The air of excitement suddenly turned somber at the Teaching Awards Ceremony on Thursday afternoon, when the most prestigious award winner gave a speech about the decline of UNM’s core mission – education.
President Schmidly presented the “Presidential Teaching Fellow” award to Dr. Howard Waitzkin, a distinguished professor in family and community medicine, sociology, and internal medicine at UNM. Upon accepting the award, Waitzkin unexpectedly gave a speech about the UNM administration’s poor performance supporting faculty and students.
“The values that most of us on the faculty and most of the student body think need to be preserved are those that focus on the advancement of education and the advancement of knowledge,” he said. “The priorities here have been on buildings, athletics and other areas that are not core to the University’s mission.”
Susan McKinsey, University spokeswoman, said Schmidly had no comment on the speech.
In his speech, Waitzkin talked about the resignation of Faculty President Doug Fields on Monday due to the unwillingness of administration to listen to faculty’s ideas on governance and budget planning. He also cited the faculty’s no-confidence vote in President David Schmidly last spring.
“Because of the deterioration of UNM’s educational mission, last year the faculty gave President Schmidly a strong vote of no confidence,” Waitzkin said. “Rather than resigning, the president has continued much of the same practices, which have provoked several scandals and reduced morale for many faculty members and students.”
Waitzkin cited financial changes, cutbacks in key programs and utter lack of support for faculty as the reasons why he decided to speak out at the awards ceremony. He said lack of support for teachers from the administration has led many faculty to teach in a “sad, alienated way,” and others to leave the University.
He said delivering his speech about problems with the president and his administration was nerve-wracking.
“I found this very scary to do,” he told the Daily Lobo. “Criticism isn’t taken lightly by this administration.”
During his speech, Waitzkin asked Schmidly to keep the Presidential Teaching Fellow award plaque.
“President Schmidly, I gratefully accept this award, but I decided to make a symbolic statement by asking you to hold my plaque until you leave administrative work, and return to your role as a highly accomplished teacher of biology,” he said. “Then I’ll accept the plaque in gratitude, if you want to give it to me.”
Schmidly is also professor of biology at UNM, according to the UNM biology Web site.
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Mel Strong, an Earth and Planetary Sciences TA, won the Susan Deese-Roberts Outstanding Teaching Assistants of the Year award Thursday. After the award ceremony, Strong said the issues Waitzkin talked about in his speech between faculty and administration are a growing problem.
“When we hear stories of administration who are making obscene amounts of money – in our opinion – it just seems like there is a huge disconnect between the people who are actually doing the work, and the administration and all the people that (Schmidly) has hired since he has been here,” Strong said.
