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.

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Universities’ betrayal of online pedagogy during the pandemic

When instructors were suddenly pushed into online teaching last Spring, many online education experts predicted that the long term impact on online education as a whole would not be pretty. Some instructors who had never engaged in systematic online course development — either by choice or circumstances — suddenly discovered that they could, in a pinch, shift their face-to-face classes into video mode without changing a great deal about the course. As the pandemic rages on, many universities now offer a mishmash of wildly different course styles unceremoniously glommed together and offered to students as “online.” Because thoughtful, best practice online education had not yet been widely understood, practiced or respected before the pandemic — many administrators and instructors still assume it’s a faded copy of the “real thing” — the latest flood of online courses is haphazard, uneven and rife for abuse by administrators desperate to produce cheap credit hours.

The situation is looking grim enough at my institution, Western Michigan University, that, after years of making my living and pedagogical reputation from thoughtful online teaching — including in this blog — I am feeling nudged back into the classroom at what may be the worst possible time. This is because courses I have developed and facilitated in collaboration with my university’s capable online experts according to best practice online pedagogical standards — necessitating modest course caps — have suddenly been threatened with a 60% course cap increase. My carefully designed, fully elaborated asynchronous courses — providing both ample daily feedback and a significant writing component — were never designed to be an imitation of face-to-face classes, but to explore and express the rich possibilities distinctive of thoughtful online pedagogy. Anyone who has done this sort of online teaching work understands the extraordinary challenge of creating and calibrating high precision courses that maximize student flexibility while amplifying engagement. No one serious about online pedagogy thinks it is easier than teaching face-to-face.

Unfortunately, administrators who never understood or appreciated the distinctive promises and challenges of online education in the first place have few qualms about increasing teaching loads in the midst of the pandemic. In fact, unrestricted by constraints of classroom size and availability, it is evident that some now see online classes with dollar signs in their eyes, a bottomless opportunity to generate cheap credit hours. The new head of my department, for example, openly disdains the notion that online pedagogy should be a factor in the determination of course caps. She has suggested that she feels no particular ethical, pedagogical or practical constraint with respect to the determination of online class size. And she is not alone. For many administrators — who may have never created fully elaborated online learning opportunities themselves — online education is not a modality with its own logic, integrity and distinctive challenges, but merely a more convenient, generic, and tepid version of the “real thing.” That being the case, what difference should it make if the names of 20, 40, 60 or 100 student names appear in one’s online class roster? Besides, shouldn’t professors like me expect to pay a price for the convenience of sitting around all day in our pajamas?

What an odd sensation to be sitting in my home office in the midst of this raging pandemic increasingly persuaded that it’s time for me to get out of online teaching and back into the classroom. The irony is, as I have explained in various essays here on the Virtual Pedagogue, I was never an online education fan. Until about six years ago, I too believed it couldn’t be more than an inferior version of my face-to-face classes. Ultimately, though, I embraced the challenge of this new modality both because it felt like an important contribution I could make to my department and because my university’s online education experts persuaded me that I could do it without losing my pedagogical credibility and integrity. Without the assurance of a reasonable online teaching load — including modest course caps — I would never have made the leap. I had heard enough about online mega-classes built around poor quality video lectures and objective exams to know I wanted nothing to do with that. Though I can certainly understand that it may not be possible for some emergency versions of online classes to aspire to creative pedagogical heights — there is surely a place right now for “video courses” — it is a terrible mistake for universities to abandon distinctively online pedagogical values because “emergency.”

In fact, the perverse twist of the situation is not lost on anyone in the online education world. Just when higher ed most needs to embrace the reality that online education is a complicated endeavor that deserves time, energy, investment and respect, some universities may actually be regressing. Just as our sick and struggling students most need and deserve a variety of high quality, engaging online experiences, some schools are making that newly difficult. If, as appears to be the case, my university is willing to embrace a mass production model of online education, I want nothing to do with it. And if administrators expect to maintain student enrollments while offering such inferior products, they should remember that our students and their families are savvy consumers with zillions of options to feed their hunger for higher education. How long do we expect them to pay sit-down restaurant prices for drive-thru window fare?

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.

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: Are universities treating the disease but killing the patient?

The virus in our midst is especially deadly for those with existing underlying health risks, though most of us who develop symptoms will eventually emerge relatively unscathed. So too, though nearly all U.S. colleges and universities are being touched by the pandemic, only some have already died or are languishing on life support. And while financial ruin may be what actually kills some, for far too many others, the true cause of death will be their failure to respond ethically and sustainably to the crisis rather than the crisis itself. Predictably, universities built on a genuine foundation of equity, respect, and sustainability are likely to survive and, eventually, to thrive, while those infused with hierarchy, secrecy, and reactivity began to teeter and crumble almost the very day that stay-at-home orders went into effect.

To take one example, my university has been at the national forefront with respect to cutting personnel and planning radical restructuring schemes, changes that may permanently reshape the university’s instructional and research capability, despite the unknown long term impact of the crisis. It was as if, one day, an abstract budget target number appeared in the sky, like the bat signal, with provosts and deans rushing to create and implement slash and burn plans that have included little or no substantive input from faculty, staff, or students. Whether my institution, Western Michigan University, is actually financially worse off than universities that have taken a more measured, holistic, stakeholder-based approach, I cannot say. As is (not incidentally) the case with many large, hierarchically run organizations, budgets are often so complicated and opaque that it can be impossible to separate fact from fiction, accuracy from exaggeration.

Though the actual underlying rational for the budget targets may be murky, the impact on our campus community has been clear: early layoffs of hundreds, with, we are told, many more to come soon. In addition, we are seeing the early signs of marginalization, merger, or elimination of academic departments, according to factors that seem to have nothing to do with metrics of productivity or cost-benefit analyses. For example, my university has also been among the first in the nation to take steps to merge or eliminate its successful and cheap Gender and Women’s Studies Department (my tenure home) which focuses on LGBTQ youth, students of color, women, and sexual assault survivors. It is the sort of move that, though sadly unsurprising to those who do diversity work, has recently earned the condemnation of the National Women’s Studies Association for its apparent opportunism. NWSA chides universities “that are using the crisis to implement cuts they have been unable to make in the past because of faculty and student opposition and organizing.”

The true devastation of top-down ad hoc slash and burn policies isn’t primarily the intrinsic suffering they cause to campus constituents, especially to students, but the fact that this suffering is inflicted from above, for arbitrary or implausible reasons, and that it falls so disproportionately on the most vulnerable. Though, to be sure, elite administrators have agreed to symbolic cuts to their sometimes jaw-droppingly high salaries, their lives and livelihoods remain largely untouched. It is as if there had been a treaty signed by administrators from the outset that, whatever cuts and restructuring might occur, the university’s existing salary inequities, power structures, and habitual priorities must remain unchallenged. Rather than serving as an opportunity to reaffirm our commitments to compassion and equity, at too many organizations, this crisis is being leveraged to further erode such values.

It is not higher education’s financial crisis alone that will ultimately determine which universities will live and which will languish and eventually die. Consider, for example, two equally resourced families of equal size, faced with the same dire economic news. The patriarchal head of the first family sighs regretfully and immediately drowns two of his children in the well. Problem solved! Fewer mouths to feed! The second family, though, sits down together to study the situation. Are these numbers accurate? Is there any way to challenge the apparent facts of the new reality? If not, are there parts of the family budget that can be trimmed to free up more money for necessities? Because this second family’s approach is values-based, participatory, and deliberate, they are better off even if, ultimately, their shared suffering is great. For one thing, their children, though skinnier, will probably still be alive to help harvest the fields when, one day, the corn grows again. But also, having remained true to their core values, the heart and soul of this family remain intact.

Those who rush to drown their children, or otherwise sell their souls to the devil to address a crisis — no matter how apparently grave — have already lost the war against this latest scourge. When the dust clears, we may celebrate the buildings and privileged employees still left standing, but we will also speculate about what transpired behind closed doors and secret meetings in exchange for such physical survival. In the long aftermath of catastrophe, we will ask: Who collaborated and who resisted? Who stood by and watched while others were pitched into the well? Such a climate of suspicion and resentment will stain our universities well into the future, undermining our will to inspire students or give our best to our disciplines or institutions. The problem universities are facing right now, then, is a financial one, to be sure, but it is just as much an ethical one. We are in the midst of a moral trial that invites us to peek behind the facade of classrooms, cafeterias and football stadiums to find out who we really are. And it does us not one bit of good, if, in a frenzy to keep the patient’s body alive, we kill the very thing that makes that life worth preserving in the first 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.

Professors in the pandemic: Getting intimate with our fears about online education

When I originally began The Virtual Pedagogue some years ago it was to explore my own ambivalence about teaching online. Though the circumstances were far less dramatic than the crisis we now face, my initial experience as an online teacher fifteen or so years ago was also rushed and born of necessity. Predictably, it left such a bad taste in my mouth that it wasn’t til many years later that I felt any inclination to dip my toes in those waters again. Happily, my more recent experiences were far more positive and, over the past five years, I’ve taught many of my courses online while also reflecting on my experience in papers like this, in workshops with colleagues, and here on The Virtual Pedagogue. With most instruction now being pushed online, this seems like a good time to reconsider issues I’ve been ruminating about for a while from my limited perspective as a tenured, mid-career liberal arts faculty member. Not surprisingly, most of my concerns have turned out to be reducible to fear, in one form or another, which does not, of course, make them any less legitimate.

The first fear is systemic. In fact, it is huge. It is that, in agreeing to teach online, we are participating in a fast-food model of education that enables crass corporatism and hastens the demise of our brick and mortar institutions. As I discuss in many places here on the VP, there is, undeniably, cause for concern, but I see it less as a function of the technological shift than of the extreme inequality shaping higher education in the U.S.. To be sure, online education must not become the default modality for the poor while privileged students and faculty at elite institutions continue to hold debates in lovely ivory towers. The challenge is real and entrenched given that, for many vulnerable students, who may have multiple jobs, mental or physical disability, and child or elder care responsibilities, online classes are the only feasible access point to college. Though it may be tempting to identify online education as the culprit, then, the real enemy is even more daunting: structural barriers that fundamentally limit the options that students have about the kind of educational experience they will have.

Especially for more senior faculty members like me, online educational technology itself can also be intimidating, especially given the proliferation of auxiliary bells and whistles that we may feel pressured to include in our classes. Many of us know what it’s like to have been brought to our knees by a computer program at some point — be it Quickbooks, Photoshop, or our university’s online advising system — and we may have little inclination to seek out more such demoralizing experiences. This may be especially true with respect to teaching which, for some of us, may be the one arena in which we feel utterly competent.

It is undoubtedly true that poorly utilized online technology can be clunky and unwieldy, serving to distract more than to enable learning. But if one focuses on the basics — and what this means will vary a lot from discipline to discipline — it is no more intrinsically difficult than other programs or apps that most of us routinely use, for example, while we shop, communicate with long-distance grandchildren, or download audiobooks from our public library. And though some learning discomfort is unavoidable, anyone who still refuses to engage with online technology at all — even to supplement their courses — is, at this point, more like that telephone-averse butler on Downton Abbey than a hero fighting for traditional education. As time and technology march inexorably onward, at some point one becomes less of a lovable curmudgeon and more of a cranky Luddite.

Perhaps the most insidious fear, and the one I explore most frequently here on The Virtual Pedagogue, is the threat that online teaching can represent to our deepest identities as competent, respected, valued professionals. Though it’s not something we professors usually like to admit, there can be tremendous ego satisfaction in traditional face-to-face classroom performance. After all, we have been assigned the featured role in a pedagogical drama, one that many of us have, over decades, honed to perfection. It is no wonder that many of us have come to relish and rely upon the adoring faces of students as they bask in our brilliance.

How often, when we extol the “fire,” “energy,” and “magic” of the classroom, might we actually be referring to the ego satisfaction that we ourselves derive from students’ attention and praise? I think this is not necessarily because we are shallow or narcissistic, but, rather, a perhaps inevitable consequence of engaging in this sort of intensely human labor. For many instructors, the physical university, with its hallowed halls and ivory towers, is a beloved backdrop that allows us to enact hard-won, lovingly cultivated identities that seem to require the nurturing attention of students. The loss of that sea of shining faces can feel like an erasure of our professorial identity altogether, as though we have been replaced by a mere machine.

While there are, of course, lots of good reasons for prioritizing face-to-face education — I will never write a love letter to online only institutions — it is critically important to get deeply honest, especially with ourselves, about what, precisely, our fears and misgivings are about online education. This is especially urgent now that, for most of us, online teaching has suddenly become an unavoidable reality rather than a mere pedagogical possibility or abstraction. To be sure, some of our complaints about online education may turn out to be intrinsic weaknesses of the online modality itself, but some, surely, are based on other fears and anxieties.

How much of our discomfort about online education is really about our anger, fear and sorrow over economic injustice, anti-intellectualism, public disinvestment in higher education, and the radical communication shifts that have fundamentally reshaped human relationships and institutions? Whatever happens next in the development of universities’ relationship to online education — and this is a train that left the station long ago — faculty must be in the driver’s seat. But we cannot guide this process wisely and effectively if we are not relentlessly honest with ourselves about where our fears and misgivings about it lie.

Below are links to a few of the many posts on this site that explore questions about online education:
Are online classes the fast food of higher ed?

Are online teachers lazy sellouts?

Is anybody out there? The loneliness of the online teacher

Telling the truth about online education

The sweet ego boost of teaching face-to-face

Plunging into online teaching: It’s not what I thought it would be

Online teaching: The joy of tedious planning

Could online teaching be a path to enlightenment?