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 .

Announcing Publcation of the AAUP Journal Academe 106(2) (Spring 2020) "In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education"

The spring 2020 issue of Academe, inspired by the AAUP’s statement In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, examines the complexities—conceptual, critical, structural, and political—of the production of knowledge. Joan W. Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, served as the guest editor of this special issue of the magazine.

Follow the links in the table of contents below or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/spring-2020.

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FEATURES

Rebellion, Authority, and Knowledge
Disciplined thought and expertise are essential to the advancement of knowledge.By Robert Post

The Big Secret in the Academy Is That Most Research Is Secret
The dangerous rift between open and classified research.By Kate Brown

A Dissenting View from the Humanities on the AAUP’s Statement on Knowledge
In defense of critical inquiry.
By Judith Butler

Dialogue across Divides
The humanities can provide understanding across disciplines.By Joy Connolly

Academic Freedom as Democratization
Faculty must be involved in all aspects of university decision-making.By Christopher Newfield

Data Snapshot: Survey Data on Attitudes toward Faculty Freedom of Expression(online only)
How might political views influence attitudes toward academic freedom?
By Hans-Joerg Tiede

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BOOK REVIEWS

Snowflakes and Syllabi
Brian Hutler reviews What Snow­flakes Get Right by Ulrich Baer.

Understanding Students Who Are Parents
Jillian M. Duquaine-Watson reviews Back in School by A. Fiona Pearson.

Liberal Education Needs Integration, Not Unbundling
Rebecca Pope-Ruark reviews College Made Whole by Chris W. Gallagher.

Should Only the Strong Survive?
Lawrence Stelmach and Allison A. Buskirk-Cohen review Strategic Mergers in Higher Education by Ricardo Azziz, Guilbert C. Hentschke, Lloyd A. Jacobs, and Bonita C. Jacobs.

Rebalancing Power in the Gig Academy
Roger G. Baldwin reviews The Gig Academy by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott. 

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CHAPTER PROFILE

Rutgers University AAUP-AFT

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COLUMNS

From the Editor: The Politics of Knowledge

From the President: Eight Years of Organizing for Change

Legal Watch: Two Cases to Watch

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NOTA BENE

Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

2019–20 Faculty Compensation Survey Data

Graduate Employees Strike at UCSC

The spring 2020 issue of Academe, inspired by the AAUP’s statement In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, examines the complexities—conceptual, critical, structural, and political—of the production of knowledge. Joan W. Scott, professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, served as the guest editor of this special issue of the magazine.

Follow the links in the table of contents below or read the entire issue at https://www.aaup.org/issue/spring-2020.

COVID-19 and the University: If you Run the University Like a Commercial Enterprise Don't Be Surprised When Your Customers Sue You for Lack of Service--Brandmeyer v. Regents

Students Sue CSU, UC Systems Over Refunds Of Campus Fees

University propaganda departments have for years nurtured the myth that they can at once be hard headed businesses and at the same time the champions and protectors of some sort of ideal non-commercial Elysian space in which students and faculty might romp in the glorious fields of knowledge creaiton and dissemination undisturbed by the machinery that keeps that enterprise running.

It was both a grand illusion and one increasingly belied by the ways in which university administrators from middle mangers (deans and the equivalent) to high level central administration officials began, like cannibal mice, to gnaw away at the foundations of an institution that for a time  held that dual vision together. In the name of hard headedness a generation of administrators (many though not all of them once academics (though to call them that after a few years in administration is to stretch the concept beyond recognition, especially as they began to see themselves as a distinct social element in the ecology of the university, see, e.g., here) have engaged, among other things,  (1) in the deprofessionalization of the faculty and the substitution of technology enhanced (cheaper and higher profit) learning for increasingly creaky traditional methods of delivery and engagement, (2) in the expansion of the business of the university to include a number of different profit centers (dorms, parking, summer camps, etc,); (3) move from a learning centered to a compliance and risk mitigating fundamental operating mode in which administrators became more valuable (and less fungible) than faculty; and (4) like banks and airlines (two other hard headed businesses in their retail operations)  in the fracturing of pricing models so that students were faced a number of fees beyond tuition, room and board for "value added" services. 

The university was at its best in its rationalization of these revolutionary transformations.  Most successful was their ability to convince everyone that there was no transformation at all--the university was no different than it was in the 1960s, except perhaps that its appointments were more luxurious and its techniques more "up to date." Yet these transformations were not inexpensive (except of course for faculty whose existence constantly depressed the ability to use university income for other, and perhaps, higher, purposes. 

Faculty has been particularly slow in learning the lessons of the modern university and obtuse about the way in which it has transformed their position within this business.

Customers, especially students, however, have learned these lessons much better.  Now COVID-19 has made that lesson learning much more visible.  While the university can shift the "cost" of operations to its faculty and staff, it will find it harder to do so with its students.

Students filed class-action lawsuits against the University of California and California State University systems Monday, demanding refunds of student fees in light of campus closures. The students are suing for a reduction of on-campus services because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but will not sue for the cost of tuition or housing. “University of California’s decision to transition to online classes and to instruct students to leave campus were responsible decisions to make, but it is unfair and unlawful for University of California to retain fees and costs and to pass the losses on to the students and/or their families,” the lawsuit states. The suit was filed on behalf of Claire Brandmeyer, a UC Davis student who left campus in mid-March. The students are suing for refunds of student fees such as the $1,128 UC-wide Student Services Fee paid by UC students, as well as other campus-specific fees. (Students sue UC and CSU systems, demand refunds amid COVID-19 campus closures).

Universities had been more willing to prorate dorm and related costs; but not activities fees. "The universities have been more receptive to refunding or discounting campus dorms, residences and dining plans. UC System President Janet Napolitano outlined in a letter to the legislature, that, “UC is providing students prorated refunds on their housing and dining services agreements in the event they choose to leave on-campus housing" (Students sue California universities over fees lost amid pandemic).

The Complaint in Brandmeyer v. Regents follows below. This is not the only action filed. "To date, higher education institutions the likes of Drexel, the University of Miami, Cornell, Pace, Columbia, Liberty University, Arizona’s state colleges, Vanderbilt and Fordham University have been hit with potential class action litigation over their apparent failure to issue refunds for the COVID-19-shortened Spring 2020 semester." (California Universities Owe Fee Refunds for Pandemic-Shortened Semester, Class Action Suits Say [UPDATE]).

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.

Academic Salaries on the Eve of Pandemic: Data From the AAUP

(Pix credit here) 

The AAUP has provided some interesting salary data for the US academy.  It has no surprises.  De professionalization and the shifting of prestige from the academic to the administrative side of the house are nicely reinforced by the shift of salary increases from faculty to administrators.  As long as the academy continues to indulge the fantasy that administrators are worth more than faculty (presumably because they are fewer and hold more (and increasing authority) there is nothing that will change these trajectories.  

These valuations,. of course, are constructs, grounded in ancient societal presumptions about the value of work and its alignment with authority.  And of course as the authority and autonomy of faculty decrease, a diminution of salary (as the way one expresses value) is also to be expected. Tied to this is the premise that the lower the value of a worker the more likely she is expendable--high value (salaried) administrators, under this premise, are far less expendable (and less likely to be reduced in numbers in the case of financial difficulties, than are lower value (and more plentiful) teaching "staff. But that is exactly how the market has been solidifying for more than a generation. Data and links follow.

Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy: Concurso Estudiantil Jorge Pérez-López 2020/ The Jorge Pérez-López Student Award Competition

I pass along the announcement of the Jorge Pérez-López Student Award Competition that is held concurrently with the Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.  This year the Conference will be held at Florida International University's Cuban Research Institute in mid August.  Information follows. Please pass this along to interested students.

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

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

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

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

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

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