Op-Ed: University of Wisconsin-Green Bay Ethics Questioned

What happens to a professor that doesn't show up for class on time at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay? She gets to double-dip when she retires, so she collects a pension and a salary.

The University of Wisconsin Green Bay is a small campus in the University of Wisconsin System, but at the moment they are in the spotlight for rehiring an employee namedTom Makiwho retired last year and was soon rehired by the university. Mr. Maki is receiving a pension and a state salary—it is called double-dipping.It seems the school sees nothing wrong with what they did, and have no problem with the man collecting a pension and collecting a salary from the state. Mr. Maki got a nice raise, and it could be argued an unfair advantage over his co-workers at the university that face a pay freeze.I went to UWGB, and received my degree from the school. I had an English professor by the name of Denise Sweet that didn’t even like coming to class on time. It may seem petty to some that I kept track of her tardiness. I wasn’t the only student that kept track of her tardiness.Professor Sweet never said how many former students complained about her tardiness, but she brought her tardiness up in class because one of my classmates had the nerve to ask her why she was always late. The professor said that there were former students that kept track of her tardiness and put the amount of time on the professor evaluations at the end of the semester.After listening to her mock these former students, I did the math, and used her average tardiness for the class, fifteen minutes. The average might seem high, but her tardiness ranged from ten to twenty minutes, and the longest being just over a half-hour. Therefore, I took the fifteen minutes and multiplied it by two because the class met twice a week. I took that answer and multiplied it by 14 because the semester was 14 weeks long, and that gave me 420 minutes of tardiness. I had to take out the two days that she just cancelled class, so that still meant she was tardy 390 minutes, or 6.9 hours on top of the two class periods she cancelled. I can’t think of too many private sector jobs where you can be late like that and still have a job.The old students that had the guts to complain on the professor evaluations probably thought that their voices would lead to some kind of change in the professor’s attitude towards her students, or they might have thought there was accountability at the university.Students pay to learn and expect their professors to be professionals, and maybe that is where the academic life differs from real life.As a graduate of UWGB, I have to wonder why they even bothered to give us these evaluations, if they weren’t going to even use them, but when I read stories about how the university skirts the boundaries of ethical behavior, I guess it shouldn’t shock me they hire unprofessional professors, too.The kicker is that Professor Sweet retired in2010, and is still on the staff at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She is one of the eleven people collecting a pension and a salary from theuniversity.I don’t know if Professor Sweet shows up for class on time, now, but bad habits are hard to break when administrators set bad examples.

Source: http://www.digitaljournal.com