Faculty members have doubtless heard about a signature gathering campaign for a letter to the Board of Trustees demanding the resignation of President Hogan. Here we re-post our commentary on this issue from a few days ago. The CFA Executive Committee encourages members to sign the letter if they think it makes sense. We also encourage you to read the Daily Illini article about CFA’s efforts to form a union by clicking here
If you have not yet been visited by a CFA member, but would like to talk to us, let us know at campusfacultyassoc@gmail.com
But the ExComm’s main thought is:
Will a new President/ CEO make any important difference to shared governance on this campus?
CFA has no defense of Hogan — we hold no brief for him at all, and recent reports in the News-Gazette make the picture even more dismal.
Some facts very much against him:
He and the BOT are spending millions fighting the legal, democratic union election at UIC
He has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on outside consultants to investigate administrative wrong doing.
He has centralized IT and cut expert faculty out of IT planning.
He and the BOT have no plan for the fair treatment of and improving the conditions for Non-Tenure Track faculty. (Neither did President White).
Hogan and the BOT refuse to negotiate in good faith with campus unions (AFSCME SEIU GEO, and currently IEA/ Academic Personell ). So did Joseph White.
He has no reasonable plan to increase faculty numbers and diversity of faculty and students. (Neither did White).
He is steadily increasing the size of the administration and the amount of money spent on administration, with BOT approval.
He is obsessed with “branding and marketing” and improving the status of the university, without attention to substance.
He is uninterested in addressing salary compression, though UIUC ranks lowest of all Big Ten public universities in salaries for Associate Professors.
He has presided over huge changes in academic policy that were not discussed with or advised by the faculty (a large increase in foreign undergraduate students “just happened”, without proper planning or support for those students and the faculty teaching them).
He has no real ability to fight to preserve faculty retirement benefits or preserve health care arrangements, and the BOT seems to have no interest in this issue.
He treats faculty and their representative bodies with contempt. He and the BOT may have violated the Illinois Open Meetings Act.
He and the BOT have no plan to lower tuition or address class size.
He does not vigorously address the public nature of the public university.
As Norman Denzin (Sociology) pointed out in the Senate this September, he has no vision for the University.
This is all very bad news for the University of Illinois and for the UIUC campus.
Hogan clearly sees himself as a corporate CEO whose job is to leverage the resources of the University into something more profitable, more corporate, more prestigious. And certainly more top-down.
CFA ASKS: Will another CEO selected by the business leaders of Chicago be any different?
We think that faculty need a base of power that is not part of the usual chain of command.
We need an active democratic union to represent educational quality and faculty interests.
Susan Davis, for the CFA Executive Committee
Campus Faculty Association 
Wow! What a list! And all true . . .
President Hogan has to resign, the sooner the better
We’re hearing that a lot. But after that, faculty’s power remains simply advisory — if that. Is that good enough? And how would we undo some of this centralization?