Now Available: Fall 2021 Issue of AAUP's Academe

 

The fall 2021 issue of Academe surveys the present state of academic governance. It includes a new report on findings of the 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, firsthand accounts of governance struggles on campuses around the country, and a pair of articles that confront the threat posed by attacks on critical race theory.

Follow the links in the table of contents below to read the issue.

Most interesting for me was  The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey: Findings on Demographics of Senate Chairs and Governance Structures By Hans-Joerg Tiede.

The 2021 AAUP Shared Governance Survey, the first such national survey in two decades, covered a wide range of topics related to academic gover­nance. I reported on responses to survey questions about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on governance and the relative authority of the faculty in various areas of academic decision-making in an online data snapshot titled “Survey Data on the Impact of the Pandemic on Shared Governance” and in the report Findings on Faculty Roles by Decision-Making Areas, respectively. This report focuses on responses to questions about the composition of senates and similar faculty governance bodies, faculty-board communication, and the conduct of presidential searches as well as questions about the demographic composition and professional character­istics of faculty governance leaders. I present the results by institutional control (public or private nonprofit); by Carnegie classification (distinguishing broadly between doctoral, master’s, and bachelor’s institutions); by institutional size, with institutions categorized as “small” (fewer than two thousand students), “medium” (between two thousand and five thousand students), or “large” (more than five thousand students); and by the collective bargaining status of tenured and tenure-track faculty members (at institutions with a tenure system) or full-time faculty members (at institutions without a tenure system). When possible, I also compare findings with results from previous national surveys on shared governance conducted or sponsored by the AAUP.

Now Available Bulletin of the AAUP (Summer 2021)--COVID and the University (and all is not Well)

 

The AAUP's annual Bulletin collects in one place the reports, policy statements, and official AAUP business materials of an academic year—in this case, 2020–21. Most of these documents have already been published on the AAUP website or in Academe, and the parenthetical dates after their titles refer to date of original publication. The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the summer issue of Academe (or as the July–August issue prior to 2019). This table of contents links to PDFs of that print version. These PDFs will stand as the historical record for 2020–21 and will not be changed. (AAUP Bulletin Announcement)

 It comes as no surprise that the AAUP focuses its reporting this year on the most important event of this generation--COVID19. Thsi issue of Academe does an excellent job of memorializing the perspectives ad analysis of that crisis on the academy.  It also suggests the great tragedy of the faculty voice in crisis.  That tragedy is centered on the irresistible urge to assume a reactionary posture--and the discourse of a "return"--in the face of transformed conditions that will make the possibility of any such return effectively impossible.  It will be left to others, perhaps, to forge forward.  But this reporting provides a glimpse of the way in which that forward might lead backwards in the context of a industry capable of such a return.  That this is not so and that other approaches may well have to be developed may be read between the lines.

COVID-19 has fast forwarded trends that have effectively sidelined traditional faculty governance and shared governance principles.  Shared governance has been reduced effectively to a technocratic exercise.  At its best it has reduced faculty governance structures to an odd form of focus group, or worse, has absorbed  the faculty into the administrative apparatus at a low administrative level. In the process faculties have refused to embrace or neglected any effort to transform themselves into stronger instruments of accountability.  Part of that, of course, is a function of the great transformation of this century--the effective elimination of tenure except as a vestigial condition.  Faculty dependent on the renewal of contracts are hardly in a position to effectively "lean in" without substantial risk. And the technological revolution will reshape teaching and student engagement--and here it is the administration rather than faculty that are driving change.  In the meantime faculty obsession with transforming their function from research to the exercise of a role as public intellectuals--a process abetted by an administration obsessed, in turn, with short term (and quite manipulative) impact measures, has altered the value of faculty as sources of the production of knowledge.  They have become a political instrument, or on the other side, the blue collar producers of "facts" that can be consumed by the policy caste. Still there is much to lear from the orthodox narrative of the effects of COVID-19 on faculty.  Links to the articles follow.

The Transformation of University Governance and the Triumph of a Peculiar Ideology of Fiscalization in the American University

 

 

The American Association of University Professor (AAUP) has just announced publication of a set of quite interesting article in the Spring issue of its Academe Magazine..

The spring issue, which will be published in full in May, focuses on the campaign for a New Deal for Higher Education and builds on the work of Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, a group founded last year by Jennifer Mittelstadt. Follow the links below or visit https://www.aaup.org/academe to read more about the Scholars for a New Deal and the work of the faculty activists who are mapping out a new vision for the future of higher education.

Of particular interest is the "better late than never" observations of Michael Bérubé and Michael DeCesare in their Column: State of the Profession: Twin Crises. They offer a "blunt assessment as cochairs of the AAUP committee that investigated departures from AAUP-recommended standards of governance at eight institutions." From this they weave a set of observations of trends they deplore that combine the trajectories of fiscal stewardship and protection of health into a potent cocktail spiced by the principles (so current in contemporary administrative ideology) of nimble leadership and of the migration of stewardship and responsibility from a decentralized model built around engagement by university professionals and overseen by its administrators, to one in which the professionalization of administration has itself served as the basis for drawing all authority into the now separable administrative class governing the university. Far too late (the professorate is itself trapped by the logic of its own pretensions as firmly as administrators are trapped in the logic of their own caste)  they have come to realize the extent to which ideologies of governance to which they have been indifferent now serve as a powerful baseline for authenticating and legitimating decisions that effectively reduce faculty to factors in the production of goods (graduates and outside income) who are both fungible and whose employment is a function of institutional profitability as such things are measured by university administrators and driven by their boards. A de-professionalized faculty is one that is vulnerable to attack on its professional prerogatives. And yet over the course of a generation, faculty has done little to resist the incremental gnawing away of both its status and its prerogatives

Still, this lamentation is worth a careful read, if only for a glimpse at the state of affairs in university governance. But the time for lamentation has passed.  And that is the great pity and the great failing of this effort. University stakeholders are not in need of keening; they are in need of the organization of response, or a consensus that response is now impossible if the goal is to preserve the imaginary of an academic life world that is quickly receding into historical fantasy. It is in that context that the issue theme assumes its ironic character.

Now Available Winter 2021 Issue of Academe

 

This issue of Academe examines several “preexisting conditions” within higher education that the pandemic has thrown into sharp relief. These long-standing problems—blind spots, inequities, deficiencies in policies and practices—have been exacerbated during the present crisis, but they require more than short-term fixes.

Follow the links in the table of contents below or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/winter-2021. Please consider supporting our work by joiningthe AAUP. AAUP members have access to full-issue PDFs of Academe, can opt to receive the magazine by mail, and enjoy a range of other benefits.

Call for Papers: AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom

 

 

Journal of Academic Freedom

The AAUP Journal of Academic Freedom publishes scholarship on academic freedom and on its relation to shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. Scholarship on academic freedom is typically scattered across a wide range of disciplines. The Journal provides a central place to track the developing international discussion about academic freedom and its collateral issues. Essays range from historical studies to analyses of contemporary conflicts, from accounts of individual faculty experiences to institutional histories.

The Journal is published online annually, and is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation. We release a call for papers each fall.

JAF has put out a "Call for Papers"  for its next volume, scheduled for publication in fall 2021. The Journal of Academic Freedom will consider any original article on the topic of academic freedom,

See the latest call for papers. Which also follows below

 

The Transfiguration of University Faculty Senates in the Shadow of Pandemic

 





 Pix: Catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter on the Via Labicana.

University Faculty Senates in the United States continue to struggle to define their role within universities that increasingly function like large public administrative agencies. This emerging "university new era" governance framework is grounded in the professionalization of an administrator class and the de-professionalization of faculty. That shift has had profound effects both on the governance of the university as an institution, and on the way in which the role of faculty is understood as workers on sometimes enormous (and in some cases enormously wealthy) learning latifundia (some might suggest modern and more benign forms of knowledge encomienda).

Where once faculty were more centered within the governance of the university (and certainly within its colleges and departments), now de-profesisonalized, they are run like administrative agencies by bevies of (former) faculty eager to rise within the administrative state that the university has become. University administrations have become engorged with assistant, associate and special case deans; they have become the sum of departments that now manage virtually every aspect of academic life (1) as an aid to, (2) for the convenience of, and (3) because of the need for specialized administrative skills and attention in connection with, the processing of students through degree programs and the management of faculty. The later, no longer capable of self management because we have now come to believe they lack the skills. . . and certainly the time given their teaching and research obligations in frenetic competition in peer prestige markets on which their internal and external status depends), become objects of management.

And yet, like the institutions of Republican Rome after the establishment of the the Principate (and then the Dominate after the crisis of the 3rd century AD), the university's ancient institutions of shared governance, and the muscle memory of the rituals of an earlier age remain long after their effectiveness has passed into oblivion. Like the Roman Senate during the Principate (after the victory of Augustus Ceasar) University Faculty Senates assumed a consultative and consensus producing role in the years after the start of this century.  Penn State provided a good example of this general evolution, one in which the institutions of the Senate were respected even as its authority was being evacuated in favor of better managed administrative led special committees in which the real business of "shared" (and well managed) governance was being undertaken. 

But the COVID-19 pandemic may well have produced the crisis that may precipitate fairly rapid change along the trajectories described above.  That is, in the shadow of COVID-19 and its threat to the income and function of the university,  the pace and character of changes in the relationship between (de professionalized) faculty and (a rising corps of professional) administrators may move shared governance from the more benign forms of a Principate to those of a crisis entrenched and  much more bureaucratized and hierarchical Dominate.

These are the thoughts that came to mind as, along with other members of the Penn State University Community, I  received this message from the Chair of its University Faculty Senate:

Faculty Senate Newsletter

September 29, 2020

 

The University Faculty Senate will meet remotely on Tuesday, September 29, 2020, at 1:00 p.m. via ZOOM (link below). 

                                                

The Faculty Senate remains deeply committed to representing our faculty and student body during these challenging times. Numerous questions and concerns were raised at our recent plenary meeting on September 15, 2020 that could not be fully addressed due to time constraints. Events have continued to evolve, and we would benefit from continued and open conversation with all members of our community. In that spirit, the meeting will begin with an extensive Forensic to support a conversation about how we can best continue to meet our shared mission of teaching, research, creative activity, service and outreach for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania across our campuses.   

The Senate will consider One Forensic Report entitled: The State of Penn State.

                                                                                   

Faculty Senate meetings are held via ZOOM. Please refer to the University Faculty Senate website for ZOOM connection instructions.

 

Members of the University community are welcome to attend this meeting.  Any member of the University community not a member of the Senate may request the privilege of the floor on any item of business already before the Senate.  Such a request must be made to the Chair, through the Executive Director, at least five calendar days before the meeting at which the individual wishes to speak. The Senate Agenda will be posted on the Senate website one week prior to each meeting and the Senate Record (minutes) will be posted approximately three weeks following each meeting. 

For information on submitting major, minor, option, or course proposals, view the Guide to Curricular Procedures. View The Senate Curriculum Report.

 

 Beth Seymour
Chair, University Faculty Senate

The message, and the meeting to come, may well illustrate more the changing face of faculty involvement in governance, than it might produce any sort of consensus or action that will have real effect on the way n which the university is governed in this emerging era.  It expresses not just a concern, but also an attempt, to preserve what is left of faculty authority against its erosion in the face of the imperatives of the consequences of crisis that may go to the viability of the ancient institution in contemporary times. It suggests as well, the forms of the rear guard actions that may well characterize the forms of retreat from authority that ay characterize the next several years in the new era of the university and its workers.  The form of the university faculty senate will certainly remain with us for some time to time.  What one makes of it, though, remains an import and open question.

The Senate Forensic document along with the "University Faculty Senate Resolution on Return to Work" follow below.

 

Leonard M. Baynes: Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg

 Librado Romero / New York Times

 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg touched many of our lives.  For some the connection was personal, for others as a consequence of her leadership in the academy and then as a judge and then justice.  Many have written about those connections. I was most touched by that written by my classmate and now dean of the University of Houston Law Center, Leonard M. Baynes.  Professor Ginsburg and Professor Kellis Parker, were and remain, as Dean Baynes notes, godsends for many of us. They remain so.

 With his permission I have re-posted his beautiful tribute and remembrance.

 

Measures for the Appointment and Management of Foreign Teachers (Draft for Solicitation of Comments) [外籍教师聘任和管理办法（征求意见稿）]

Pix Credit: Precarious times for foreign teachers in China.

The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China has distributed for comment （征求意见稿）  Measures for the Appointment and Management of Foreign Teachers [外籍教师聘任和管理办法]. Much of the legislation covers the usual issues in the usual fashion. With respect to these there are issues of efficiency and the connection between objectives and the administrative methods chosen to meet these objectives.  But these issues are little different from those facing an administrative apparatus anywhere. And the legislation represents the end of a process already well underway in 2019 (e.g., Precarious times for foreign teachers in China ("Another reason that authorities are cracking down on foreign teachers is ideological. China has long been wary of foreign influences in education, and in December 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping reminded education leaders that, “Adherence to the Party’s leadership is essential to the development of higher education in the country”, emphasising the need to “build universities into strongholds that adhere to Party leadership”.")).

And indeed the two sets f provisions that are the most interesting for foreigners are those relating to the legalization of the policy of Part leadership over education. These merit sustained consideration.  The first is Article 5:

Article 5 (Specific Obligations) Foreign teachers shall abide by Chinese laws and regulations, abide by Chinese public order and good customs and professional ethics of teachers, and abide by the principle of separation of education from religion. The educational and teaching activities and contents implemented shall conform to China's educational policies and basic teaching principles. It is required that China’s national sovereignty, security, honor, and social public interests must not be harmed. [第五条 （特定义务）外籍教师应当遵守中国法律法规，遵守中国的公序良俗和教师职业道德，遵守教育与宗教相分离的原则，所实施的教育教学活动和内容应当符合中国的教育方针和教学基本要求，不得损害中国的国家主权、安全、荣誉和社会公共利益。]

The second are Articles 27-32 (Chapter 4 Supervision and Responsibility [第四章 监督与责任]).  Articles 27 and 28 establish an administrative structure for the supervision of the obligations imposed by law on relevant national and local governments. Article 27 requires the establishment of deep cooperation between the science and technology depart and the education departments of the State Council.  The Science and Technology Department is charged with sharing a list of foreign teachers, and the education department is required to deliver to the science and technology department lists of foreign teachers prohibited from employment "in real time." Article 28 charges the education administrative department of the local people’s government, the administrative department of science and technology, the entry-exit management agency of the public security organ, and other relevant departments shall strengthen the daily supervision of the employment of foreign teachers by educational institutions with the daily supervision (日常监管) of foreign teachers for violations of law relating to their hiring and work. 

Articles 29-32  then establish the parameters by which the Chinese Social Credit system is extended to foreign teachers in China. Article 29 requires that assessments relating to the foreign teacher's compliance with law, ethics, and quality of teaching be included in a national foreign teacher comprehensive information service platform.  Good social credit scores will ensure that regulatory hurdles relating to employment will be convenient. Article 30 then lists four key areas of activities that will reduce social credit scoring: (1) Serious academic misconduct; (2) Engaging in paid work in violation of regulations outside the appointed educational institution; (3) Dismissed in violation of the rules and regulations of the employment agency; and (4) Resigning without authorization after the appointment period has not expired [（一）有严重学术不端行为的；（二）在受聘任的教育机构以外违规从事有偿工作的；（三）违反聘任机构规章制度，被解聘的；（四）聘任期未满，擅自离职的。]. Lastly Article 31 lists those actions or activities that will result in dismissal of appointment. The resulting Social Credit score will require that such individuals be placed on a black list, which will make it impossible for educational institutions to hire them [教育机构不得聘任有前款情形的外籍人员担任外籍教师。]. The ten include:  

(1) Words and deeds that damage China's national sovereignty, security, honor, and public interests;
(2) Being held criminally responsible;
(3) Obstructing the implementation of the education policy;
(4) Violating public security management such as taking drugs;
(5) Sexual assault or abuse of minors;
(6) Engaging in religious education or preaching illegally;
(7) Engaging in cult activities;
(8) Sexual harassment of students or other serious violations of China's public order and good customs, teachers' professional ethics and codes of conduct;
(9) Providing false certification information in the process of applying to teach in China;
(10) The total number of untrustworthy records specified in Article 30 of these Measures exceeds 3. [（一）有损害中国国家主权、安全、荣誉和社会公共利益的言行的；（二）被追究刑事责任的；（三）妨碍教育方针贯彻落实的；（四）有吸食毒品等违反治安管理行为的；（五）有性侵害、虐待未成年人行为的；（六）非法从事宗教教育或者传教的；（七）从事邪教活动的；（八）有性骚扰学生或者其他严重违反中国的公序良俗和教师职业道德、行为准则的；（九）在申请来华任教过程中提供虚假证明信息的；（十）本办法第三十条规定的失信记录累计超过3条的。].

 Lastly, Article 32 provides that educational institutions that fail either to ensure the proper operation of the social credit system (by facilitating negative activity) or hire a blacklisted foreign teacher will "be handled by the public security organs of the local people’s government at or above the county level."
 

For foreign faculty from liberal democratic states, the changes require a conscious sensitivity both to supervision, and to the measurement of conduct by reference to values and markers that are not the same as in many of their home states.  This is particularly true with respect to "(1) Words and deeds that damage China's national sovereignty, security, honor, and public interests" [（一）有损害中国国家主权、安全、荣誉和社会公共利益的言行的] and "(3) Obstructing the implementation of the education policy" [（三）违反聘任机构规章制度，被解聘的] if only because they may no way of understanding where the conduct boundaries or expectations are.  In those cases, it will likely fall to educational institutions to closely supervise and guide foreigner teachers in the conduct of their classes. It is also likely that educational institutions that contribute foreign faculty to the black lists will likely find their own social credit scores dangerous lowered, and in the worst cases, may find themselves on a black list as well (likely, at a minimum, prohibited from hiring any foreigners).

None of this, of course, ought to surprise. And in many cases the net result of the provisions will hardly be felt--other than with respect for the need to cultivate a greater sensitivity of the context in which teachers operate.  Still, even when teaching very young children, it will be necessary to be conscious that an offhand remark, or a reference to baseline principles and concepts that are cherished in a home country (and not really thought about as problematic) may be sensitive in the context in which it is heard.  It is the inadvertent act that poses the greatest threat. 

Of course, much of this would be ameliorated if it is possible t understand the analytics that will go into the social credit scoring for foreign teachers, and more importantly, the way that black lists are constructed, and the rules for getting off a black list.  None of that seems to be available currently. In a sense, then, the value of social credit in this case is to provide guidance necessary to adjust conduct.  Thus rather than produce regulatory guidance, authorities might be able to produce a guide to how scoring will be measured (the value of data and its identification) for purposes of Articles 30 and 31.

Moreover, in certain circumstances, the rules may provide substantial challenges for educational institutions and their foreign faculty.  This may be particularly true at the university and graduate levels in those areas that touch on professional education, business and some of the disciplines in the social sciences, especially where the issues touch on necessary aspects of globalization or are connected to foreign and comparative study.  It is likely that substantial regulation and soime waivers  and a waiver system will have to be greater in those respects--but the price will likely also be substantially greater supervision of those activities. As a result, it is possible that except for elite institutions, and those otherwise designated for that purpose, the scope and conduct of teaching by foreigners will change. At a minimum, national and local authorities would do well to provide more specific guidance to avoid a situation where the law itsef serves as a series of traps for the unwary (and those otherwise not guided by savvy educational sponsors).  Otherwise the result will be to reduce the presence and impact of foreign educators in China. In that respect it may be necessary to carefully consider the Communist Party Basic Line respecting "Reform and Opening Up" in the New Era (e.g., "The Party shall implement the strategy for  invigorating China through science and education")

The entire provision in the original Chinese along with a crude English translation follows. Interested individuals and entities  are encouraged to send their comments to the Ministry.

Thoughts on Giorgio Agamben - Requiem per gli studenti (A Requiem for Students) and the Birth of the Hollowed Out Simulated University

Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, saith thus; Wailing shall be in all streets; and they shall say in all the highways, Alas! alas! and they shall call the husbandman to mourning, and such as are skilful of lamentation to wailing. . . Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light. (Amos 5:16, 18)

Giogio Agamben has written an exquisite essay on the university in the wake of COVID-19; It is a lamentation, a wailing, a mourning for the darkness that has been called forth from the pandemic.  It is a provocative piece of impudence at a time when such things may be punished by social actors and risk averse institutions. "Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time; for it is an evil time." (Amos 5:13). Agamben has chosen to speak; it is not clear who is left to listen.  And yet the movement toward the reconstruction of the university as simulacra--the way that it parallels the movement toward the reconception of political space as a complex living analytics better understood through models than in flesh and blood--is worth pondering. The techno-populism that the university has become is likely the best simulation of the transformation of society that one can observe as the moment. What comes after pondering, and after observing in these times, is truly best left to silence.  

The essay, Requiem per gli studenti, follows (first published in Diario della crisi of the Instituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici 22 May 2020) along with my own brief reflections and a crude English translation. 

Shifting the Employment Paradigm in the Shadow of COVID-19: "Open Letter to the Penn State Administration Regarding Plans for the Fall and the Response to COVID-19"

Pix© Larry Catá Backer, Flop, Needlepoint Pillow, Kuntshaus Zurich, displayed at the Museum of the Ohio State University Columbus

Like most universities of its type, Penn State University has been facing a number of substantial challenges  during the course of the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Like most universities, like moved its classes online since March 2020, and has effectively closed its physical facilities during the most dangerous period of transmission of the disease. It has also brought most of their students and faculty home and forbidden travel, especially foreign travel, for a long period to come. Like most universities, it is wrestling with the issue of an Autumn term, balancing the needs of safety with the realities of institutional finance (and collaterally, the preservation of the value of traditional face to face instruction and the solidarity achieved by a community of students coming together in shared space).

The closing of borders, the effect of the move to online teaching, the loss of revenue from operations over the summer and related to student services, and the fear of a drop in enrollment for the autumn term has many university high administrators worries.  Many university administration across the nation have been proactive in working through their worry. One of the most worrisome elements, it seems, is the cost of university operations.  And in the context where teaching and teaching services both account for a large portion of revenues and a sizeable portion of expense (without for the moment considering the drain on university resources of ever expanding compliance and other administrative bureaucracies) some high administrators have begun to target teaching resources as an area where pruning--predictive or anticipated pruning, may be undertaken with the greatest benefit to the fiscal integrity of the university (again without taking into account the revenue drain of its burgeoning bureaucracies).

It is in this context, as well, that Penn State University appears to have chosen to modify its relationship with its contract or fixed term faculty.  Having grown the percentage of fixed term faculty as against tenured or tenure line faculty for a generation, on the basis of all sorts of rationales, not the least of which was that fixed term faculty provide the university with flexibility in meeting and changing teaching demand more quickly and efficiently.  Of course, in the process fundamentally changed the character and protections of the teaching element of the university. 

Now the university appears to be seeking to deploy that power of flexibility proactively by changing a key contract term in the employment contracts of its fixed term faculty. More specifically, it has inserted sme language in their contracts: "This appointment can also be terminated on twelve weeks notice in the event of serious budget or enrollment challenges; all of which shall be determined by the university at its sole discretion." Even assuming that one might read some sort of rwasonablness or good faith constraints, the laguage effectively gives the university unfetterd authority to treat their contract faculty as disposable goods--disposable even before it might consider disposing of other things. Yet, the university would remind its fixed term employees, in the nature of the fixed term relationship.  Little solace to employees who until a few weeks ago conted their service, as well as their expectaiton of continuation, in years.

Simultaneously, the universty, like its peer institutions, has also been busy developing procedures, rules, and approaches to the operation of the institution for the Autumn term, none of which involved faculty to any substantial extent.  But that is hardly to be surprising.  The university, like virtually all others, has merely contributed it bit to a national trend that has reduced faculty shared governance to a vestigial form.  Faculty involvement has been bureaucratized--it is increasingly limited to ritualized post hoc consultation, and to the selection of favored symbolically representative faculty on administrative committees where the real governance of the university is undertaken. Within this new constellation of governance, the formal structures of the faculty have all but disappeared. But that has been something the direction of which has been well known even as those who warned of its trajectory were ignored and marginalized. 

Even the faculty now understands these realities.  And so faced with the tremendous challenge of university action with respect to which there has been little direct faculty input that is meaningful, and developed in a process notorious for its behind closed door development, a group of faculty has had to circulate a letter for mass signature as a means of conveying its own perspectives on anticipated actions by the university.  That letter-- Open Letter to the Penn State Administration Regarding Plans for the Fall and the Response to COVID-19--has been posted for signature.  And it has indeed garnered  a number of signatures. It is not clear where, in similar contexts across the nation, the formal faculty representative organization can play an effective role.

The letter, along with links to the original site where it is posted, follows as it appeared on 12 June 2020.  An active engagement with its contents is encouraged, as potentially the only sort of forum left to faculty increasingly cut out of a ritualized process of engagement tightly overseen by administrators  with the power to retaliate against expression they find 'threatening' or 'unpleasant.'

The Price of Complicity: From the AAUP--The State of the Profession Now Better Exposed

Gianni Pisani, Il guardiano della casa (1980) (Naples)

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has  distributed its 2020 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession recaps the key findings from the AAUP’s 2019–20 Faculty Compensation Survey.  The Report expands on a general pessimism that has now become virtually impossible to ignore.  But more than that, it suggests the product of complicity.

For decades the American professorate (and their fellow travelers abroad) have rationalized the fundamental changes occurring in the academy. Among them, (1) the deprofessionalization of the faculty; (2) the rise of a professional administrator class that was first an aid and then the overlord of matters once left to the professional discretion of those involved in the production and dissemination of knowledge; (3) the change in the character of the institution arising from the general movement in American institutional culture towards risk avoidance and compliance mentalities which produced the sort of surveillance cultures necessarily overseen by an autonomous administrator class; (4) the commodification of education and its closer alignment with the needs of wage labor markets (and those with disproportionate influence over those markets); (5) the transformation of students into present values of income streams, and the provision of services into profit centers; (6) the rise of technology that transformed the way one valued the effectiveness (and objectives) of education; (7) the rise of educational servant classes (so-called contingent faculty) in a professorate already riddled with corrupting internal status hierarchies; (8) the reduction of knowledge production to quantifiable status markers which then drive a culture of producing knowledge to its markers (which can then be used to discipline production and manage academic freedom without the need to actually read and assess work); and (9) the move to online education the character of which is driven by administrative rather than faculty objectives and standards.

In the construction of each of these faculty has been complicit (in its ancient sense--from the Latin complicāre, “to fold together”).  Faculty become administrators, as assimilate into the logic of a culture that increasingly distinguishes itself from the faculty as both superior and managerial--that is faculty administrators take professionalization with them into administration and necessarily reduce its significance for those left behind.  But faculty has freely transferred administrative responsibility to others to make their lives easier, and to create more time for research and teaching (time made necessary in part because of the way that they have permitted administrators to develop accountability measures). Faculty have participated in the construction of compliance and accountability cultures without thinking about the way these operate as political elements of administration. Faculty have facilitated the commodification of education, both in terms of the production of knowledge and its dissemination; they have delegated not just administrative but also course and research work to "hired help" that then contributes to cultures of "high" and "low" learning, as well as the way one creates systems of valuing research (per unit of effort). Faculty has been led into leveraging operations that make them (per student) less necessary in part because of a willingness to accept the metrics of measuring student learning by those who now are more professionally capable then they were. And, indeed, the embrace of specific metrics by faculty have been instrumental in the transformation of its own character and the framework through which it is disciplined. More important, perhaps, has been the migration of the control and authentication of those metrics from faculty to administrators and to groups of autonomous "experts" (experts in the theories of metrics, in the simulacra of production and impact) from which these measures derive power now detached from those who produced the work judged. And so on.  

The results are becoming clearer in the wake of the pandemic.  The nature of the university has changed, as has its purpose.  The relationship between its stakeholders (students, faculty, administrators, and "staff") has changed in response to reflect both new power relationships and new expectations.  More fundamentally, the way that faculty are needed (in the production and dissemination of knowledge) to students or generally for the greater glory of the institutions who pay or fund them is also changing.  Increasingly faculty are useful for the production of facts that can be consumed by others.  They are even more useful for the construction and maintenance of simulated realities to be applied as directed by and for the benefit of others. Faculty, de-centered from the process of learning, now facilitate the transmission of knowledge that is as a general rule produced authoritatively by smaller and smaller of people. This is all reflected in the (re) organization of the university as an institution, and faculty, as a factor in the production of its welfare in relation to its key stakeholders--students, alumni, the state and labor markets.  This is a problem that is neither inherently American, nor only manifested within liberal democratic systems.

The Press Release follows (AAUP Report Identifies Key Factors to Watch following COVID-19 Pandemic), with links to the Annual Report .

The COVID-19 Effect on the University: The Populist-Technocratic Model of Governance, Free Riding, and Sorting Through the Financial Consequences of Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a tremendous amount of economic stress to all sectors of the American economy.  Though universities sometimes indulge the conceit that they are neither an "industry" nor that they function like other economic institutional actors, that becomes difficult when they are are the wrong side of economic planning.

The pandemic however, appears to have come to the university, like it has come to every other sector of American industry. Having come, it becomes interesting to see the way in which they respond to crisis.  Will they adopt the same tactics of other industrial sectors, in which middle and high level administrators protect their own turf even as they jettison their workers like any other commodified factor in the production of their positions and the income of their institutors?   Will they use the cover of pandemic to move forward a number of initiatives that tradition, custom or politics made impossible or at least difficult before (in the case of the university the evisceration of effective and muscular shared governance, the shrinking of multi-campus locations deemed uneconomic though serving a public or private mission)? Will the cover of pandemic permit the university to use the crisis and the need to exercise discretion hide a series of long and short term retaliations against individuals deemed troublemakers (e.g., At the Borderlands of Ethics: Soft Retaliation and Unethical Exercises of Administrative Discretion)--especially those who have asserted in a muscular form their responsibilities for what they understood to be shared governance, or those who are simply just "in the way" of the personal agendas of administrators as they reshape their "domains"? Will the university indulge in the sort of free riding that has marked the actions of other institution as they preserve the jobs and status of their middle and higher level administrators and shift the burden of financial distress down to line workers (faculty and staff) especially where that shifting is disproportionate (Subsidizing the Free-Riding State and Enterprise Apparatus on the Backs of those Least Capable of bearing that Burden--The Micro Consequences of COVID-19 and Containment Measures)? To what extent will the university, which has over the last decade, practice energetically its ethical principles as it navigates these stressful decisions ther than by giving them lip service?  

These and other questions have now moved from the realm of the hypothetical.  Over the next several months, university high officials will produce the facts form which a close analysis may be undertaken--and their conduct and decisions subject to the salutary exercise of review and accountability.  For the moment what we have are first moves.  One of the first, though likely to be coordinated with those of sibling universities, is that of Penn State. Its president distributed a message to the university community in which the administration revealed its planing for COVID-19 response.  There is nothing singular about the message; this university merely follows a number of other institutions which have concluded that they face serious fiscal challenges that now require a good faith effort to make critical choices that are meant to protect enterprise mission but which invariably will shift the costs of those efforts among critical stakeholder communities. The danger is that the choices made might well shift the financial burdens of such mission protection among stakeholders in ways that may not reflect their ability to bear those costs. 

These messages do not make for easy reading.  They are crafted using a stylized language now common to the communications of high level U.S. academic administrators  in the second and third decades of the 21st century, a language that is both precisely accurate and also redolent with ambiguity and veiling--carefully crafted for the consumption of a broader public.  Yet they provides  template against which one might usefully study the way that university administrators will re-shape their institutions as they respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.   

The university wide communication follows.  The massaging of the message, in house, will occur at the sort of carefully curated "town-hall" meetings that the university now deploys successfully for managing the message to its internal audience to preserve both stability and the appearance of engagement (see, e.g., On the Practice of Town Hall Meetings in Shared Governance--Populist Technocracy and Engagement at Penn State; Practicing Mass Democracy at Penn State: The New Populist-Technocratic Model of University Governance, Socialization, Stakeholder Management and Benefits).

One can only wish high officials well as they take on the burden--along with their staffs and subordinate officials and overseen, to the extent that is their practice and the law, by their boards of trustees.  And it is kind of them to share, after they have begun wrestling with the titanic issues of governance within that community of managers, to share the fruits of their labors with university stakeholders, especially where, as in many cases, it will be them, for the most part, who will be tasked with bearing the brunt of the burdens shifted down to them as a consequence of the decisions of these high officials. That, certainly becomes clear from a careful reading of the formal messaging of which that of the Penn State President is but an example.

Still, the opportunity presented by efforts to speak to the formal messaging through the device pf these "two hall" events might provide an opportunity to inquire about some of the detail suggested by the by high level messages of this type: (1) to what extent had the administration been transparent about financial issues that appeared to blossom over the course of the six weeks; (2) to what extent were stakeholders involved in the analysis and identification of the choices among which hard financial choices would have top be made; (3) how has the burden of the financial challenges been shared proportionately among all stakeholders, including the offices of high administrative officials; (4) what metrics have been used to assess the value of the choices and to measure their effectiveness going forward; (5) what role did the university faculty senate play in the formulation of the choices and in the determination  of how the burdens would be shared; (6) what accountability measures have the high officials instituted to review and assess the decisions they have adopted; (7) are accountability measures public; (8) in light of the burden shifting from the institution to those of its employees least able to bear the burden of the university's financial challenges, to what extent are its mid¡dole level administrator's guided in the exercise of their discretion with respect to the budget reductions they must implement; (8) what efforts were made to develop these hides with the inputs of all affected stakeholders and how might they participate in the departmental budget reduction processes; (9) to what extent will all decision making be justified by the principles that are meant to guide all decision making at the institution (at Penn State, for example the Penn State Principles); and (10) what alternatives were considered and why were they rejected (including the factors that contributed to the construction of best through worst case scenarios used for planning and choice making)?

Of course, it is unlikely that any of these questions will be asked.  And if asked, it is unlikely that answers would be forthcoming.  And yet, the questions, and their answers, will point to the exact form in which the modern university has transformed itself.  Not that this transformation  is unexpected, as lamentable as it might be to some. Business is business.  But the culture of a business, and the character of its leaders, becomes all the more interesting as a business responds to changes in an industry. Those revelations become clearer when the pace of change increases dramatically.  All the more so when those changes can, through the tragedy of pandemic, become much more clearly visible in ways that produce quite dramatic consequences for those on whose shoulders the university prospers. Lastly, pandemic centers questions of character, questions that become more pronounced where decisions made by those on whom responsibility is delegated produce consequences on those with little power or influence in the construction of those questions or the development of responses. In the context of the university, like other businesses, the more telling of those questions revolve around the ethics of decisions that produce administrative free riding within an institutional context in which those who bear the burden of decision making appear to shift, and quite decisively, the burdens and costs of such decisions to those who are least able to bear the burden of these decisions.

Retaliation in the Bureaucratic University--the Uneasy Relationship Between Administrative Disciplinary Discretion and Protection Against Unethical or Strategic Retaliation

Universities  have, form time to time, made a big show if  "taking a stand" against retaliation.  But that sort of sloganeering only tends to obscure the realities of a system which is increasing the authority of administrators--especially middle and lower level administrators--to retaliate through the strategic use of their administrative discretion.  

And that suggests the fundamental contradiction of the modern bureaucratized university: on the one hand the trajectory of institutional development appears to increase the scope of the exercise of administrative discretion  by operating administrators (deans, and lower level officials).  This is being undertaken by an increasing mania to "legalize" the structures within which administrative discretion can be exercised.  It is the rare university today whose deans do not push for more "rules" to provide "certainty" to practices, but which effectively serve to regularize administrative authority to rule  through decision making now ceded to them by"rule."   Law or rule in this case does not serve as a cage of certainty and constraint, but rather as the constitution of the space within which administrative discretion may be exercised effectively without oversight or accountability. On the other hand, the university has increasingly adopted pseudo-cultural principles (ethics rules or the like) which they have projected onto their employees (faculty and staff) within which any protection for retaliation is limited to reporting wrongdoing (and here the principles come into play--in good faith) to augment the capacity of administrators to discipline others.

I have written about this before (At the Borderlands of Ethics: Soft Retaliation and Unethical Exercises of Administrative Discretion), that is, of the use of discretionary authority to punish faculty and staff who irritate or oppose their administrative supervisors (I can't bring myself to call them superiors for the false hierarchy of merit that might suggest).  The problem, of course, is not one of an inherent evil on the role of administration, or in the good faith efforts of most people whose undertake the burden of administering complex institutions in a chaotic societal climate. Their task is hard enough and most undertake it well enough. I focus, instead, on the consequences of the construction of rule systems to enhance rather than constrains the worst of human nature. And in the process to contribute to a blindness that may affect everyone honestly trying to bear the burden of administration. 

Ultimately, discretion without sound accountability structures makes a mockery of the legalization of university operations--and more importantly, it makes the jobs of those middle level administrators who are trying to exercise their discretion fairly and ethically that much harder. Those who give in to their darker natures become opportunist free riders on a system which inadvertently creates a significant space for protected unethical conduct.    This is especially the case where the protections against retaliation are limited to reporting claims while accountability for indirect retaliation--through the exercise of strategic discretionary decision making may be undertaken essentially with impunity. See, The Disciplinary University Factory--Faculty Discipline and De-Professionalization as Officials move to Expand Faculty "Misconduct" and Its Control

One sees the construction of this contradiction in the emerging policies--the legalization of discretion--adopted by prestigious universities.  Examples follow below.

AAUP Announces the publication of Volume 10 of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom and Call for Papers--“Academic Freedom on the Managed Campus"

This from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP):

We are pleased to announce the publication of Volume 10 of the AAUP's Journal of Academic Freedom. The journal features recent scholarship on academic freedom and its relation to contemporary crises of austerity, shared governance, tenure, and collective bargaining. This year's contributors draw connections between the multiple frequencies of bullying present on our campuses and the principles and practice of academic freedom and shared governance.

The volume’s eleven essays address a wide range of topics, including the use of discourses of civility and student evaluations of teaching to bully faculty, threats from on and off campus to the academic freedom of faculty of color, and the troubling legacies of historical infringements on academic freedom and shared governance. Follow the links to each article in the table of contents below or access the complete volume at https://www.aaup.org/JAF10.

We are also excited to share a new call for papers, “Academic Freedom on the Managed Campus," for the eleventh volume of the journal, scheduled for publication in September 2020.
—Rachel Ida Buff, Faculty Editor

The Journal of Academic Freedom is supported by funding from the AAUP Foundation.

The table of Contents with links follows below.

From the American Association of University Professors--A Rich Collection of Articles and Reports from its Summer 2019 Bulletin

The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors is published annually as the summer issue of Academe. This year's Bulletin features academic freedom and tenure investigative reports, college and university governance investigative reports, a report on the assault on gender and gender studies, a statement on dual enrollment, and annual reports and other business documents. Follow the links in this email or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/summer-2019-bulletin.

 

Links follow: