Breaking news: My teacher-education courses ended this weekend and my over-busy schedule of the past seven months now has some breathing room. Ergo, I’ll be blogging again. Hopefully there are still some readers out there. So, here goes.

Yesterday, I got this e-mail from Nick R. Martin of Heat City:

“You better start blogging again now that you’ve been named best news blog!”

He was referring to the Arizona Press Club awards, which, were given out May 15, exactly a year to the date that Gannett Co., Inc. stopped publishing the Tucson Citizen newspaper, laid off 65 staffers and converted the paper’s website into a community blogging/citizen journalism site produced by dozens of unpaid bloggers and administered by two former Citizen employees. (Geez, that was a mouthful.)

Mark Evans, my former editor and TucsonCitizen.com’s site administrator, was kind enough to report on the three APC awards I received over on his blog, so I won’t repeat it all here. But I want to add a couple things and expound on a third.

First, while I’ve won second and third place awards in various contests in the past decade, I’ve never placed first in anything, especially not in a category judged by someone from the New York Times!!! So I’m pretty jazzed about that. (I have an overwhelming urge to send some Godiva chocolates to judge Aron Pilhofer, editor of the Times’ Newsroom Interactive Technologies and founder of DocumentCloud. I’m fighting that embarrassing urge by blogging and reminding myself that I’m unemployed.)

Secondly, if you’re wondering how a God blog won best news blog in Arizona, it is because of my “and more” posts on the University of Arizona and the craziness of the faculty poll and Provost Meredith Hay, among other things.

Finally, and here’s the exposition, the irony of my award and one Heat City received for breaking news cannot be ignored. (Well, I mean, you could ignore it, but then you’d miss the fun part.) Young Martin, who has more gumption, tenacity and intuition than many journalists twice his age, was laid off from the East Valley Tribune Jan. 2, 2009 and started his kick-tail news site three days later. (Yes, he is an overachieving go-getter. Mr. Pilhofer, you should call him.)

Martin’s first-place award came for a series of exclusive stories about the arrests of two white supremacists suspected in the 2004 bombing of the city of Scottsdale’s diversity office, news he broke on Heat City hours before the wires or local papers. And here’s the irony: Martin and I were laid off from paying newspaper jobs only to win awards for free reporting we’ve done in the aftermath. Which has to be, we agreed (only half-jokingly), part of a grand conspiracy by mega-bucks media companies shutting down newspapers to keep their profit margins up — laid-off journalists are doing exactly what the industry was hoping they’d do by reporting the news sans paychecks.

Granted, many unemployed reporters aren’t doing what Martin is doing, nor near as well. Lord knows I’m not. But one has to wonder how long Martin and his ilk can live on Top Ramen and the up-down freelance work cycle before packing it in and saying, “Yes, ma’am, I’ll take that $15/hour job answering phones” or “Grad school doesn’t look that bad.” And one has to wonder how long it will take before people realize they are less informed than they were a year or two or five ago, or how long it will be before they agree to pay for the news they are now receiving for free – or if they ever will.

If you want to support Martin, donate on his site via the “Give to Heat City” button on this page. If you want to support me, vote yes on Proposition 100 tomorrow. And thanks for reading. Up tomorrow sometime – an update on all of this, including Gannett’s decision to turn over the Tucson Citizen newspaper archives to the Arizona Daily Star.

I spent my blogging time over here today, talking about the new trend of “recess coaches.” Feel free to jump over there and comment – especially you parents of school-age children. (I think you’ll like the site simply because it is just easier on the eyes.) Other than that, you might want to note that Pres. Obama’s proposed rewrite to No Child Left Behind looks like it might be good news for the vast majority of schools that are not failing – but not necessarily excelling either. And, for those of you counting, UA’s Paul Portney’s announcement that he’s going to step down as dean of the Eller College of Management next year brings the dean shake-up count at UA to at least six since the “restructuring” began nearly two years ago.

The deans of the now no-longer-on-their-own colleges of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Humanities and Fine Arts (all now part of the mega Colleges of Letters, Arts and Sciences) and the dean of UA South all resigned/retired within the last year, and the dean of University College was removed for insubordination in a tiff with Provost Meredith Hay. There have been a number of higher ups who’ve been jostled around the UA chess board, everyone jostling to stay employed (who can blame them?) or save their schools in the Transformation Process.

UA Provost Meredity Hay

It is hard to believe it has been a month since a University of Arizona faculty poll revealed that at least 31 percent, and possibly nearly 50 percent, of the voting faculty wanted Provost Meredith Hay fired. Time flies when you’re buried under textbooks.

During the past four weeks, while I’ve been building lessons for rascally high school freshmen and learning new terms like “constructive assertiveness” and “summative evaluation,” UA’s upper administration has been following up on President Robert N. Shelton’s promise to meet with faculty and improve communication. My e-mail inbox, once a veritable clearinghouse of faculty and department head concern over Hay, grew silent, leading me to wonder if Hay’s apology in a faculty senate meeting had made things hunky-dory in Wildcat Town. Apparently not, according to inquiries made yesterday and today.

“She dug herself a deep hole and she’s now trying to dig her way out of it,” said Lynn Nadel, UA Regents Professor of Psychology and Chair of the Strategic Planning and Budget Advisory Committee. “The general feeling I’ve gotten from speaking with the faculty who have attended the meetings is one of guarded – well, I wouldn’t even say optimism – it’s just guarded. I think she is sincere, but I’m not surprised people are skeptical. But to her credit, she’s been brave and gotten out there. She hasn’t run away.”

Not that some don’t want her to, still. This, from a department head who admits to being more than a little skeptical:

Robert’s gotten the word–from faculty, from administration, from faculty leadership–that the provost is arbitrary, incompetent, and personally impossible. “Never been a dean, never been a department head” is how she gets regularly characterized around here, by way of explanation for why she understands leadership, budgets, curriculum, and the management of a university so poorly.

UA President Robert N. Shelton

Indeed, Shelton held a meeting with various department heads on Sept. 15 – before the faculty poll – and was told (according to minutes obtained through a public records request for Shelton’s emails) that, of the four meetings Shelton had held prior to Sept. 15 with these department heads, “the meetings that were held with Dr. Shelton alone had a different tenor than those in which Dr. Hay was present as well. … in the perception of the Heads Representatives, there was little in the way of give and take dialog…”

Nadel said the big change since the faculty poll is the creation of a SPBAC subcommittee that is charged with making sure Hay’s my-way-or-the-highway method of faculty consultation is changed. The committee, called SPBAC 2012 in reference to the funding “cliff” anticipated in 2012 when the federal stimulus dollars go dry, is meant to increase communication both up and down the chain of command. It is a 15-member committee appointed by Nadel, with representation from staff, the student body and every major UA college, including the College of Humanities and the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, both of whic have felt put upon since receiving 7 percent cuts to their budgets this year. Here’s Nadel:

Everyone still agrees (Shelton and Hay) will have to make decisions, but in the recent cuts it is like they got input too late in the process from the faculty to take advantage of the collective wisdom of the campus. This committee will ensure input early so that it isn’t us just getting the decisions they would recommend but rather we help them come up with options, help decide what are the priorities of the institution. Decision-making is not shared, no one argues with that, but the point of this committee is to institutionalize a mechanism that they have to have proactive discussions with faculty early in the process.

Also, it is to make sure this change in behavior on (Shelton’s and Hay’s) part is real. We worked hard to create some space for them to change because the alternative – trying to get rid of them – is too horrific. I think they know we’re serious. They’d have to be stupid not to understand they came very close to the edge. This was a real public thrashing. I hope they don’t get lulled into a sense of false security about what is happening here. This committee is meant to hold their feel to the fire.

Holding Shelton and Hay’s feet to the fire, however, doesn’t mean looking to the past, but focusing on future cuts, Nadel said. While there’s no doubt that the money that is being poured into translational medicine and environmental sciences is coming out of the hides of other colleges, he said, but it isn’t as bad as some people have made it out to be.

“The $12 million is misleading,” he said. “That is over a number of years, not at once. But yes, they made a $2.6 million cut in permanent funding over and above what they had to do to meet the $19 million in reduced state funding. We know that’s a flash point. They will defend it as necessary for the success of the whole university. It added to the total amount that had to be cut campus wide. In principal, they could have given smaller cuts and that differential investment couldn’t have been made.”

But, Nadel said, while a 7 percent cut equates to cutting 1 out of every 14 faculty members, that cut doesn’t equate to Shelton and Hay saying they want to get rid of a college.

“If you want to get rid of a college, you close it, you don’t just cut its budget,” he said. “Look, we lost six out of 36 faculty in psychology and we’re not getting them back. That’s one-sixth of our faculty, not one-fourteenth, and we teach more students than any unit on campus. And 1/14th is the worst-case scenario, because the cuts can come in other positions. They aren’t trivial cuts, they are forcing some hard decisions, but it isn’t like they are the only hard decisions.”

Arizona Board of Regents President Ernest Calderón

Arizona Board of Regents President Ernest Calderón is keeping a close eye on all these changes. He’s been down to the UA at least four times in the past four weeks for meetings with Shelton, Hay, faculty leaders and just about anyone who calls and says they want to meet, he said this morning.

The Provost apologized and she’s going around meeting with colleges – kind of a road show – and I’m told she’s taking responsibility for being rude and being brusque. I’m hearing some good things, but the question is, will she walk the walk? It’s one thing to say, I should not have talked to you that way, or I should have asked for your input before I made these decisions, but it’s another thing to see if there’s real change. When this comes up the next time, how will she do? That’s what I’m interested in. She’s told me in a very heartfelt way that she is sorry for this. And I said, ‘Great, do better.’

Ultimately this falls into Robert’s lap. If she goofs up again, it will be his responsibility. But this isn’t over. I’m going back down there next week. I’m still trying to sift the fact from the fiction, hear all the sides. People need to know that Earnie is going to keep coming back, and keep coming back, and keep coming back to see if things are working. I don’t care if people disagree with each other – it’s a university, of course they’re going to disagree – but they need to get to where they can work together down there and treat each other with respect.