Thursday, April 4, 2013

The problem with the coup d'etat...

Since the dust has settled from all the drama of last month’s coup d’état of the Board of Trustees by the still President of CSU Watson and hizzoner Emil Jones and a phalanx of the southside pol’s followers, I’m reminded of the old joke about the dog who chases cars –what will he do when he catches one?

So now that it is out in the open (finally after all these years) and there can be no doubt in anyone’s mind that Wayne Watson and Emil Jones control the CSU Board of Trustees (dangling southside votes to get the gutless Quinn to off the three board members, Rozier, Scott, and Morrison-Butler, who dared to think that a board actually determined the leadership of the university) how do Watson and Jones now propose to run the university?

For those of you who haven’t considered the implication of the gutless Governor’s actions, there are a few pesky state laws that require board actions for tenure/promotion decisions and for certain university contracts. CSU no longer has a full board membership. There is no chair named, more importantly there is not even a quorum on the board in which to conduct business. What we have are three board members and one student member. There is no quorum for voting on tenure/promotion matters because the student cannot vote on faculty. The gutless Governor gutted our board. Have I mentioned that no business can be conducted legally right now. To compound matters, the gutless Governor has been having trouble getting his membership picks approved by the Illinois Senate—no doubt CSU’s fixer Jones can work that out, but so far he has not.

And this doesn’t even get to another question—who wants to serve on a board of trustees that has no power? If the Board objects to President Watson’s actions all he has to do is call in Daddy Jones again to set that board straight, no?

Maybe the CSU Act should be changed—abolish CSU’s board of trustees-- and we can just move on from farce to pure fascism. Last month we were shown by our gutless Governor, by the ruthless political maneuvers of Watson and Jones and their loyal soldiers, that there will be no challenge to their authority. HLC shared governance and integrity issues be damned. This is Chicago!

I’m waiting to see what they do now that they’ve caught the car.

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