The COVID Wars Continue at Penn State--A Tale of Two Senate Resolutions. . . and the Administration's Counternarrative

 

 

I have been following the sadly patched up disaster that has been the lurching progress toward what passes for policy at Penn State relating to the COVID pandemic (Pandemic and the University: "An Open Letter from Penn State faculty to the Penn State Administration and the Board of Trustees").  Not that any of this could be helped.  All of the actors in this drama have been prisoners (and happily so) of the logic of the positions they occupy since the start of this pandemic, and they frankly know no better than what they are are doing.  But a century from now that will be the epitaph of the first part of this century: here lies homo adminstratus incapable of agency other than to perpetuate the structures of power and culture into which they were willingly thrust. But administrators are not the only university actors trapped within the logic of the structures that they populate.  University faculty also perform to type. That is especially the case for the faculty representatives in its University Senate.  All people of good will--to be sure.  But also all necessarily trapped within the logic of their position and discourses of power and legitimacy which binds each to the other. Faculty also may merit an epitaph of their own: here lies homo complicitus who is trapped by the logic of Esau, famished and willing to sell his birthright to the administrator Jacob for a pot of stew (Gen 25-34).  

The Penn State Administration's choice to privilege the un-vaccinated using the discursive tropes of contemporary anti-discrimination for atmospherics, has produced something of a backlash. That backlash has been strengthened in part because Penn State leadership choices (unlike their usual cautious efforts to fall somewhere hidden in the middle of bench marked decision making) put them somewhere on the right side of the outlier curve. 

That has provided an opening for the University Senate, which to some extent has been formally marginally in the process of developing administratively "sound" policy, within the meaning universe of the university administrative community. The Senate has rushed through that opening.  It has called a special meeting of that body to vote on two resolutions, aptly named Resolution A and Resolution B--offering up of two related versions of a counter narrative, and plan of action, to that marketed by the university administration. 

Resolution A offers a counter approach to the administration's COVID planning for the Fall 20201 Semester. It calls for  an immediate vaccination mandate for eligible Penn State students, faculty, and staff and and demands that, until full vaccination can occur, that the university impose rules for universal mask mandates; twice weekly COVID-19 testing for individuals without proof of vaccination; and adherence to CDC recommendations.  

Resolution B serves the purpose of condemning the current administrative approach. It os based on the obvious--the faculty was cut out of the process of decision making. It then seeks an affirmative vote of NO CONFIDENCE  in the University’s COVID-19 Plan for Fall 2021. That s followed by a more meek request to be included in whatever revised decision making process might be triggered as a result of the vote.

That the university's leadership core takes this serious might be evidenced by a last minute appeal to the faculty in the form of an "open letter" signed by the University's president. It s a marvelous statement of its kind.  At the same time its discursive allegiance to the forms and sensibilities of the administrative milieu evidences both the increasing gap that is now apparent in the way that faculty and administration approach an issue, and as well the differences in the way that risk is valued by those who bear the risk but have no control over risk versus those who control the risk but effectively can avoid bearing the risk. 

The Presidents narrative is detached (though the words are meant to suggest caring, at least form a distance)  and Olympian.  It speaks from above conveying the sense of those burdened with the balancing of factors in a "greater game" of which the productive forces of the university (faculty, staff, buildings, services) play a role. The Senate narrative is risk based as well, but from the perspective of risk bearers the discursive form is more personal and more immediate. The Senate balances risk on their bodies; the administration bases its risk calculus on abstractions--important abstractions to be sure, but bloodless, ledger entries within ideological structures of compliance and accountability regimes.  That remoteness, of course, diminishes the micro risks of those who must bear responsibility for the operation of the ecologies of principles that the administration seeks to advance.  And it ignores the anger of a professional caste once central to the running of the university that increasingly is recast in hyper technical functionaries and transformed into live ingots that serve as one factor in the production of university welfare. 

But decide for yourselves. In the immediate term the issue is simple enough--what and how does the university value most among the factors the university administrators balance, ad whose voices count (and how) in that balancing. 

The text of the two Senate Resolutions. along with the text of the Presidential Open Letter follow.

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.

Now Available Vol 107(2) of the AAUP's Academe Magazine and its Vision for an Academic "New Deal"

 

 

Spring 2021 | Vol. 107, No. 2

Times of crisis always seem to bring out that fundamental and powerful human response of looking back toward a golden age, whose re-establishment in contemporary form is thought to be essential for successfully overcoming crisis. The darker the present, the more powerful the urge to look to the past for the ideal that the future is tasked to recapture.

Al societies appear to have a golden age somewhere in their cultural back pocket--and sometimes elements of society, important social actors, have very specific eddies of "gold" that they can mine within these rapidly receding times that look better and better as they move farther and farther from out experiences. 

So it is with the world of the American academic community.  In the face of a crisis, and the likley end of a century of more of less stable ideals of university education, a crisis with respect to which  there is more than enough complicity to go around involving all of the academy's major stakeholders, even the complicit can look back and seek to replicate in modern form the essence of a past age which in retrospect now looks so appealing. 

To that end, the American academy has sought solace in the Great Depression, and in the transformative changes that occurred then (judged in the rear view mirror of time of course) --now transposed in ways that are acceptable to modern sensibilities, to the contemporary age and its contemporary problems.   Thus Academe's marvelously valuable Vol. 107(2).  Whether or not one is open to the vision that its many essays develop, the volume itself serves as an extraordinary testimony not just to the times, but also to the passing of an age.  And it is in the shadow of the hope that these essays advance, that one might see the darker forms of what actually lies ahead for the American academy. Links to the articles follow below.

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.

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.

 

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 Elite University Administrator-Priest and Orthodox American Civic Religion: David Westbrook, "The Church of Harvard A Reading of President Bacow’s “What I Believe”"

From the end of the 19th century the American political vanguard (civilized Americans at the top of whatever then passed for hierarchies of power), like their Marxist-Leninist analogues, have been driven toward civic values as a means of civilizing the masses of migrants now grown powerful through the discovery of the power of disciplined voting. This informal but well organized vanguard group, our American aristocracy, continues to work diligently to develop an orthodox civic religion through which they could oversee the transformation of the American masses into something like the ideal American (the way that Marxist Leninist vanguards seek to develop the ideal worker, or the ideal socialist citizen). It was to be grounded in the articulation of authoritative meaning in the form of the core principles of the American nation. The application of its principles were to be protected (and interpreted) by an alliance of industrialists, financiers, elite lawyers and judges, high government officials, and the leaders of the leading universities. 

That alliance produced a powerful engine for meaning making, and the making of the American sense of itself well solidified in something like its present form just in time for the global unrest unleashed by the first post World War 2 generation eager to translate the principles of the American Republic so carefully developed  by these elites in ways better suited to their own desires.  This collective meaning making was to be enveloped in the language of the core principles of the American political economic model--democracy, stake holding, participation, inclusion, elections, and the like.

But this movement  also produced a substantial divide, the ruptures of which manifesting first in more benign form from the rebellion of Barry Goldwater to the election of Ronald Reagan, and then in its fully mature form with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Still, the old aristocratic vanguard held together. Its priesthood remained deeply embedded within the societal institutions that drove and shaped cultural narrative. Now allied with sectors of the tech industry, the vanguard could more easily leverage its interventions, and use societal techniques to ensure the privileged position of the orthodoxy over the application of which they presided. To a large extent it is still true that failure to embrace the orthodox position can serve to effectively block any real chance for someone to rise with social, economic, religious and political hierarchies.But reactive forces ought not to be underestimated as rising cunter vanguards emerge.

Within the traditional vanguard united front, the university has always played a key role.  The university served, in substantial respect, as the magisterium of the American civic religion, and the professorate its priests.  That has changed since the 1960s.  The role of priest may still be undertaken by the professorate, but it is the high university official, the leading administrator, that has taken for herself the role of "higher" priest in the Church of Academic verities. And even as that has occurred, sites of resistance has also manifested, sites that seek to produce a counter narrative, one embraced  by a reforming faction, even within the university.

These are the themes that are superbly considered in David A. Westbrook marvelous essay.  Entitled "The Church of Harvard A Reading of President Bacow’s “What I Believe”" the essay first appeared in Medium on 31 May 2020.  The essay is very well worth reading for  its many insights into the complex interweaving of collective meaning making, the academy, its administrators, and the management of social narrative. 

Professor Westbrook has kindly permitted me to re-post his marvelous essay.  It follows below. The original may be accessed HERE.  His bio also follows.

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 .