Quick Takes

Bonnie Ashley has apologized for the tone of her communications with staff members at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where David Ashley, her husband, is president, The Las Vegas Sun reported. “I don’t want this to be misconstrued as an apology for being a strong-minded woman, but rather to show an awareness that it must be exercised in a more temperate fashion,” she wrote in a memo to the Board of Regents in which she volunteered to relinquish her "hostessing role" until the university system determines what it wants from her. Among the e-mails that have recently been made public are ones in which she told some staffers "You all are paid way too much for me to have to put up with the constant problems I am dealing with, and it’s just wasting my time.” Another said: “I should not have to tell you this ... you do NOT argue with the first lady ... that behavior is completely unacceptable.” In December, another presidential spouse -- Carol Petersen -- was the center of a dispute over allegations over how she treated staff members at the University of Tennessee. Not long after, John Petersen quit as president.

A recent Washington State appeals court ruling has forced Western Washington University once again to debate the comments of Perry Mills, a drama professor accused of repeatedly making bullying or abusive remarks to students and faculty members, The Seattle Times reported. The appeals court did not fault the decision of a university panel to suspend Mills for two quarters without pay, but the court found that by not opening the hearing to the public, the university violated the professor's rights. The Times article looks at how Mills is seen by some as a powerful instructor and by others as a bully. At faculty meetings, Mills allegedly called his colleagues "idiots," "maggots" and "the usual." In one incident where his words are in dispute, he criticized a student recovering from chemotherapy who was hesitant to present her work in class. In Mills' version, he said, "If you don't put up your work, it's just as if you died of cancer and aren't here at all."

An arbitrator has rejected the grievance of the faculty union at Lakehead University, in Ontario, that the institution violated professors' rights when it replaced a campus e-mail system with Google's e-mail system. The professors had argued that because Google is based in the United States, e-mail communications could come under the rules of the Patriot Act and faculty members could have their privacy rights violated. As a result, they argued, the shift in e-mail service was a significant enough change that it should not have been made under the collective bargaining agreements in place. The arbitrator did not contest that the shift could pose a danger to faculty members, but ruled in favor of the university because of the lack of a contract provision requiring the university to assure the "absolute privacy" of professors. In response, the Canadian Association of University Teachers plans to advise faculty union chapters on how to assure better privacy protections in their contracts.

The Internal Revenue Service on Monday proposed several possible changes in its requirements that employers document workers' personal use of employer-provided cell phones, rules that have caused headaches and cost money for numerous colleges and universities in federal tax audits. The changes (see page 13 of the linked document) would allow colleges and other employers to set a certain dollar amount or time of personal cell phone use as "minimal" usage that would not require them to pay taxes, or set a "safe harbor" level that would treat a certain percentage of each employee's cell phone use as business usage, and require them to pay tax on the rest (say, 75 percent and 25 percent, respectively). The Association for Information Technology Professionals in Higher Education favors legislation that would drop cell phones from the list of employer-provided services that are taxable to employees, but its officials said the association, known as ACUTA, saw the IRS proposals as a positive development and would review them.

Some professors are questioning why the University of Idaho is spending $112,500 for a "chief inspiration officer" who works on the campus up to two weeks a month, the Associated Press reported. Magaly Rodriguez is a Minnesota-based consultant who university administrators credit with helping to figure out how to deal with some of the difficult strategic and budget problems facing the university. But some professors have criticized the meetings she has organized as simply providing forums for people to express feelings -- a worthy goal, but perhaps not worth six figures annually when the university is making deep cuts.