{"id":4873,"date":"2016-04-01T17:20:16","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T21:20:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.khpi.org\/blog\/?p=4873"},"modified":"2016-04-03T10:48:54","modified_gmt":"2016-04-03T14:48:54","slug":"what-does-the-faculty-think-about-uofl-president-james-ramsey-does-it-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.khpi.org\/blog\/what-does-the-faculty-think-about-uofl-president-james-ramsey-does-it-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"What Does the Faculty Think About UofL President James Ramsey?\u00a0 Does It Matter?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cApril is the cruelest month.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

It is going to be a busy and certainly controversial month at the University of Louisville.\u00a0 On April 6, the UofL Faculty Senate \u2013 the highest governing body of the University\u2019s faculty \u2013 will have its last scheduled meeting before the meeting of the Board of Trustees later this month on April 20.\u00a0 At the Trustee\u2019s meeting, the Board will re-consider its postponed vote of no confidence in the presidency of James Ramsey.\u00a0 An aborted effort last March 1st to proceed with such a vote was aggressively blocked on procedural grounds by longtime Ramsey supporters.\u00a0 I am told that the President’s Office has retained an expensive outside crisis-management consultant.\u00a0 (I wonder who is paying for this, don’t you?)<\/p>\n

Those who have declared their intention to cast a vote of no confidence are being categorized as “dissidents.”\u00a0 Demonizing one’s opponents is a strategy often resorted to when other arguments prove insufficient. We see examples in the papers every day. I am forced to ask, how can a majority or even a near-majority of the Board be called dissidents?\u00a0 Would it then follow that if President Ramsey does receive a vote of no confidence, that his supporters would be the dissidents?\u00a0 I have listened to the language used by both sides.\u00a0 In contrast to the professional, restrained, and respectful language used by those Trustees unhappy with the current direction of the University, Ramsey’s supporters are becoming even more shrill resorting to personal character attacks. These smack of desperation.\u00a0 I am not alone in this perception.<\/p>\n

By accounts, the vote will be a close one.\u00a0 Not every one of the 20 trustees has expressed how they plan to vote.\u00a0 None of the three trustees representing faculty, staff, or students has done so.\u00a0 It even remains possible that Governor Bevin will name two new trustees who would then be asked to vote on the President’s performance even before they had their required orientation, and certainly before they had any opportunity to observe events as a Trustee. I cannot find evidence that the Postsecondary Nominating Committee has begun their statutory process, but obvious Ramsey supporters are already standing in line to be noticed. Stacking the Board with Ramsey supporters would be a bald political move that would only perpetuate the current weakness of the University’s position. Using the excuse that the Board is illegally constituted to support Ramsey in his understandable efforts to hang on is hypocritical in the extreme.<\/p>\n

In a current matter of obvious concern to the entire University, Governor Bevin just announced an immediate mandatory 4.5% budget reduction for all state universities independently of the legislature’s ongoing deliberations over future higher-education budgets.\u00a0 Compared to other University leadership, President Ramsey’s reaction was downright tepid.\u00a0 Perhaps he is hoping for another gubernatorial bailout of his personal predicament.<\/p>\n

Some units of the University are already polling their faculty so as to be able to forward general faculty opinion to their Trustee representative.\u00a0 The results so far have been strongly against Ramsey.\u00a0 In the largest university unit, that of Arts & Sciences, 75% supported a vote of no confidence, and only 18% would vote in support.\u00a0 Among the law school faculty rendering an opinion, 68% supported a vote of no confidence and 24% did not. I am not aware of any other university unit that has made the opinion of its faculty public, or for that matter whether any attempt was made at all to systematically gather individual faculty opinions \u2013 the major responsibility of the Faculty Senate. I am a voting member of the Executive Faculty, and no one has asked me what I think. I am reliably informed that at least one very large department in the health sciences center has not been asked for the opinions of its faculty at all.\u00a0 This is what results when an unstructured, idiosyncratic and ad hoc effort is launched.\u00a0 Results will necessarily be fragmentary and subject to distortion and bias.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Insider Louisville placed a poll before the general public asking whether readers would vote for, against, or abstain from a vote of no-confidence in President Ramsey.\u00a0 The initial results were overwhelmingly in favor of a vote of no-confidence.\u00a0 Miraculously, the results were flipped overnight when hundreds of votes from a limited number of Internet addresses within the University were registered.\u00a0 Perhaps this was part of the strategy of crisis management consultants in the Office of the President.\u00a0 Perhaps it was a lone-wolf supporter of Ramsey.<\/p>\n

Anecdotes make for bad medicine and also policy but are often used in both arenas. The Office of the President urged a faculty supporter of President Ramsey to write to the Courier-Journal claiming that the survey conducted by the College of Arts & Sciences was flawed.\u00a0 (More crisis management?)\u00a0 That faculty member is an obvious supporter of President Ramsey and appears to have benefited from the commercial research enterprise that has been a\u00a0major initiative of President Ramsey’s tenure.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, these examples demonstrate why faculty opinion on such a critically important issue for both President Ramsey personally and the University and its community must be obtained in a careful manner.\u00a0 I see no evidence that this is happening now.\u00a0 Indeed, the agenda of next week’s Faculty Senate meeting indicates that the matter is intended to be discussed in secret, presumably with even other faculty members like me excluded. The faculty representative to the Board of Trustees, who is also an Associate Vice President in University-wide administration, has already indicated that she will not necessarily vote in accordance with the majority will of the faculty. \u00a0This is a recipe for further disenchantment with the process, and guarantees that our current crisis of confidence in University governance will be prolonged. Perhaps the matter should be handled by the Assembly of the Faculty in which \u201cultimate faculty authority resides.\u201d\u00a0 Whatever happens this month, there must be no lingering doubts that either Trustee or Administration politics has interfered with what is claimed to be the opinion of the faculty.<\/p>\n

I have already expressed my opinion to all faculty Senators individually that faculty opinion collected on the matter of confidence in the leadership of President Ramsey which is used to reliably and actionably inform the vote of our faculty Trustee representative, must be done in a transparent, uniform, secure, and confidential manner that is not subject to distortion or bias. The same should be said for University staff and students. While the Trustee representatives of these three constituencies may choose to ignore majority opinions in casting their votes, should they do so, they will at least need to be prepared to explain why.<\/p>\n

The stakes are high for both the University, the individuals involved, and our community.\u00a0 Will we move from an \u201cunreal city under the brown fog of a winter noon<\/em>,\u201d, or \u201cwill we go on into sunlight<\/em>?\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Hasselbacher, MD
\nEmeritus Professor of Medicine, UofL<\/p>\n

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