Spread the Word: I'm Comin' Ouuuuu-t!

Not as a debutante or a gay man. Nor as Beyonce in Tokyo!



(Although I would appreciate it if y'all'd be a little more into the call and response thing than the apparently mostly-non-Japanese people in her audience that night.) So if you had to put a label on it, I guess I'd say I'm coming out as a campus governance leader. No, not as step x in some kind of rehab program (for "hearing the sound of your own voice" addiction? to make a public apology to those I've hurt?). How and to what end? Well, read on.

I don't need to tell my handful of regular readers that first as Vice-Chair of the SUNY Fredonia University Senate last academic year and then as Chair this one, I've lost the time, inclination, and motivation to do much academic blogging here at Citizen of Somewhere Else. It's been as obvious as the numbers in my archives to the right. Frankly, communicating with my fellow officers of the Senate, with administrative leaders, with leaders of the local union chapter, and with everyone else on my campus, not to mention fellow campus governance leaders and others in the state-wide University Faculty Senate, has taken up so much of my thought, time, and effort over the past academic year and a half tht I haven't been able to stay awake enough hours in the day to cram in some academic blogging at the end of it. Well, my term runs out June 30th, I've got a pretty good handle on the job by now, and to accomplish some of my remaining goals, I'm going to need to use the bully pulpit more on my campus and take to teh intertubes here at CitizenSE to (hopefully) reach wider audiences.

And that's where you come in. I need you to spread the word: I'll be talking here about various issues that we've been wrestling with at Fredonia and in SUNY since I've been on my campus's Senate Executive Committee. What kinds of issues? I don't want to limit myself in advance, because the biggest thing I've learned is how to roll with surprises, but certainly among them will be the value of effective governance, conflicting theories of governance and what's at stake in them, the meaning(s) of consultation, the financing of public higher education.... The list goes on and the actual blogging will be a lot more interesting than that list makes it sound.

While blogging, I'm not going to talk personalities or play trivial academic politics. And while I'll be commenting on the news here at CitizenSE, one of my goals will be more ambitious: I'm going to be trying to make some news via CitizenSE. First on the agenda is the coming NYS budget apocalypse and political meltdown, Governor Paterson's Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, the battle over it between the Chancellor of the State University of NY Nancy Zimpher and the President of United University Professions Phil Smith, their courtship of statewide and campus Senates in SUNY, and What This All Means and What's At Stake In It.

So get your #2 pencils out, put on your thinking caps, and getttttt rea-dy to commmmmennnnnnnnnntttttttttttttt!