In the wake of the release of the Paul Barrows investigation last week, Chancellor John Wiley expressed a need to review and repudiate certain University of Wisconsin employment policies regarding disciplinary and paid leave issues at a Faculty Senate meeting Monday.
At the meeting, the first of the semester, Wiley expressed his thoughts on the scandal and reiterated a need for employee policy reform at UW.
While the university has no formal plan in place, Wiley said UW will set "higher standards for behavior" of university employees and enact more precise protocol for sick and vacation leave.
"We're also going to require mandatory sexual harassment and climate training," he said. "And finally we're going to set higher, clearer rules for [paid leave]."
Wiley said the new rules will go "well beyond" what has been imposed in the past, adding the current leave policies have been somewhat confusing, even for himself.
"And if you do it the way I do it, we need to improve," he mused to a crowd of chuckling senate members.
Yet Wiley was serious about his message and the scandal.
"Those are the things I intend to do and we'll see where we go from there," Wiley said. "This has been a very difficult period for everyone."
During Wiley's address to the senate, professor James Donnelly asked him to form a committee to repair the university's reputation in response to media coverage of the scandal.
"As you yourself have acknowledged, one of the worst consequences of this incredible contamination of adverse events has been the damage that has been done to reputation of the university in the minds of the general public," Donnelly said. "I think it's very hard evidence of the serious difficulty we face in repairing the damage that has been done and I hope that you will consider, perhaps, appointing a[n] administration/faculty staff committee that would be devoted to exactly that task, of repairing the damage that has been done."
Wiley replied to Donnelly's statement optimistically, stating the process will take time and many joint efforts.
"Anything I say right now in direct response to some of the perceptions would be seen as defensive, and I don't want to do that," Wiley said. "We do have some damage to repair. I think it's a shared governance task here; I think we need to show the public we take these issues seriously, that we spend at least as much time worrying about protecting innocent victims as we do about protecting ourselves, our prerogatives [and] our faculty status."
Wiley said the general public does not want to see convicted felons on UW payroll.
"Nobody is going to buy the argument that academic freedom somehow protects a convicted felon," he said. "So we need to take a look at our rules."
After the meeting, Wiley expressed regret for the situation, and a desire to find redemption.
"A lot of partial information and misinformation has driven friends apart, and really caused a lot of bad feelings that we need to get beyond," Wiley said. "We need to do some healing."
