The proposed amendment to the Faculty Code (see document) was supposedly written by the UW faculty Senate to address protections for faculty free speech.
The problem is not with the intent, but with who wrote this? 
The UW faculty do not have a union nor do they have individual contracts. Most importantly the Faculty Senate does not have any attorneys who represent the faculty.
Instead, legal advice comes from a cadre of administrators, at least 100 lawyers, whose job it is to advise the administration.
I wanted to show the kind of attorney who might do such a job so, given our times, I turned to the images of workers protesting the offer from Boeing to the machinists. A number of the women struck me for their intensity so I used their faces to construct the Photoshop figure in my drawing above, an attorney whose intensity is driven by personal interest rather than objective or ethical principles of law. Her textbooks include a lot of Ayn Rand.
I have met some of the UW attorneys and apologize if they are offended by the mashup but they too tell me that “all we are doing is our job.” The UW attorneys claim not to represent the UW but merely to be working for a salary as UW consultants, “experts” in things like labor law and corporate law that have obvious ties to the Code.
Can you imagine the Boeing Machinists accepting this sort of input into their recent contract dispute?
Someone has briefed them on what NOT to say. By law, only the Attorney General can “represent” the University. So, of course, this army of attorneys on the University payroll have to be “consultants.” But can anyone explain to me, an outsider, why a university that prides itself on its collegial relationship with its faculty needs 100 legal consultants?
I think these people mean well. They are there because the AG’s officer is limited in what it can d because the lawyers there ARE clearly limited by the Bad and because the AGs office is political and more subject to public scrutiny. The sort of crap we just saw in NJ is quite routine amongst campus consigliare .