Members of the Associated Students of Madison said the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents returned a complaint regarding how members were picked to the School of Education dean search-and-screen committee without filing it with UW System President Kevin Reilly.
Members said they spent months choosing and appointing students for the committee before Chancellor John Wiley rejected the offer. ASM members then took their offer to the regents, who returned the complaint.
ASM recently filed a complaint with the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents concerning UW’s recent denial to accept students ASM chose to make up part of the committee created to find a replacement for the retiring UW Dean of Education Charles Read.
Still, UW Provost Peter Spear said ASM’s demands for two additional students to a committee that already had an undergraduate and graduate student from the School of Education would have been unorthodox.
According to Spear, the regents’ rules suggest students chosen for any committee selecting school officials are to be taken from the most “local population.”
“If it’s the School of Education dean, you go to the students in the School of Education; if it’s the School of Engineering … you go to that school,” Spear said, saying students were selected through the School of Education. “If it’s the Madison chancellor, you go to ASM.”
However, ASM members voiced distaste with the school officials’ decision.
The best situation, according to ASM Shared Governance Chair Eyal Halamish, would have been for Reilly to appoint ASM-chosen representatives to the committee and clarify the regent policy on the matter, preventing future problems. The Wisconsin State Constitution gives students the right to govern over student policies and issues.
“The issue here is who selects student representatives because we all agree students should be on the board, and they are,” Spear said. “We believe we followed the regents’ guidelines by choosing the students we did, and ASM disagrees with that.”
Halamish feels the UW System Board of Regents’ failure to acknowledge ASM says something about the UW System.
“They tend to forget about the real student issues,” Halamish said.
As of now, ASM members are still waiting for a response from the regents and are prepared to continue to demand an answer from them until they get one.
“We plan on calling them in the next couple days and keeping the pressure on so we can get a response,” Halamish said.
ASM members intend to be placed on the regents’ agenda for the April 7 and 8 meetings at Van Hise.
If all else fails, they may take the matter to court and challenge the UW System Board of Regents’ decision not to appoint an ASM-selected member.
According to Spear, the committee to select the new dean of education was selected “months and months ago.” Additionally, the majority of the committee must always be composed of faculty members.
If new students were added, they would be months behind in selecting the new dean, and so would the new faculty members who would also have to be appointed alongside the new ASM members.
