriously, that we spend as least as much time worrying about protecting innocent victims as we do about protecting ourselves, our prerogatives, our faculty status. No one is going to buy the argument that academic freedom somehow protects a convicted felon.

So we need to look at our rules. That’s what I’m suggesting – that we get together with governance. I don’t know if a task force is the way to do it. It might take more than a task force, but if all the elements of governance pull together here and take it seriously, I think some good can come out of this and we can regain a lot of that trust.

On budget issues:

Like every state in the country, we’re in a bad situation in Wisconsin, where the elected officials believe, rightly I think, that they were elected with no mandate whatsoever to raise taxes, with a need to balance the budget and that being an impossible task. They have so little flexibility in the budget that about the only places they can take the cuts are in the discretionary part of the budget, and we’re a big part of that. Of all the state agencies, we’re the only one that they see having a viable alternative revenue source in the form of tuition.

For years they’ve been cutting state support and raising tuition. Now they like to do that while telling the public, “This isn’t going to hurt. Tuition is very low and it’s still second lowest in the Big Ten. They [university officials] don’t have to cut any classes or in any way cut back on their program delivery. They can take this all out of administrative fat, bloat and waste.”

That gives them a vested interest in continuing to insist that there’s a lot of fat, and it’s one of the reasons that some legislators are so eager to jump on every embarrassing situation or everything that they disapprove of and use that as an example of just what they were saying – that “they’re wasting so much money that we can take more and it won’t hurt at all.” That’s part of the environment we’re in.

We’re still not out of the fire on the budget. We’ve had to absorb some more cuts in this biennium. We’ll get through that.

We are still in a national environment that is cutting back year after year on the public support of public higher education.