UAA faculty votes “no confidence” in President and Chief IT Officer

In a meeting on Friday, UAA Faculty Senate voted “no confidence” in both current University of Alaska President, James Johnsen, as well as UA’s Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO), Karl Kowalski.

The faculty cite multiple reasons behind this decision in a release from the faculty senate, most notably high faculty turnover, low staff morale, and what it calls “critical errors in basic business decision-making and program management.”

This comes on the heels of the university improvement plan of Strategic Pathways (SP) failing to right the ship. In the statement released by the faculty, they say that though SP was advertised as a “collaborative process” with faculty’s input to be considered and encouraged, the major issues and concerns raised by faculty in has had “no apparent influence.”

Faculty alleges that turnover has more than doubled during President Johnsen’s time in office since 2015, going from four percent to nine percent. In the vote of no confidence, they say this pattern of high turnover and low morale are “fundamental threats to the continuation of UAA as a high-quality institution and negatively impact mission fulfillment.”

But the faculty doesn’t stop there. They identify several new practices within SP that they believe to fail the goal of the university, especially when it comes to financial matters.

“The SP process is presented as an attempt to implement efficiencies and ‘best practices’ yet the very process used ignores sound business practices and provides no sound basis for decision making based on fiscal impact to the university.”

This extends to CITO Kowalski, who also received a vote of “no confidence” on Friday for a long list of failures identified by the senate, mostly stating that changes to the IT department have been mismanaged.

Among these factors was the decision to transfer multiple UA systems to Google, which the UA faculty release claims has cost the university thousands.

Whether this vote of “no confidence” will result in the change of the Strategic Pathways program remains to be seen. The current phase of SP, phase 3, will see review at the end of January.

I have reached out to the office of the president for response, however due in part to the Martin Luther King Jr holiday, have not yet received a response.