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.

 

Diversity in Silence: A Look Back To Diversity Reform Now Forgotten at Penn State University

I have not commented on the recent, and potentially quite profoundly transformative, movements to center diversity generally, and the African American experience in particular, in the American University. Penn State University, like many other similarly situated university institutions, has now sought to intensely engage with the issues that have become once again passionately current in the United States.  On 10 June 2020, "Penn State President Eric Barron issued a statement . . . outlining steps the university will take to address instances of racism, bias, and religious intolerance within its community." (President Barron Outlines Penn State’s Actions Against Racism, Hate Speech).

Given the nature of events, and the very short time cohorts of students have an intense engagement with the university, for many this may seem new and long overdue.  For faculty, many of whom have been insulated from events increasingly shunted behind the closed doors of "leadership teams" and the closed cultures of emerging university bureaucratic practices, the extent of university efforts to confront issues of inclusion may well seem somewhat removed fro their lives--and certainly from the center of their shared governance experiences.  

For the ever growing administrative superstructure, and its increasingly distinct and remote operational ideologues, the issue of diversity has been treated as one of many on a large platter of issues , the importance of which might have been measured by the risk it poses.  The reason for that, of course, is that at the heart of emerging ideologies of university governance is the framing principle of risk avoidance, implemented through the application of the secondary principles of prevention, mitigation, and remedy. Every challenge to the university (that is to the stability of the governance of the institution, and the avoidance of threats as those are understood by university administrators) is understood only within the parameters of risk, and the riskiness of choices among prevention, mitigation, or remedial measures. Diversity issues--like campus drinking, the registration system, the allocation of student fees, and the smooth running of dormitories, parking spaces, and events--are conceptualized first as a normative challenge (goal) but one that must be assessed for the risk it poses and the value of adopting policies that focus on prevention, rather tan on mitigation and remedy.  It has been, in that sense, nothing special.

And yet, it would be a mistake to believe that there have not been efforts to change the way that senior officials approached the application of these governance parameters, even within the logic of what they perceive their operational function to be. 

One such effort to bring greater focus on diversity started in January 2013  under my leadership of the Penn State University Faculty Senate when at my invitation students addressed the Penn State University Faculty Senate about the issue. (Diversity Awareness Task Force: Statement to the University Faculty Senate January 29, 2013). Following that intervention a Joint Diversity Awareness Task Force was constituted including elements from the major stakeholders of the University. Its charge included:

· Bring a diverse group of administrators, faculty and students together to work collaboratively to engage in dialogue and provide recommendations to the University Faculty Senate and Administration to enhance diversity awareness in the University Community.
· Thoroughly investigate practices that will be most effective to increase diversity understanding among the student body.
· Provide recommendations to the Faculty Senate Committee charged with reforming the general education curriculum as a whole.

This post chronicles both the achievement of that remarkable committee over the course of several years--and the ultimate marginalization of its work--now so long forgotten that it is not even a memory within the administrative organs of the university, much less among its stakeholders. Those efforts are worth remembering if only as a cautionary take for the current group of individuals and institutional representatives now bent on a similar task. The principal lesson was one that I pointed out in 2014, even before the full set of Joint Diversity Awareness Task Force Reports was produced:

This response provides an excellent illustration of the approach to diversity at many institutions--engagement and oblivion.  This is all the more important because of it collateral result--Marginalization.  Even as the University devotes a tremendous amount of resources to its reconstruction of General Education, even as it focuses substantial public time to experiential learning and other important elements of a public education--the education and practice of diversity is buried and marginalized. . . . The expectations appear simple enough--provide a formally responsive forum for meeting, produce a report well received but avoid robust interconnection to the vital life of the university, and then move on with a sense of satisfaction of having engaged with diversity. (Diversity in Silence--The Joint Diversity Task Force Report at Penn State University Becomes Less Visible).

That chronicling was set out in a series of Reports produced by the JDATF over the course of several years.  Now long forgotten (and effectively inaccessible except by university faculty senators "For agendas or records prior to 2016-2017, please contact the Senate office. Faculty Senators may access Agendas and Records through the Senate Archives.") they are reproduced below.

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.

The Abusive University Administrator--Unfettered Discretion in the University and What the "Census Case" May Teach Us About Abuse

(Pix source HERE)

Those of you who follow my academic blog, Law at the End of the Day, have seen recent posting of PowerPoints through which I tried to synthesize the essence of the sub-systems that together make up the U.S. legal system.  In the process I have tried to capture for foreign lawyers the essence of the core values of American ideologies (of fairness and other baseline political principles), which are inscribed in quite different ways in the law.

One of the areas that struck my students as most curious was that of the ideologies and practice around administrative regulation.  The idea of discretion as a legal tool (outside of dictatorships and Marxist Leninist States) seemed curious. They might have treated those as political acts rather than the application of law. More curious still was the way that only recently, the Supreme Court reinforced a set of core principles through which the courts would review and if necessary overturn discretionary decisionmaking that appears to be arbitrary, capricious, or a hidden pretense.  They found it interesting to see the way that such principled constraints on exercises of discretion, even when undertaken by officials holding the highest appointed offices, could bve used to undermine important policy choices made at the highest levels of state. 

The case, of course, was the "Census Question" case: Department of Commerce v. New York, U.S. Supreme Court No. 18-966 Slip op. (Decided June 27, 2019). The PowerPoints may be accessed here.  And

What struck me more as I sought to lecture through this a as matter of public law--was the way that such constraints might well exposes the laww-less-ness of private administrators, and especially those in the academy.  Not to say that they are born bad; but merely to suggest, as the Supreme Court has just done in relation to the Secretary of Commerce, that no mere instrumentality of the administrative apparatus--public or private--ought to exist within an environment in which the core principles of fairness built into American law appear absent. 

This post considers the great principles of checks on administrative discretion and the principles underlying them (hopefully written simply and not for lawyers).  It then poses the question: to what extent do the great role models of the American Republic; to what extent to those institutions which put themselves out as the forms of social, political, and economic organization that embraces wholeheartedly the core values of this nation; to what extent to the people in control of that apparatus feel the weight of responsibility for their discretionary decisionmaking reinforced by principles and outside robust checks? 

I pose a null hypothesis--university administrators have no real constraints on the exercise of their discretion within the university that is effective, reliable, fair, or readily available to those against whom discretion is exercised. "The null hypothesis, H0 is the commonly accepted fact; it is the opposite of the alternate hypothesis. Researchers work to reject, nullify or disprove the null hypothesis. Researchers come up with an alternate hypothesis, one that they think explains a phenomenon, and then work to reject the null hypothesis." (See here). I would dearly love to see that null hypothesis disproven--and not by incantation from above. 

The Power of Charity and the University--A Pleasured Patron and Obliging Nomenklatura Model of University Governance

(Pix credit: Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa, published June 18 in The Nation )

I had observing the quite emotional battle at the University of Tulsa that appears to pit the old ideals of a university against the realities of universities as businesses. That battle is raging across American academia and touches all aspects of its operation.  I have noted its particular effects in the way that universities consume their graduate students and student athletes (See, e.g., Consequences of the Growing Divide Between the Ideal of the University and its Reality: Thoughts on the Unionization of Student Labor (Graduate Students and Athletes) in this Age of the Learning Factory). Universities cling to the ancient ideals long after it has faded from living memory because its consumers and sponsors find value in the ideal detached from whatever reality is then offered by way of "application." That universities engage in this behavior ought not to surprise, especially as these institutions have been urged to adopt the outlooks and ideologies--the practices--of those businesses into which they mean to project their graduates. Like a "White Christmas" in Miami, the ideal can be consciously embraced even as the reality around it makes even the pretense of attainment laughable. 

The real issue has now shifted from even this ridiculous attempt to market the past as present to a more important one--if the university is no longer to be itself, the question becomes what ought it to be.  There have been two models competing for status as orthodox institutional form. The first s the model of the for profit business corporation. That model is appealing if only because it s ends are all bent to making money--and money is what university administrators are now trained to chase--if only for the best things that it can buy for those from whom fees and tuition (and donations later) are extracted.  The problem is that the university does not resemble a business enterprise culturally or in its operation. While it produces things (degrees,for example) it is better understood as managing people toward objectives and then placing them. The model, then, is one that is more like an administrative agency in a state bureaucracy, than of a business in a purely (of course there is no such thing as pure anything anymore) markets based environment.

The successful university administrator is one that is both fungible and anonymous.  They are cogs in a bureaucratic machine the logic of which must be furthered.They are risk averse and exercise their discretion to minimize risk and manage compliance with those rules and cultures that conform to benchmark.  They become a closed circle in which innovation is the ability to better mimic everyone else (that everyone, of course is hierarchically arranged as universities adhere to a caste culture every bit as rigid as those of ancient societies). With university administrators as a modern Western version of the old nomenklaturas, then it appears that the model most compatible with a university that no longer can afford to be itself(the old ideal),must be that of the charitable foundation. It follows that charitable foundations--institutionalized patrons, would also dominate their stakeholding classes and serve not just as a source of imitation but as the institution most likely to have influence over university administrative (and ultimately substantive) cultures.  One has seen the effects of this in other contexts (e.g., here, and here).  But the control of the ethos of a university is indeed something quite new and remarkable. Thus it is not the corporatization of the university that ought to be feared--it is the conversion of the university into a foundation overseen by a private sector regulatory apparatus in which the core administrative values of ability, risk aversion, compliance and conformity to orthodox views and institutional objectives, narrowly drawn, become the lodestars of academic culture. 

Jacob Howland has stepped into this battlefield with a great deal of vigor and much to say.  His focus ison the University of Tulsa as the great exemplar of change--and in his view not for the better. His passionate original essay, Storm Clouds Over Tulsa, was published in City Journal and appeared 17 April 2019.  It was reproduced along with my own brief comments  here (A Report From the Front Lines of the Transformation of the American University: Jacob Howland, "Storm Clouds Over Tulsa"). is reproduced (without the embedded pictures) below. 

Professor Howland continues his archeology of the university necropolis.  His current essay, Corporate Wolves in Academic Sheepskins, or, a Billionaire’s Raid on the University of Tulsa, published June 18 in The Nation magazine, delves deeper into the case study that is the University of Tulsa.  Whether one agrees or not, the story he tells must be necessarily considered.  It follows below. 

A Report From the Front Lines of the Transformation of the American University: Jacob Howland, "Storm Clouds Over Tulsa"

In April 2019, Jacob Howland, wrote a blistering analysis of the great institutional transformations that are occurring at the University of Tulsa. This was no ordinary Jeremiad by someone easily dismissed as a failure within the (teaching side) of the academy. Professor Howland is the McFarlin Professor of Philosophy and past Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Tulsa where he teaches in the Honors Program as well as in philosophy.

The Essay is remarkable for a number of reasons beyond the lamentation about the way in which university programs are being transformed, and the relationship of the university to its athletic and professional programs. Equally interesting to readers ought to be the way in which such transformation has been occurring without the substantial participation of the faculty. That has substantial ramifications. It evidences the continuing transformation of the education side of the university.  First it is no longer necessarily the principle undertaking of an institution--the production of athletic events and professionals readily who might be inserted into higher end portions of the wage labor markets might now be as important, if not more so. It also suggests again that markets rather than knowledge drive the business of education, and that the business of knowledge production is deeply tied to its direct power to generate revenue. While that is well known, the shift from long term to short term calculation  is less well appreciated, though its effects on the way in which American business has been shaped is well known.  Now those birds have come home to roost in the academy.  It also suggests the way that cultures of administration, rather than cultures of knowledge production and dissemination have now come to dominate the operation of the university.  The effects are profound. And apparently in the case of the University of Tulsa, the effects might not be economically viable.

But that opens the real question behind the essay--for whom is the university operated, whose interests does it serve, and to what ends is it run.  One answer may be the trustees and large foundations  who are willing to fund enterprises to please themselves irrespective of the economic (much less academic) consequences? Ironically, while this reduces the role of faculty (and the influence of the academic.side of the house to irrelevance, to a passive object of production), it also reduces administrators to a more servile role (they also perform for their masters). This ultimately provides the most interesting insight of the essay (for me at least)--is it possible that the real transformation of the American academy is not in the shifting of authority from faculty to administrators, but in the transformation of the academy itself from a self-controlled institution, to one in which authority has shifted outward. We know where some of that authority has leaked out--to the state (regulatory authorities can be as fickle and capricious as any patron, and even more politically motivated).  But authority appears also to have leaked to foundations and other actors  whose control of money increasingly shapes the academy form the outside (without preference for political ideology, just financial power politically exercised). Those are some of the ideas that swirled through my head as I read the essay.  But I leave it to readers to make what sense they can from the essay.       

His Essay, Storm Clouds Over Tulsa, was published in City Journal and appeared 17 April 2019.  It is reproduced (without the embedded pictures) below.  The original may be access here.

Higher Education Trends for 2018: Relfections on " Saddle Up: 7 Trends Coming in 2018" Plus Six of My Own

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2018 ("The Chariot" Visconti Tarot))

It has become something of a ritual for  people to engage in prediction--what I call the oracular function of influence or drivers--in virtually all sectors of production, including the higher education industry.   Prediction serves a variety of functions--it draws attention to specific issues; it helps order these issues into hierarchies of importance; it helps to frame the narrative, that is the way in which such issues are understood and discussed; it provides a window on the issues that those in control of the affected institutions are worried about--it reveals institutional fears;  and of course it enhances position of those in the business of prediction within the webs of influence in the sectors in which they are embedded (or through which they are trying to make a living). 

Julie A. Peterson and Lisa M. Rudgers (co-founders of Peterson Rudgers Group, a consulting firm focused on higher education strategy, leadership and brand) recently considered a set of important trends in the higher education business for 2018--"Saddle Up: 7 Trends Coming in 2018," Inside Higher Education (2 Jan. 2018). This complemented their oracular efforts of 2017 (trends coming for 2017).  Their predictions are worth considering carefully. They hit the mark in several important ways: (1) identification of key issues that university officials will likely confront; (2) the way in which such official will likely approach the issues and their "resolution"; and (3) the narrative around the issues from out of which an understanding of how to think about these issues are developed.  Identification, response, narrative control are the three key elements that will define  the administrative "to do" list and control the orthodox way of understanding, thinking about and speaking to those issues. 

This post briefly considers the seven issue identified by Peterson and Rudgers and then offers additional trends that will have a high impact on the education business in 2018. 

Limiting Access to Faculty Organization Archives and Records--When Administrative Gatekeepers Abuse Their Authority and Undermine Shared Governance

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

Universities are well known as great centers of knowledge production and dissemination.  Faculty tend to be at the center of the production of both.  But like other industries, administrators have increasingly assumed a larger role in the management of exploitation of knowledge production and dissemination by and through faculty to the greater glory of the institution.  In the process there has been an increasingly large distance created between those who produce university wealth (faculty) and those who manage those productive forces and their product (the administrator) who produces no wealth. 

Administrators produce a very different kind of knowledge than that produced by faculty. Administrators generate data from the productive work of others.  And that data is then used either to (1) increase the productivity of wealth producers (appropriating the entirety of such increases in wealth per productive unit to the institution and their greater glory) or (2) ensure the separation of the means of production of knowledge-wealth (faculty) from its control  (invested increasingly in an administrator class with no connection to knowledge production). 

Within these new forms of production and control--the ownership of information, especially the ownership of information relating to the wealth production of the university becomes among its most valuable commodities. It is valuable especially in the sense that it represents the ownership fo the power to control the wealth generation by the university and to direct its form and expression.  Information, then is power.  Information, in this sense, is power. 

This relationship between information, its control and power over an institution suggests bath the emerging hierarchical character of the university and the way that appropriation of control is used to reduce the role of knowledge producers to share in the governance of the university and in the control of their own knowledge production and dissemination. But this emerging relationship, as troubling as it may be int he context of shared governance, faculty de-professionalization, and the administrative control of a university becomes a tragedy when the same pattern is used by the administrators of a faculty organization against its own members. 

This post speaks to the issue, increasingly problematic of administrators of faculty organizations from access to the archives of their own institutions.  

"We Know You Are Busy and Wanted to Avoid Burdening You With This" -- More Techniques that Undermine Shared Governance in the Contemporary University

(Brochymena, Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2015)

I have been considering the ways in which administrators undermine shared governance in effect without appearing to challenge the forms by which it is undertaken. Undermining shared governance rather than challenging the authority of faculty to engaged in shared governance avoids the politically costly effort to eliminate formal structures (and the discussions it might require). More importantly, it preserves faculty as a tool, a resource, for governance without having to acknowledge any governance authority beyond those wielded by administrators. One uses tools; one negotiates with governance partners.

I have posted thoughts of my list of the top ten techniques that administrations currently have deployed to undermine shared governance ("You Don't Have the Authority": Counting Down the Top Ten Techniques that Undermine University Shared Governance). I added a shorter list of honorable mentions ("We Abhor Retaliation But Expect Loyalty to Our Decisions" -- Techniques that Undermine University Shared Governance, the Honorable Mentions and the Deeper Issues they Reveal).  I noted then:

That the techniques are not necessarily developed to subvert shared governance for its own sake hardly absolves an administration that on the one hand heralds its embrace of shared governance and on the other engages in radical industry transforming actions that enhance structures in which faculty become "knowledge workers" on an assembly line the principal purpose of which seems to be the "production" of units (students) ready fr insertion in labor markets at a level commensurate with the reputation of the university itself. (Ibid.)

This post adds to the list of honorable mentions of techniques that did not make the original two lists. They are the synthesized expression of  experiences from a number of different institutions. 

1. "We Know You Are Busy and Wanted to Avoid Burdening You With This."
2. The Absent Administrator and Ghosting the Faculty Organization .
3. "We promise to get that information to you right away."

I will continue adding to the list, please send me additional techniques I might have missed (and perhaps prudently via personal email from a non-university computer using non-university provided internet service.

On the Proper Role of University Administrators as Members of a Faculty Senate: Do Voting Rights Subvert the Institution of Faculty Governance?

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

University faculty organizations serve as the institutional voice of the faculty in the complex but important operation of shared governance. This role distinguishes universities from other corporate enterprises, and brings them closer to models of public organizations in which principles of democratic participation are essential for the legitimacy of the organization and its operations (e.g., On the Institutional Role of a Faculty Senate: Part 1(May 4, 2012)). 

The essence of the institutional character of faculty organizations is its role as a representative of the faculty and its perspectives.  That representative role can be preserved only to the extent that the faculty organization itself is controlled by and reflects the will of the faculty, especially in its relations with other stakeholders, principally the administration of the university. Under this model of shared governance, faculty, administration, and board of trustees are three distinct actors which together comprise the critical institutional elements of governance.

Yet in some public research universities, the representative role of the faculty organization has been challenged.  In some of these institutions, there has been efforts, sometimes successful, to include within the faculty organization a substantial number of voting members who represent the administration within the faculty organization itself.  This post considers the issue of administration membership within a faculty organization, its effects on shared governance, and advances a suggestion that recasts the role of the administration and its officials within a faculty organization. 

Just Because it is Legal Doesn't Make it Right--The Extension of University Control of Employee "Outside Business Activity"

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The evolution of the legal rules constraining the terms  through which labor may be purchased in the West had seen a long evolution--from villeinage and indenture (slavery for some) to service in the form of the sale of labor to a master who is empowered by law to manage and control the person whose services have been purchased.  That employment relation, that relationship between master and servant is hierarchical and personal in a way that the relationship between investor and enterprise is not--capital is invested but not purchased and performs no service beyond offering the value obtained and a forbearance of repayment for a time certain. Echoes of the the more comprehensive notions of service, and of the role of the servant, remain visible today in the scope of discretionary authority the law permits to a "master" to regulate the non working lives of employees to the extent it might interfere with its business and operations--as those are conceived by the employer. For at will employees, of course, the legal master-servant relation is to permit the master (though technically both have the power) to terminate employment for any reason--and in the master's case, to condition employment on a host of criteria, subject only to the constraints of other law, contract, or at the extreme, constitutional limitations. 

The master-servant relationship exits within the university as well.  For faculty, however, the operation of the master-servant relation has been constrained both by contract and by the scope of the interpretation of the twin principles of academic freedom and shared governance.  These have sometimes proven to be strong protection in the absence of statute or policy.  Other times, their protection has been somewhat less powerful.  Beyond the legal constraints lie a powerful policy conversation that has been shaping the societal consensus relating to the propriety of the exaction of conditions for work that touch on the non working life of the employee. These have tended to push toward a growing societal disapproval of the assertion of employer power reaching into the private lives of employees. At the same time, universities across the United States have sought to expand the boundaries of the definition--and thus the protection--of their interests in the intellectual prowess represented by the individuals whose services they have purchased for the provision of customary teaching, research and service duties.  Where once universities were principally concerned about the protection of its interests in the face of patents and related innovation and the opening of businesses by mostly scientists and engineers seeking to exploit ideas nurtured through the university, and to constrain the scope of professional practice by its lawyers, architects, musicians, etc., now the university seeks to control well beyond these simple and direct activities.  It is at the intersection of these two opposing societal movements that university policy relating to the control of faculty outside business activity meet.

Many of these issues have been dealt with relatively uniformly by contemporary large research universities across the United States.  This post considers one hypothetical example of this effort in that light and the Commentary of Professor Hypothetical in light of that effort.  It is a hypothetical example only; but it presents issues that touch on such efforts across the nation.  As a generic model it will be presented as the efforts of Public University (PU), a land grant University in the State of Republic,  in the development of a Labor Policy (LRX) that seeks to manage employee business activities in the context of a new model. 

Proposing a Set of Guiding Principles for Operating Health Care Plans in the Contemporary U.S. University

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There is a new orthodoxy in the development of benefits plans.  Universities now appear to march in lock step both with respect to the forms and the socialization techniques that they use to purchase and then market their "benefits" products to their captive consumers--the populations of employees who are given little choice and whose employment sometimes depends on their willingness to pretend they like the stuff they are made to consume.  Perhaps it is a function of the markets for benefit plans that have emerged over the last half century.  Universities, like larger corporations , tend to purchase either off the shelf "manufactured" plans, or they cobble them together from benefit programs peddled by professional plan designers and managers--the same industry to appears to sell benefit bits and pieces to every large enterprise in this country. 

There are benefits to buying manufactured plans, such as there are benefits to purchasing manufactured foods in the grocery stores.  First there tends to be a lot of them,.  They have long shelf lives.  They are easy to consume.  "Everyone" is consuming them--that is all one can talk about at gatherings of benefits plan consumers, the way the aisles of supermarkets are clogged with people whose carts are stuffed with manufactured consumables. And for the most part they are not very good for you in the long run.

That does not prevent people for engorging themselves on manufactured food.  It does nothing to prevent universities and enterprises from feeding off of these prepacked plans--and then try to sell them to their stakeholders usually using many of the strategies that have also been manufactured for that purpose by and with the aid of those selling the stuff in the first place. Eventually universities and enterprises, like people, come to believe what they have been sold, and become wholly dependent on these manufactured products.  That new normal makes alternatives--better and healthier in the long run--pricier and less available.  And that scarcity then becomes the greatest selling point for the perspectives (the ingredients) that are used to manufacture these products.  

As a consequences, as I have noted before (Benefits May Not Be Accessed!: Penn State and the Transformation of Benefits Policy in the Contemporary American Public University): (1) universities begin to think of themselves as insurance companies not institutions providing a benefit to employees with substantial positive effect on their operations; (2) the benefit itself is either viewed as a cost or profit center rather than as a value added to the operation and sustainability of the institution; (3) benefits are viewed as an instrument to manage the behaviors of employees on and off work; (4) plan administrators develop an obsession with cost--and indeed all benefits are increasingly viewed through the lens of cost and its mitigation--either by reducing access to payouts or by managing the behaviors of beneficiaries; (5) the ultimate aim, subconscious no doubt, is to view administrative objectives not in providing the best plan given fair valuation but to reduce the costs of the provisions of benefits while maintaining or increasing employee productivity.  The result is an odd situation in which the benefits of health care plans are undervalued and its cots overvalued--where costing is privileged as a driver of plan design and institutional benefit is subsumed within a leveling hyper focus on cost rather than value.That, of course, follows from the way in which manufacturers of plans tend to conceptualize the enterprise of health care construction, which is driven in part by its conceptualization by a financial side of the university house. These plans, then, get it half right. 

Yet it is possible to conceive of healthier alternatives to the manufactured  for profit plans that are peddled by the industry in which universities shop for the benefits they mean to bring "home."  The purpose of this report is to recommend core principles for the design of university health care plans. It offers four key principles that university benefit plans should embrace to make them better--to avoid the deleterious effects of the proffered for profit variations on manufactured benefit products, for something that adds value to the university as well as for the employee.

Part 1 Penn State Law: The Public Face of Diversity--The Example of Penn State

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Diversity has become an important element of operations at the American University.  It has become a priority for governance at most research universities.

At Penn State diversity has been embedded at the core of the strategic planning of the university on both pragmatic (demographics) and normative (morals) grounds. Among the challenges identified by Penn State in its project of enhancing diversity touches on communication--both to stakeholders nd the wider community (see, e.g., here). is  This post and those that follow will consider the public face of Penn State's diversity efforts.  It will look at the way that Penn State's units have embedded diversity in their communications by looking at diversity on the web sites of Penn State's units.  The purpose is simple--the way a university projects itself provides a good means of understanding how the university sees itself.  In light of the President's commitment, it would be useful to examine the way that diversity appears throughout Penn State.  This post provides a short introduction to the character of that public face from the top of the administrative hierarchy.  In the posts that follow, we will consider how each of Penn State's units projects its own image of its engagement with diversity in light of official and public face of diversity at Penn State.

The object is not just to get a sense of the collective self projection of this important issue an an important an influential university.  It also serves to see the extent to which diversity can be administered in a coherent manner throughout a large and complex institution.  Do all units approach the issue the same way? Do all units share the same approaches to diversity as the central administration suggests they should?  What are the variations in approaches?  These and other related questions will be posed and considered.  Comments, suggestions, and additional insights are welcome as we work through the theory and practice of diversity at major institutions.

This post starts with Penn State Law.

The Table of Contents may be accessed HERE.

"Now THIS is Shared Governance"; "NOW this is shared Governance"; "Now this IS Shared Governance": Embedding Faculty Within the Bureaucratic Machinery of Authoritarian Regimes

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The American university has changed.  A combination of (1) de-professionalization (in the form of dis aggregating  faculty responsibilities among a number of roles and limiting tenure to a remnant), (2) advancement of autonomous administrator cultures (senior administrators are socialized into an administrator caste system whose highest interest is to perpetuate itself and its own status interests), and (3) the change in the mission of universities from providing education (understood in what was its classical meaning of preparing individuals for citizenship and vocation) to efficiently producing suitable "product" for wage labor markets (targeted to different spots on that wage labor market depending on the position of the university within the industry) has transformed it into a point in global labor production chains. While hints of the classical American university might be preserved--something either as a "proof" that things are still the same, or for the production of elements slotted for elite responsibilities in society, markets, politics, defense, technology or religion, university administrators now serve as overseers of a distinctly different "human value added" production process. One might lament the change, but it is far too late for nostalgia--the ramifications of this foundational change must be recognized as embedded for some time to come.

With this change, of course, comes changes in the nature of the relationship between faculty and the administrator caste with respect to the operation of this "learning factory." No longer the most authoritative source of knowledge about either knowledge or programs of training for students to impart this knowledge, faculty are increasingly seen as little more than the operational element of market driven verities of knowledge and its transmission. Operating in the form of collegial "senates"--a Roman republican form grounded in deliberation, but one less useful in those more authoritarian regimes that mark the structures and cultures emerging as the new university governance architecture--traditional forms of faculty shared governance are becoming increasingly irrelevant, and indeed, burdensome, in an authoritarian learning factory model of education.  Senates are increasingly brushed aside or co-opted--not because they are incapable but because the ideology that made their operation so useful has been brushed aside in favor of another in which a vigorous Senate can play no vibrant and autonomous role.

This post considers a hypothetical drawn from a number of imagined strands of possible behaviors at public universities.  The hypothetical illustrates the contours of change in shared governance at the everyday and operational level.  It also suggests the ramifications for what might remain of effective faculty engagement in what is becoming the baseline cultures of American educational society.  It suggests both the context and character of the growing erosion of faculty authority--and its inevitability in the new educational order.

Unionization of Fixed Term/Contingent Faculty and the Abandonment of Shared Governance--The View From the University of Chicago

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I have been suggesting that shared governance in the modern American university is failing. That failure is a function of fundamental changes in social expectations of universities, in the effect of the changes in the composition of university faculties (introducing a class element to labor structures), in the reactionary response of faculties unreasonably holding on to past ideals now effectively abandoned, and to university administrators eager to reject the classical model of collaborative governance in favor of the (more efficient) hierarchical corporate model of diffused governance in which accountability becomes easier to avoid.

These changes appear to move the university to the adoption of 20th century corporate factory models of administration and operation.    And the consequence of the adoption of that form will have an inevitable consequence for labor--the move toward unionization of a "deprofessionalized" cadres of knowledge workers seeking to protect their interests against exploitation by the operators of learning factories.  These effects are now quite visible among the most elite American universities.  The contingent and fixed term faculty at the University of Chicago have now begun a process that might lead to the unionization of their ranks (Maudlyne Ihejirika, University of Chicago's nontenured faculty file to unionize, Chicago Sun-Times, Oct. 29, 2015) (portions reproduced below).    

This post considers the inevitable move toward unionization and suggests that it may point to a radical change in the nature of the university and its abandonment of a collaborative for an adversarial model of governance. It suggests the way these changes may point to the need to restructure the operations and objectives of faculty governance institutions  in this new administrative and operational climate.

Faculty Complicity in Undermining Shared Governance--A Hypothetical For a Large Public University

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Faculty governance depends, in large part, on the willingness of administration and faculty to bear the burdens of cooperation, consultation and compromise in furthering the mission of the university. That, in turn, is based in part on a further burden--the burden of undertaking institutional governance. For faculty, especially that involves the burden of collective governance responding to and assessing administrative actions, as well as in the traditional domains of faculty governance--courses, curriculum, and faculty tenure and promotion. In other words, while administration is institutionally designed for efficient operation, through the institution of hierarchical chain-of-command based operation, faculty governance is institutionally designed for inclusion and engagement in a necessarily inefficient meeting of relative equals gathered for collaborative decision making, consultation, action, and calling administration to account (see, e.g., here and here). 

Those foundational differences in institutional organization and operation cause conflict in collaboration, consultation and accountability.  Administration is built for speed, faculty governance is not.  Most often, that produces incentives to end run faculty (on efficiency grounds) or to cabin its engagement to those matters with respect to which administration views as of little importance to its leadership and command role (discussed here).

But faculty have also been socialized to belief in a hierarchy of values in governance that place efficiency and command and control structures well above the value of collaboration, debate and the processes of holding administration publicly to account.  To the extent that faculty view the logic of its own organization and operation as inefficient, it contributes to the undermining of its role in effective faculty governance by conceding that faculty impede rather than enhance governance by the very logic of its operational modes. 

This post includes a hypothetical example of the sort of complicit undermining of robust faculty governance that results when individual faculty seek to undo the core methods and techniques that are central to faculty governance.  The method is simple--importing values of efficiency and chain-of-command to faculty governance. The tragedy is that this may be done without thinking through implications or rather perhaps unconscious of their socialization into administrative cultures,or it may suggest the sort of systemic corruption that is itself something that may undermine faculty governance more profoundly still.

Presentation: "Institutionalization of Faculty Role in Shared Governance: The Faculty Senate at Penn State University"

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Last week I was pleased to have been invited to speak to Chinese and Japanese academics about the concept of shared governance from its origins, through its golden age to the challenges that have emerged in recent years (for more see, here, here, here, here, here, and here). The focus of the study was the organization, operation and challenges of the University Faculty Senate at Pennsylvania State University.

The group of administrators and graduate students was organized by Hideto Fukudome, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education, The University of Tokyo. More about the group here.

The PowerPoint Slide of the presentation, "Institutionalization of the Faculty Role in Shared Governance: The Faculty Senate at Penn State University," may be accessed HERE:

A transcript of the presentation follows: