Universities’ administrative elites seen through Zoom’s unforgiving eye

As a number of the symbolic trappings of higher education have come to a screeching halt — including convocations and graduation ceremonies — the value of many high-level administrators is increasingly unclear. With ivory towers and ivy-covered walls long out of reach for many students in any case, universities are now being confirmed as symbols not only of contagion, but of excess and elitism. In some cases, the move to virtual communication has breathed new life into a question that’s been smoldering for years: How many of the expensive administrators populating our campuses are actually necessary? Though they may be taking great pains to continue to publicly perform their roles, so-called virtual dialogues — “town halls,” “forums,” and the like — place them under the microscope of traumatized constituents who also happen to be visually savvy consumers. Not surprisingly, faculty, staff, and students are demanding much more from these astonishingly well-paid leaders than the usual feel-good claptrap.

In the past, presidents, provosts and deans (together with their “vice,” “assistant,” and “associate” versions) have often served as a reassuring presence on campus, especially in difficult times, even if we didn’t always know how they could possibly be earning their exorbitant keep. When we see them up close through webcams, though, in these volatile times, struggling to stay on script in a format that invites and demands authenticity and responsiveness, some are revealed to be poorly performing politicians rather than competent leaders. These glimpses of our elite administrators — some of whom, like Nixon in 1960, seem to be shifting and fidgeting before the camera’s gaze — help peel away remaining illusions about the glory of public higher education. Campus talking points are revealed not just to be idealistic, but, in some respects, a downright lie, especially with respect to fundamental values such as “we’re all in this together.” Assured that the royal “we” will permanently be transformed by the COVID catastrophe, the actual “we” bearing most of the suffering reflects racial and gender inequity, and a basic lack of parity across employee groups.

Many have been aware of the astonishing gap between rhetoric and action on the part of university officials for years. There is, for example, the shameful open secret of many universities’ failure to attract and retain faculty and staff of color (in direct contrast to their high flown, self-congratulatory diversity rhetoric). There are the entrenched patterns of salary inequities between women and men, as well as between supposedly “masculine” and “feminine” academic disciplines. There are the whole segments of poorly paid gendered staff labor according to which women may be treated as disposable. There are the appalling labor conditions imposed upon legions of adjunct instructors on whom most universities have long been dependent. At the same time, there has been the creation of an elite administrative class of variously titled (e.g., vice, associate, assistant) deans, provosts, presidents and the like with salaries that have come to rival those of greedy corporate fat cats. The hype about universities as hotbeds of liberalism or radicalism notwithstanding, most campuses have been quite content to mirror the stunning inequities of the corporate world.

The pandemic crisis is not itself responsible for shattering the support beams of our public universities. It is, rather, laying bare some fundamental rottenness, and some of this is occurring before the watchful eye of our teeny tiny computer cameras. To take just one example, high level administrators at my university recently participated in an eight-person panel discussion on diversity that appears to have included only one non-white participant. Even though the national call for Black voices, and the outcry against white obliviousness, has perhaps never been louder, it appears not to have occurred to these white administrators to have raised their privileged voices to help proactively create a genuinely multicultural, inclusive event. Though these administrators were almost certainly well-meaning, a resulting impression is that they care more about performing their own racial virtuousness than about facilitating an authentically self-reflective moment for themselves and for higher education. Would such a colossal miscalculation of racial optics have occurred if the event had been of the usual face-to-face variety? Would it have been as visible to so many people?

As I watch some of these “televised” appearances of university spokespersons desperate to manage the growing discontent of faculty and staff, I am reminded of a caricature of the most decadent years of the French monarchy. Here, nobles attempt to make good will gestures towards the starving masses but end up inadvertently flaunting their privilege and aloofness instead. They aim to appease the masses in the usual ways, but woefully underestimate the discontent, and also fail to appreciate how closely they are being watched. Of course, the populist uprisings that marked the end of this system were, literally, revolutionary, with global reverberations. There is, it seems, only so much people will tolerate once they’ve become hungry enough, and glaring inequalities and obliviousness have been revealed to their frustrated eyes. How might things have played out if French peasants had been able to scrutinize kings and courtiers up close through their own personal webcams, capable of seeing each nuanced facial gesture and of hearing every word of rationalization and excuse?

Despite the new democratizing power and pressure of webcams, the wealthiest and most privileged universities will, of course, continue to be able to hold out, resisting the inexorable forces that are ravaging and rewriting the rest of higher ed. We might recall how some social elites in England continued to enjoy the anachronistic comforts of the Victorian era well into the 20th century. They did not regard them as luxuries, of course, but as utterly necessary to the natural order of things. This is very much to the point as we consider the leveling forces that will continue to sweep through higher ed as the national political tide turns (please!), as demands for racial justice remain urgent, and as more of “university life” is pushed online, much of it permanently. The elite administrative cadres that have come to operate at some universities like aristocrats, strolling across campus in a perfumed cloud of noblesse oblige, are suddenly revealed as obsolete. Exposed before a merciless camera in virtual “forums” that reveal them dancing from one trusty cliche to another, whatever mystique they once projected is being unceremoniously stripped away.

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Administrative Crackdowns on “Appropriate” Faculty Expression during the Pandemic

(An essay by the “virtual pedagogue” published on the AAUP’s Academe Blog this past Friday)

I was sitting in my high school French class the first time I got called to the principal’s office. I don’t recall what the “controversial” newspaper story was about, but we student journalists explored issues such as drunk driving, race relations, and graduation requirements. I don’t even remember if I had actually written the offending article, but I was the editor, so off I went to absorb the principal’s stern warning to stick with more “appropriate” subjects. Some months later I was called to the district superintendent’s office across town and offered the same “friendly advice.” Fortunately, my high school newspaper advisor had taught us a lesson I’d already learned from watching my father all my young life: sometimes speaking out was not just my right but my duty. The lesson applied, too, when, a few years later, the Kansas City ACLU asked me to testify on behalf of a new cadre of student journalists at my alma mater facing ever more assertive administrative crackdowns.

Continue reading at the AAUP’s Academe Blog.

The betrayal of shared governance in the university’s darkest hour

Imagine starting out at the trailhead of a thousand-mile backpacking journey and making a pact with a companion to share burdens, concerns, and to treat one another as respected partners. You set out knowing that if one of you runs short on water, the other will share; if one sprains an ankle, the other will slow their pace too. If the snows come early you will huddle together despite the tedious misery of frozen toes and unwashed bodies. You set out confident that, no matter how bad it gets, decisions will be made collaboratively. In fact, the power and promise of this initial pact is rooted precisely in the presumption that, at some point, things may get very bad indeed. Ethically mature individuals know that such commitments are fully realized, not in times of ease, but when tested by frayed nerves, supply shortages, and danger.

This analogy helps explain the heartbreak many of us feel as some universities have stopped collaborating with faculty, staff, and students in the midst of the pandemic. We have not only been left scrambling to deal with budget secrecy, top-down program “restructuring,” and devastating layoffs, but also to absorb the stunning disappointment of discovering that what we thought were respectful partnerships with university administrators were an illusion. At some universities, shared governance now stands revealed as a managerial ploy to increase compliance and good will, made at a time of relative prosperity, when such promises cost little.

And so we watch open-mouthed as decades-long policies and practices are swept aside under cover of “emergency.” We wait in nail-biting silence as deans rush to compile lists of “expendable” employees and “unnecessary” academic programs, according to criteria that they need not share, debate, or even plausibly explain to the campus community. Even life and death decisions, such as whether or not to invite students and employees back to campus, seem to emerge as if from the royal chamber. All those decades of managerial sweet talk about the value of student, staff, and faculty input are erased as a paternalistic frenzy sweeps through the ivory tower.

The worst of it may well be not just that well-paid administrators have been prepared to throw others overboard in a panicked attempt to deal with the crisis, but that they are enabled by well-placed apologists, including some faculty members, who urge the rest of us to stop complaining. Shared governance, they explain, echoing administration’s self-serving definition, doesn’t mean what we think. A university is a businesses, after all, and its presidents, provost, deans, and chairs are the CEOs and managers charged with making the trains run on time. We were out of place to have ever expected collaborative decision-making to be a real thing. When it comes right down to it, some frightened coworkers now tell us, universities are like fast food joints: If the manager orders you to scrub out the deep fryer, you should do it without question, suggestion, or complaint. And be grateful you’ve still got a job.

But the majority of us are not ready to concede that shared governance can so easily be tossed aside. We watch as administrators close rank, as university public relations and marketing machines go into overtime, as critical financial information is withheld. We stand shoulder-to-shoulder with students, staff, and faculty colleagues and refuse to accept this grim corporatism as the new normal. For one thing, at institutions like mine, faculty have contractually guaranteed rights to participate in many aspects of decision-making. So long as we are willing to assert ourselves, rather than accept belated scraps of consideration, we will turn the tide. What a colossal institutional failure, though, for loyal employees to be forced into legalistic squabbles to have these long relationships accorded a modicum of basic respect. After all, formal policies and legal contracts are meant to underwrite and guarantee healthy professional engagement, not to stand in for basic personal and professional ethics.

Even though we can — and must— fight contractual battles, then, much damage will have been done. To many employees, those decades of assurances about the value of their expertise and feedback now seem like a smarmy come-on. With the shallowness of ethical commitments to shared governance now out in the open, it is not only the future of faculty and staff that is at risk, then, but our past as well. Our very sense of what our careers have meant — these professions and universities we have poured our lives into — threatens to collapse in the midst of institutional dissemblance and betrayal.

Though we are disappointed, hopefully we have learned a lesson. As cynical as it sounds, we must accept that our most reliable companions on this winding, treacherous trail, are not the well-heeled, glib-tongued leaders who have promised to go the distance by our side. Our true allies are, instead, whatever policies and procedures we have at our disposal and the potential power of collective action to enforce them. If we have learned nothing else, let us have learned this: To get it in writing and hold feet to the fire as soon as pretty promises and ceremony — including neutered “task forces,” “action teams,” or other committees — replace actual shared decision-making.

Some will say that this cynical conclusion is unfair to administrators who, after all, are doing the best they can. But having the determination to enforce the legal and ethical aspects of shared governance is good for the entire campus, including, in an important sense, for administrators. Shared governance helps preserve a balance of power that discourages any of us from being as selfish, greedy, or shortsighted as we might otherwise be. We do others no favors by permitting them treat us dismissively even if times are tough and they are desperate, frightened, and well-meaning. It is, in fact, in the very midst of this conflagration of uncertainty and fear that collaborative partnerships matter most. There is, then, nothing more hopeful, respectful or constructive — or more in keeping with deepest values that define “university” — than for faculty, staff, and students to demand the immediate restoration of authentic shared governance.

Students Return to Campus mid-Pandemic: A Horror Movie Unfolds

Is there anything more perverse than being attracted to bad horror movies? My friends and I loved classics like “Friday the 13th” and “Chopping Mall” because they were terrible. We’d sit near the back eating junior mints, groaning each time the hapless protagonist did the opposite of what any halfway intelligent, sort of awake, person would do. There’s a crazed axe murderer in the woods? Let’s go foraging for mushrooms! Shark-infested waters? Why not go for a romantic skinny dip with your hunky boyfriend? It’s only entertaining, of course, because we know it’s a dystopian dreamscape that will end. The lights come up, we brush the popcorn dust off our laps, and go merrily on our way. It’s a controlled and contained form of horror and terror, precisely the opposite of the mayhem we are watching unfold on campuses right now in the midst of the pandemic.

There can be little doubt that many universities are in a terrible spot. In a nation that has long turned its back on higher education as a public good, administrators have been scrambling to keep their ships afloat long enough to weather this who-knows-how-long disaster. The promise of a face-to-face Fall semester emerged from this cauldron of desperation and not, one presumes, from indifference or greed. And months ago, before the current surge in infections and deaths began, it was still possible to suspend disbelief about the disaster that an on campus Fall would represent. Sure, the epidemiological experts predicted the increase in morbidity and death, given the nature of the virus and the national government’s apparent determination to make the situation ever worse, but a few months ago one could, perhaps, still plausibly imagine inviting students to return to a relatively safe campus.

At some point, such pie-in-the sky hopes transformed into something like delusion. And now we watch as our college-town streets fill with students’ cars — usually an exhilarating time for us university folks — and are filled with sick dread. The image of fresh-faced youngsters streaming in from around the region are indelibly juxtaposed with the news from Alabama, UNC, and Michigan State. We read our university presidents’ pre-blaming stern messages about student responsibility as we clean up the plastic beer cups from our front yards and recall our own carpe diem college attitudes. We professors and staff have been turned away from our own campus offices — not safe! — even as students haul dorm fridges and box fans into the residence halls next to our buildings. It’s not just that it’s unlikely that this experiment can be pulled off safely, but that, given the obvious realities of communal life, how could anyone even believe it would be possible?

In its innocent and productive mode, the sheer optimism of wishful thinking can be energizing. That plucky little train made it up the hill because it thought it could despite evidence to the contrary and defeatist naysayers. It is precisely the whiff of unreason in wishful thinking that makes it so irresistible in dark times, whether one is facing a terminal disease or expecting a good grade on an exam for which one is utterly unprepared. That it is, in fact, true that we can’t, strictly speaking, KNOW what the future will bring can also sometimes provide a level of deniability that mitigates our moral responsibility when our decisions bring others to harm. In short, the line between productive hope and willful ignorance can sometimes be thin.

What’s happening on many university campuses right now, though, pushes wishful thinking to an exaggerated level that would be comical if it were not so tragic. And we campus citizens aren’t merely watching the horror movie, we are also living it, at once the hapless teenagers bumbling their way through the dark woods and the omniscient viewers. We see, not an unknown future, but a script that has already played itself out at institutions around the world.

Some are even placing bets: In how many days will students be sent back home again? How long before campus leaders and marketers stop pretending that they truly believe what they’re saying? And how long before the rest of us withdraw our conspiratorial silence as university logo face masks are distributed along with dad-like lectures about student responsibility? It’s a situation made even worse by the fact that it occurs at the same time we are urged by unscrupulous national leaders to deny the evidence of our own eyes. Ignore trusted experts and common sense, they tell us, and place your faith in our optimism and authority instead.

Covid 19 and the university: Professors are not Dorothy and the administration is not our Oz

Though the university is frequently characterized as a liberal hotbed, professors have always had to fight, sometimes even within our own ranks, for our right to speak up. This is especially so during times of national or global crisis when, predictably, efforts to silence supposed disgrunts may reach a fever pitch. Even at universities, and even within the professoriate, our habitual pleas for academic freedom and the need to be robust critical thinkers may fade. What’s more, it’s not unusual for those asking difficult questions to be scolded, smoothing the way for administrative overreach and excess.

Critics should expect to encounter efforts to silence them — both subtle and gross — culminating in accusations of disloyalty, to the institution, to the nation, even to humanity itself. These may begin as a gentle form of ostracism where the critic is simply ignored, even by those who suspect, or know, that the warning is more than just someone crying wolf. This passive strategy of shunning may escalate into more overt shaming, with squeaky wheels being called out for betrayal of the common good. Perhaps because I am a gender studies professor, I can never hear such admonishments outside the framework of the silencing politics of sexual violence. Keep it to yourself, the victim may be urged, or the police will come and take daddy away.

Even basic questions of leadership competence and accountability may be automatically turned back on the critic, dismissed as potentially treasonous. When commanded to jump by a president, provost, or dean — some of whom until very recently were mere mortals, just professors like ourselves — otherwise staunch faculty advocates may now reflexive reply, “How high?” Obviously, this creates the perfect conditions for the most egregious forms of administrative overreach, especially when rumors are unleashed that employees will be lucky to have jobs come Fall. In the blink of an eye, proudly empowered members of the professoriate may be reduced to begging for scraps, perhaps volunteering to give back their salaries with no idea of what the financial exigencies actually are.

Too often, as a distraction during crisis times, difficult nuts and bolts conversations are bypassed, and, instead, we are urged by leaders “take deep breaths,” and “be grateful for what we’ve got.” In the service of compassion, privileged, tenure-line faculty who have relative job security, especially, may be urged to make “sacrifices.” Such humanistic values are, of course, well and good, but quickly turn sour when used to paint those who persist in demanding institutional accountability, or even rudimentary shared governance, as crass or unspiritual.

Not incidentally, vague calls for sacrifice and compassion from the professoriate distract from the obvious and egregious economic disparities that we have long known exist between elite administrators and almost everyone else. Against this backdrop, the critically outspoken professor may still be painted as too privileged, naive, or narcissistic to appreciate the gravity of the situation. It is as if the horror of the fact that people are dying around the world — and that we all have a moral imperative to respond — somehow erases, rather than intensifies, our ongoing duty to think for ourselves and insist that our institution to live up to its basic commitments, including to campus employees far more vulnerable than most professors.

Professors’ special responsibility to be critical thinkers and outspoken members of our campus communities — including on behalf of our staff employee colleagues — surely doesn’t end because we are in the midst of crisis, regardless of what paternalistic higher ups or even terrorized colleagues may imply. If anything, the need for brave, questioning professorial voices is more urgent than ever and we must resist the temptation to glorify the authority or magical abilities of administrative colleagues as if we had suddenly been transformed into Dorothy and Toto, wandering haplessly in an unknown world.

As usual, there is a practical benefit to our continuing to behave as the flexible intellectuals, incisive social critics, and responsible, skeptical adults that we are. If we permit our fear to overtake us, and start behaving like dazed, frightened children, then we are inviting our presidents and provosts to function as decisive authoritarians, no matter how much (as is evidently the case) they may be flailing. Only with a collegial relationship based on mutual respect and fierce accountability can we both meet this crisis and also make it more likely that, together — faculty, students, staff, and administration — we will thrive in the aftermath.

Lazy professors, “junior” faculty, and the sexism of calls for shared sacrifice

As we all know, some universities are beating the bushes in search of cash. For example, my university offered eligible faculty one month to sign on to a pretty darn decent retirement incentive. Retirement-eligible colleagues could elect to move on, encouraged to believe they were freeing up resources to help forestall future staff and faculty layoffs. Unfortunately, if predictably, the retirement initiative got tainted early on by a swirl of pre-existing ageist and anti-professor stereotypes: “Senior” professors are dead weight, impeding the futures of vibrant “junior” faculty. Oldsters and middle-agers have not just been presented with an attractive exit strategy, then, but some are effectively feeling nudged and cajoled into it both by threats of inequitably increased teaching loads and unsubtle shaming tactics: Professors are to blame for our institutions’ money woes and we are selfish if we refuse to fling ourselves overboard to save others. Though such calls for sacrifice may not feel at all coercive to the most empowered faculty members, the very notion of institutional sacrifice is shaped by sex and race, making it more likely that women faculty, especially women of color, will feel called to bear the brunt of the pain.

The ageist aspects of this may be readily visible, i.e., the notion that the careers and livelihoods of older people should somehow matter less, simply because, well, they are older. It’s a view mirrored in society at large every time it’s suggested that the death of an adult, especially an elder, matters less than that of young person. At universities, ageist and anti-professor stereotypes combine with the familiar trope that tenured professors are complacent layabouts. Because of this stereotype, it is easier to get people to believe that it is aging professors, and not millionaire administrators or elite football programs, that are draining the institutional coffers. The notion that “older” faculty can and should solve university budget crises by sacrificing themselves could only emerge at the intersection of offensive stereotypes about both older people and professors. And this idea gathers force in a university environment that already leverages the disproportionately well developed sense of social responsibility felt by women, perhaps most especially, women of color.

Part of what makes the current “sacrifice the tenured professor” rhetoric so problematic is that it exploits structural inequities marked by sexist and racist inflected expectations of self-sacrifice. For example, partly because of many universities’ chronic failure to retain and properly advance faculty of color (women and men) or white women, a disproportionate number of untenured faculty are likely to be people of color, both women and men, and white women. A likely racist and sexist impact of layoffs that target the “last hired,” then, is that women and men faculty of color, and white women will more likely feel the pain of these budget cuts. Such threats may include opportunistically increased teaching loads — making it harder to ever earn the security of tenure — as well as job loss itself. Provosts, deans, and chairs know, of course, that it is a particularly precious group they have chosen to focus on when they implicitly invoke the vulnerability of these untenured colleagues. It is a strategy that mirrors what’s been happening so frequently in Washington with a president who routinely targets vulnerable groups in order to extort funding from bleeding heart liberals in order to then “save” these same vulnerable people.

Based on ample past experience, administrators could predict that those who feel compelled to leap to the rescue will be more likely to emerge from a particular subset of senior faculty. These are the usual suspects, the reliable contingent of women, especially women of color, who have been counted upon year after year to to perform the institution’s “caring labor,” e.g., unpaid advising, mentoring, and endless diversity work meant to improve the optics of universities’ handling of racial and gender “issues.” The provost, dean, or chair announces with a heavy heart that untenured colleagues may be made to suffer unless “senior” faculty are willing to accept unjustifiably large teaching loads. But who can reasonably be most expected to step up to the plate? It is surely not the most privileged, best paid white male professors, those who likely feel the most entitled to their positions, salaries and ample time for research. Isn’t it more likely to be those who are already underpaid and overextended, those who’ve long been expected to prioritize others’ needs before their own? In this crisis, as before, women’s socialization towards caring, service, and sacrifice will be used against them. Further, faculty members who may already have the most reason to doubt their value and belonging in the ivory tower will likely answer calls for sacrifice that more entitled colleagues may be able to tune out entirely.

Underlying all of this is a disingenousness that deserves to be highlighted. My university, for example, continues to employ the usual cadre of exorbitantly priced administrators (and unprofitable, mindblowingly expensive Division I athletics). And it is these same administrators who now summarily lay off poorly paid staff employees and exhort “lazy faculty” to “tighten your belts” and “do more with less.” Despite their positions of extraordinary power, privilege, and wealth, such administrators depict faculty as responsible for forestalling the supposedly otherwise inevitable tragedy facing “junior” colleagues. The temerity of variously named presidents, provosts, and deans, some of them rich as Croesus, implying that tenured faculty are the problem — many of us earning quite humble salaries — and not they themselves, is stunning when you think about it.

In this essay, I’ve used the term “junior faculty” reluctantly. Untenured colleagues are not, after all, children, and continuing to speak about them this way, as if they had no adult agency or voices of their own, further disempowers them. Also, they are a heterogeneous group just as tenured professors are, some with far more privilege than others. In the end, though, any university’s decision to expect tenured faculty to save “junior” faculty is a classic divide-and-conquer management trick meant to bring the professoriate to its knees. So long as universities continue to prioritize elite administrators (and Division I athletics), why should anyone believe that the sacrifices of tenured faculty would actually be redirected to faculty or staff central to the academic mission? At my university, faculty have been absent from substantive budget deliberations for so long it would be unforgivably naive to trust administrators to make good on such supposedly humanitarian bargains. In any case, the practice of taking aim at a group of vulnerable people, whomever they are, in order to force concessions from caring others is very nasty politics. It is a tactic appropriate to bullies and demogogues, but, one imagines, far beneath the dignity of enlightened university leaders.

The dirty work of academia: Why do so many university administrators refuse to teach?

At some point, lots of deans, provosts and presidents stopped identifying primarily as faculty colleagues focused on supporting academics and embraced the role of elite business manager. This shift is, of course, reflected in the astonishing CEO-like salaries commanded by many of these folks as well as the increasing distance they place between themselves and the hands-in-the-soil work of being a professor: research and teaching. Many university administrators have come to function like distant factory bosses who emerge from air conditioned offices from time to time to stroll between the machines, awkwardly quipping with workers, and then summarily issuing orders to speed up the production line. That these specialized academic managers and foremen might dirty their own hands by descending into classrooms, labs or library archives is such an absurdity that my recent proposal to administrators at my institution that they might help teach in this tempestuous coming school year fell on deaf ears. It was, I guess, as if I’d suggested that the CEO of Disney consider cleaning up the vomit on Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.

My proposal was simple enough, meant both to help shore up instruction in the wake of layoffs and to address the growing crisis in faculty morale, including a sense that admin is increasingly out of touch. If we are to take seriously both the spirit of shared sacrifice and the imperative to provide students with the best possible classroom experience, I wrote, shouldn’t we do more than simply push additional labor onto already beleaguered faculty (as seems to be the plan right now). With so much campus activity suspended by the pandemic, many, perhaps most, of the usual campus events and responsibilities that occupy administrators’ time are unlikely to take place in the coming year. Why not refocus their energy back into the classroom? Since the university may, in fact, be able to promise students nothing more than an academic experience this coming year — with athletics, cultural events, and other activities indefinitely sidelined — shouldn’t each of us be prioritizing academic teaching and research?

Sadly, none of the administrators to whom I directly addressed my proposal even acknowledged receiving it, though scores of faculty members with whom I also shared it responded with great enthusiasm. Several faculty colleagues even called it a “a great idea” underscoring how radical the notion of being a teacher-administrator has become. Apparently, many administrators have so fully embraced the notion that their role is to stand on the sidelines, scrutinizing and judging faculty research and teaching without, you know, actually doing it themselves, that my proposal seems utterly preposterous. With some important exceptions, it seems, public university higher administration has evolved into its own separate professional class, which, like its corporate role model, comes with its own MBA-inspired uniforms, silly jargon, and the imperative to maintain distance from working grunts. That is, of course, unless rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi is part of a scripted performance of noblesse oblige. The sheer fact that many administrators wax so poetically about student-centeredness and vibrant intellectual engagement, while having forever turned their backs on their own classrooms and research labs, speaks volumes. At some point along the way, the academic labor of teaching and research seems to have become menial dirty work — no wonder so much teaching has been dumped onto poorly paid part-time instructors — with the increasingly corporatized script of today’s elite administrators specifying that they keep their hands squeaky clean.

Just in case anyone assumes that my proposal was such a disingenuous howler that it did not even deserve a reading, I’ve included it below. And in my narrative I also anticipated some likely objections to it, for example, the trusty truism that administrators are SO VERY, VERY BUSY, you know, unlike the rest of us. I suggested that foisting more teaching onto faculty, while the teaching skill and energy of administrators languishes, would subvert instructors’ attempts to prepare for the as yet unknowns and ongoing upheavals of Fall and Spring teaching. Further, because many students are disoriented by the pandemic, they will need even closer faculty attention. Finally, as noted above, many of administrators’ usual responsibilities will dissolve if, as is almost certainly the case, most campus activities are prohibited or restricted. If our university’s true goal is to enhance instructional quality and student experience, I concluded, then my proposal should be taken seriously. However, if the true aim of administrators were, even in part, to punish faculty perceived to be “lazy” by speeding up the teaching credit production line, then my proposal should be summarily rejected.

As I said, though the administrators to whom it was addressed did not reply, my proposal resonated with lots of faculty. This is not surprising, especially when I consider how the idea of getting administrators back into the classroom occurred to me in the first place: As I worried about how my own department might deal with quite specific threats of a workload speed up in the fall, it dawned on me that one of the very few people on campus who might be able to retool to teach a popular, but specialized, course that I developed and teach is the professor-dean of my college. Given her strong background in, and publicly expressed commitment to gender equity, diversity, and science, combined with her reputation as an effective teacher, it occurred to me she might even be eager to return to the classroom this Fall in the spirit of pulling together to prioritize academics. I concluded by offering that “I would be happy to help her prepare to teach ‘Race, Gender, and Science,’ and also hear her suggestions for improving the course.”

The response? Crickets. Not only are some administrators too busy-and-important to directly participate in their universities’ purportedly core academic missions, some are, apparently, too busy to even entertain the possibility that they might do so. This would probably be far less troubling to me, and many other faculty, if we hadn’t already been nursing suspicions and misgivings about this whole elite administrator schtick. I mean, if our universities are transformed into ghost towns as this pandemic lingers, students and professors having been driven into exile by “sensible budget cuts,” don’t you half expect this cadre of VIPs to still be wandering around in suits and ties hawking their strategic plans? Let’s tell the truth: Politicized and corporatized bosses, managers, and football coaches elbowed academics off stage years ago. The fact that, in 2020, so many administrators refuse to do the very same work that they harangue faculty to do more and more of, the very work, mind you, that they too trained to do, should surprise no one. After all, how many fast-food CEOs will ever touch, let alone consume, the greasy burgers their workers are paid a pittance to churn out?

 
The proposal in a nutshell: WMU’s Students First Teacher-Administrator Initiative

Slogan: “At Western Michigan University, faculty, staff and administrators join forces to guarantee student access to the academic expertise and attention they deserve!”

Summary: For both the fall and spring terms of AY 20-21, all presidents, provosts, deans, and chairs (including vice presidents, vice provosts, and associate or assistant deans) will prepare and teach no less than one course for the department(s) that can best make use of their particular instructional expertise. Further, no regular faculty member shall be subject to having their regular teaching loads raised until the untapped teaching labor of administrators has been distributed. Administrators who, for objectively compelling reasons, are unable to contribute their teaching labor, will take temporary pay cuts or voluntary furloughs to free up funds to compensate term or part-time instructors who can responsibly provide course coverage in their place.

Pandemic 2020: Let the university hunger games begin!

Does anyone wax longer or louder about respect, transparency, diversity, and equality than university presidents, provosts, and deans? For decades, at commencements, convocations, retirement ceremonies, and ribbon cuttings, we have been serenaded by one misty-eyed official after another reminding us of the unutterably precious value of our unique voices. These are not just pretty words, we have long been assured, but values rooted deeply in the shared governance structures that underlie our universities in the form of faculty senates, collective bargaining units, and enough faculty committees to make our heads spin. Our universities, with their enlightened and compassionate leaders, their egalitarian and rational decision-making processes, are oases in the midst of the nation’s MAGA barbarity, right? Sure, we have our ethical challenges, but no one can question the basic decency of our institutions, can they? No wonder it has been a shock for many of us that the moment times got really tough, some of our universities set out to stage their very own hunger games.

The premise is simple enough: A powerful, centralized oligarchy forces subjects to “volunteer” for an elaborate killing game intended both to solidify dependence and obedience, and to entertain the elites. Not only are subjects compelled to send their children into these orchestrated killing fields year after year, but they are expected to do so willingly, to dress up, smile, and join in the festivities surrounding the games. They are required not only to surrender their lives, then, but their own consciences and voices of protest as well. As deadly as the games are, their larger purpose has more to do with killing peoples’ spirits than their bodies. Though I have read lots of dystopian novels, I was especially moved by this aspect of The Hunger Games when I finally got around to reading it a few months ago. I could not shake the image of otherwise proud people coerced by artificially induced scarcity into killing one another while pampered elites looked on, sipping champagne and placing bets on who would be left standing at the end.

I was primed by my reading of The Hunger Games, then, to pay special attention when my institution, Western Michigan University, began listing and picking off its “non-essential” employees just a few weeks into the pandemic crisis, the first of many devastating personnel decisions that have emerged since. Hundreds of “expendable” employees have now been laid off and hundreds more have been told to expect our marching orders in the coming weeks, according to lists that have already been compiled and are being scrutinized by other inner-circle administrators behind tightly closed doors. Carefully choreographed, stylized messaging from presidents, provosts, and deans insists that this is all necessary for the good of the whole, and that we must do our duty and somberly accept these edicts. After all, these decisions have not been easy. In fact, they have kept the president up at night and been heartbreaking for the deans. Can’t we see the terrible position they are in, under extraordinary pressure from even higher ups, huddled in their private chambers, compiling human elimination lists to be shared with us when they’ve decided it’s the right time for us to know?

As with the hunger games of fiction, the damage here isn’t only to people’s lives and livelihoods, but to their hearts and minds. We, the remaining subjects of this newly authoritarian realm, are expected not just to live with whatever decisions spew forth from our “leaders,” but to get on board. In the spirit of shared sacrifice, we are expected to return as cheerleaders for our university in the Fall once the bodies of our faculty and staff colleagues have been cleared away. After all, didn’t the president and deans themselves accept voluntary pay cuts of five or ten percent? Well, no, those symbolically small cuts haven’t actually gone into effect yet but they will in a few months. You know, probably. Meanwhile, like the traumatized subjects of the eleven districts outside the pampered capitol city, we remaining university faculty and staff whisper among ourselves, knowing we should speak up, but terrified that it might be our own head next on the chopping block.

For example, though I belong to one of the most “protected” employee groups on campus, I assume that the letters of concern I sent recently to administrators have placed my career in even greater danger. After all, their decisions to not even acknowledge my messages were surely not intended to reassure me that my voice is still needed at this university, if, in fact, it ever was. And though I know, as we all do, that these administrators are, themselves, being pressed by even higher level “bosses,” this does not erase their basic ethical responsibility to me and the other faculty and staff entrusted to their stewardship. Partly because so many professors routinely remind our students that “just following orders” is a poor excuse, we have a hard time buying this when it comes from our intelligent, remarkably well-compensated, administrators.

It isn’t just those who have drunk the Kool-Aid who are now apologists for these clearcutting sprees by administrators desperate to meet budget targets based on rationales from higher up so obscure that even they themselves may barely understand them. As is nearly always the case with systematic injustice, elite administrators must leverage longstanding inequities between employees to meet their goals. At universities, there is often a sort of petty bourgeoisie of middle managers who help rationalize elite excess and soften resistance from below. Such complicity and accommodationism is critical because it helps obscure the fact that there is no actual necessity to the cruelty unfolding on our campuses. Our very real budget crises don’t require us to suddenly devolve into a Game of Thrones bloodbath. For example, my colleague, Charlie Kurth, describes a progressive furlough approach that could help us weather this situation and emerge even stronger in our fundamental social justice values than before. But try sharing these more progressive, compassionate, egalitarian strategies with your university administrators. Their responses, or lack of them, may be the quickest way possible to learn what, deep down, this horrific spectacle we’re being required to enact is really all about.

Entitled and out of touch: The danger of anti-professor stereotypes in the pandemic

The stereotype of university professors as entitled babies who are oblivious to the “real world” takes on new urgency as the pandemic rages. Encouraged for decades by well funded conservative extremists, it’s become pretty standard for pundits and politicians to dismiss professors as spoiled, elitist, and selfish. Not surprisingly, it’s a stereotype that many university functionaries, including administrators, have accepted as well. Worse still, some professors have themselves come to internalize it, thereby discouraged from asking questions about anything “administrative,” including apparently hasty top-down decisions that may bypass our contracts or cripple our institutions’ academic viability.

For decades, then, professors have been getting the message that they are barely tolerated by many in the state capitol, and by variously titled chairs, deans, provosts, and presidents who, increasingly, assert their own managerial identities by differentiating themselves from us. Faculty members who are occasionally privy to administrative conversations often express surprise and distaste at the degree to which supposed faculty obliviousness and incompetence feature. It starts to seem as if many administrative-types don’t merely believe anti-faculty stereotypes but also bond with one another over them. There is perhaps no more effective way for rookie administrators to perform their new bureaucratic identity than to join in the familiar banter about impractical, coddled, and lazy faculty.

In the midst of higher education’s pandemic response, then, is it any wonder so many university administrations plow ahead with critical decisions, making little effort to substantively collaborate with faculty? After all, haven’t professors exempted themselves from the right to participate by virtue of being self-exiled prima donnas who care far more about their arcane research than balance sheets or the public good? Is it any wonder that even those of us who are the object of these stereotypes may still feel shamed and silenced by them? “Maybe it’s true,” we may think. “Perhaps a professor of English (or geography or music or mathematics) has no business speaking up given the life and death urgency of the moment.”

Except, of course, that the dismissal of professors’ voices is mostly based on an impressive pile of half-truth and hooey. Yes, some small percentage of U.S. professors come from elite backgrounds, land plum positions, and go on to live and work in “splendid isolation from the world.” In most cases, though, professors are actual flesh-and-blood people. Often, we have taken on staggering student loan debt and struggled for years, working as waitresses, census takers and retail clerks in the increasingly desperate hope of snagging tenure-track positions at humble regional universities in Pennsylvania or Ohio or Kentucky.

When we join these institutions, we are required to fully immerse ourselves in increasingly bureaucratic university service, provide individual attention to understandably beleaguered students, and research and publish in our areas of academic expertise, many of which are not arcane in the least. We spend our workdays teaching, lobbying for critical research equipment, making cold calls to prospective students, working through piles of accreditation forms, and writing tons of student recommendation letters. This, mind you, is if we are one of the lucky ones. For the majority of instructors, who are adjuncts or otherwise undervalued academic laborers, work demands and anxieties are usually far greater.

Only vanishingly few of us, then, ever catch a glimpse of anything resembling an ivory tower into which we might retreat with quill and parchment while kingdoms rise and fall around us. We are, rather, members of the communities in which we live, often small towns where we buy our groceries, fall in love, get mammograms, and send our children to school. We anguish along with our neighbors about gun violence, climate change, access to medical care, and the opportunistic fascism and viral pathogens sweeping through our nation.

Yes, the vast majority of instructors in higher education are privileged by race and class, a reflection of the unacceptable stratification that deforms all of U.S. culture and society, and not just higher education. Only when compared to the most shamelessly exploited members of society — especially the essential service workers now required to put their lives at risk for peanuts — do professors, as a whole class, appear to be an especially entitled, elite group. It is no accident that, with respect to pay, status, and the other factors that insulate a group from the pains of the world, professors are rarely compared by critics to CEOs, hedge fund managers, or even university administrators. Evidently, there is something especially appealing and effective about scapegoating professors and other educators for the hideous erosion of the American middle class.

It has long been clear that U.S. professors have been targeted for derision and elimination by conservative extremists. Just as evident is the fact that anti-professor stereotypes are rooted in the assumption that, while folks in private business, technology, medicine, entertainment, and sports might deserve some degree of prestige and pay, professors and K-12 teachers generally do not. This is in no small measure a result of concerted conservative efforts to exploit the longstanding American love affair with anti-intellectualism. In the U.S., it seems, it has never been especially difficult for unscrupulous plutocrats to funnel populist outrage toward books and those who love them.

But the tensions and exigencies of the pandemic make it ever clearer that it’s not just conservative extremists who use stereotypes to justify vilifying and marginalizing professors. It is also a growing cadre of professionalized university bureaucrats for whom professors’ supposed impracticality and pampered entitlement rationalize our exclusion from critical decision-making. At best the scenario that unfolds in one in which faculty are hapless children with wise and benevolent parents. At worst, we are self-centered nincompoops who must be flattered and manipulated into accepting policies that we have had no voice in creating. If, in the midst of crisis, we consent to such treatment — perhaps persuading ourselves that university administrators really do know best — will we ever again be allowed to sit at the big table with the grown ups?