Original document: the Provost’s interview in the News-Gazette (April 21, 2016).

Detect language: admin-speak

Translate into: reality

Administrators want multiyear contracts to be based on merit and performance…

Translation – Administrators have set up a system that excludes almost all non-tenure-track faculty from multiyear contracts. The system is working! Merely 19 non-tenure-track faculty members campus-wide have multiyear contracts.

The hundreds of non-tenure-track faculty members at UI-Chicago who won multiyear contracts through their union bargaining must be undeserving.

Feser noted that most UI employees, aside from tenured faculty, are “at will” employees without multiyear contracts…

Translation – The administration regards everyone except tenured faculty as disposable. Non-tenure-track faculty should stop agitating for a better deal.

“we do not regard questions of academic freedom as a matter of wages, hours and terms and conditions of employment”

Translation – The administration sees no need for non-tenure-track faculty to gain contractually enforceable procedural rights in academic freedom cases (as is the case at UI-Chicago). Such contract rights would force the administration to follow its own rules.