Shadow Work in the University--Administrative Requirements as a Barrier to Productive Work at the University and a Suggested Response from Faculty at Cornell

(Cornell University, Report of the College of Arts and Sciences Committee on Streamlining Research Administration, 2015)

Existing and new policies run the risk of a hidden cost – increasing the time required by faculty and/or staff for compliance. While this cost may be justified by the risk or benefit underlying the policy, the gradual accretion of these small burdens decreases the productivity of both faculty and staff and that makes it more difficult to pursue the academic mission. Moreover, without examining the time required for compliance, it is impossible to fully understand the cost-benefit of any existing or new policy. (Cornell, Stay Informed)

This is how Cornell University, through the efforts of its faculty and the cooperation of its administrators, has sought to frame the issue of bureaucratic creep that has marked at least one aspect of the transformation of post secondary education as an industry in the 21st century. It is a reminder that administrative creep emerges because of the increasing task for risk management and transparency to outside constituencies and public regulators. It evidences an overlooked manifestation of administrative creep within the risk management university--the rise of responsibilities to feed the administrative machinery with data necessary to fuel the functioning of the administrative apparatus. (The Riskless University and the Bureaucratization of Knowledge: From "Indiana Jones" to Central Planning). At Cornell is is references as "Overzealous Risk Management, which paralyzes research function" (Report, 2015, p. 2).

Cornell has done more than document the way that the burden of a growing administration with an engorged portfolio has increasingly fallen to faculty.  There is a lesson here for many universities--and not just Research 1 institutions.  The most important lesson is one that touches on shared governance in risk management:

These faculty and staff stakeholders should not be called in as advisors in the development of the procedure. Rather, they need to be an integral part of the development process, with the power to prevent the procedure from being implemented until the group as a whole has come to consensus that the proposed procedure is both necessary and as efficient as possible. (Report, 2015, p. 8-9)

This post includes links to the relevant documents produced at and about the efforts to meet the challenge of shadow work at Cornell. 

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.  

Reflections on Human Rights Day: The University, Its Human Rights Obligations, and the U.N. "Stand Up for Someone's Rights! Campaign

(Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, (United States) holding a Declaration of Human Rights Pix © U.N. Photo Library)

On December 10, 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To mark that anniversary, in 1950 the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 423 (V) (4 December 1950), inviting all States and interested organizations to observe 10 December of each year as Human Rights Day. To observe this celebration, President Obama proclaimed "December 10, 2016, as Human Rights Day and the week beginning December 10, 2016, as Human Rights Week. I call upon the people of the United States to mark these observances with appropriate ceremonies and activities." (Presidential Proclamation 9 Dec. 2016).

As has been the recent practice, for this year the United Nations adopted a specific theme and initiated a campaign: "Stand Up For Someone's Rights!" The Campaign is structured around the power of individual agency in protecting the human rights of others against individuals and institutions. The Campaign explains:

The time for this is now. “We the peoples” can take a stand for rights. And together, we can take a stand for more humanity. It starts with each of us. Step forward and defend the rights of a refugee or migrant, a person with disabilities, an LGBT person, a woman, a child, indigenous peoples, a minority group, or anyone else at risk of discrimination or violence. (Campaign website HERE). 

My observations about the 2016 Human Rights Day observation in the context of this campaign can be accessed HERE.

While it is fairly common to think about human rights in terms of the normative rights embedded in and forming part of the autonomous human person, and perhaps also of the resulting obligations of institutional actors--states, enterprises, religious institutions, and others to protect them,  one rarely thinks of the university in this regard.  Yet universities, like other institutions, have duties and responsibilities to protect and respect human rights to the same extent as other institutions--and perhaps more so in cases where the university is itself an instrumentality of the state. To fail to embed human rights within university administration violates not just law but likely the ethical and corporate responsibility that many universities have loudly proclaimed for their own.

This post considers some of the consequences for universities of undertaking an appropriate level of responsibility for human rights in its operation.  I have little illusion that universities will actually pay attention to their responsibility; like other corporate entities, they tend to respond either to the lash of law or to the preferences of the stakeholders on which they are most dependent (students as consumers of its services; employers as consumers of its product (students); and alumni  as providers of resources to maintain reputation status).   It is perhaps to them, then, that this point is directed.

On Being Student Centered--More than the Periodic Aspirational Message is Needed

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

X's mom died of heart disease when she was 16, her father is disabled, and she is his custodian. X cares for her sister's kids when she needs to make extra money to put food on the table. Z's mother died in a car accident when he was 12, with no life insurance, his sister is disabled and he is her care giver in their small apartment. This is all they can afford; to make ends meet and because of the medical equipment required for care, he sleeps on the couch......Today is a bad day; no transportation.  X is lucky.  She managed to borrow a car, no insurance though. X is picking up Z, her study buddy Z so they can both get to class. Without their mutual support, they would be unable to survive the stress of their personal and academic lives. Both X and Z look to their faculty for support but expect nothing from those who run the institution. If our administration had half of the chutzpah of these students...... I am lost here....

These are the circumstances of a significant enough portion of the students who seek the fulfillment of the hope that is at the very center of the promise of post secondary education in contemporary American colleges. How does an academic institution practice being the sort of student centered place that the typical institution trumpets  from the lofty speeches of its administrators to the pages of its social media products? The answer, increasingly is that they may not.

This post considers the problem of being student centered for the contemporary American university and the growing chasm that separates administrative formalism of the concept (through rules and aspirational sentiments) as against its functional realization.

On the U.S. Department of Education Final Program Review Determination Re Penn State's Clery Act Compliance Before 2011 and Its Assessment of a $2.9 Million Fine

"This letter is to inform you that the U.S. Department of Education (Department) intends to fine the Pennsylvania State University (Penn State; the University) a total of $2,397,500 based on the violations of statutory and regulatory requirements outlined below." So begins the official notification, with justification and explanation, of the largest fine assessed to date by the federal government against a university for violation of that cluster of statute and regulation usually shorthanded as the Clery Act.   It is possible that the University will contest this fine, though it is hard to speculate on what grounds. That alone might be cause enough to think about the implications of this fine and its underlying causes, as American universities consider these ramifications for their own operations.

To some extent, the letter, and the action was not unexpected by the wider community in the United States. It was a long time coming--the investigation began almost five years before.  What is especially interesting is both the odd logic of the letter and what it suggests, not about Penn State's failures before 2011, but those of the government itself. Equally interesting, perhaps more so, is the determination of the university itself, in its heroic efforts to move forward, to seek to obliterate the past, one might think, as if it never happened. One can only end an analysis of action and reaction with a sense that the lessons learned may well have been the wrong ones--both for the United States, and for the university it has sought to make an object lesson to advance its own agendas. 

The U.S. Government's letter may be accessed HERE.  

My thoughts follow along with the statement of high University officials follows and for background, the story as reported by the Associated Press.

Without Comment: "Jury orders Penn State to pay McQueary $7.3 million"

(Pix © Larry Catá Backer 2016)

This post requires no comment.  There are strong feeling on either side of this, and it is a small piece of a much larger puzzle that touches on the nature of the modern public university within the cultural transformations in early 21st century U.S. life.

"McQueary's award could grow larger in the coming weeks. Gavin still has to rule on his whistle-blower claim that Penn State ousted him from his $104,000-a-year assistant coaching job because he spoke out about Sandusky and school officials. . . . . Since 2012, the school has paid more than $93 million to settle claims from 32 Sandusky accusers, and university officials have acknowledged the school bears some responsibility to the victims of its former assistant football coach, who is serving a 30- to 60-year prison sentence for the sexual abuse of 10 boys." (Jeremy Roebuck, Jury Orders Penn State to Pay McQueary $7.3 Million, Pilly.com, Oct. 28, 2016).

I note only this: "On the Management of Scandal in the Modern University; Some Lessons and Insights for Times of Crisis" (July 13, 2016).

"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. 

Economic Determinism and the University--Considering Voluntary "Early Retirement Packages" to Tenured Faculty

(Pix LarryCatá Backer 2016)

It is something of a national trend among American universities to offer variations of a standard form of "early retirement program," loosely modeled on those quite common in industry. A recent article in University Business nicely lays out the context and the economic politics of the tactic:

It’s an increasingly common move by campus officials during challenging economic times: voluntary retirement. Offering these incentives to faculty and staff provides a ready means of reducing personnel costs while not being seen as severe and traumatic as layoffs, salary reductions, and furloughs tend to be.

Although the details of such plans vary from one college to the next, they all rest on the potential for shrinking the workforce during times of static or declining budgets.

Even where employees will be replaced, costs may be lowered by using part-timers or hiring less experienced full-time personnel. New employees may also come with less expensive benefit packages than those negotiated in earlier eras. (Mark Rowh, Retiring Minds Want to Know How institutions are making voluntary retirement programs work  University Business (July/August 2012))

 This post considers the trend from the perspective of its collateral effects--first on the way this tactic is used increasingly to systematize fundamental changes in institutional character and operation, and and second on the faculty tempted to take the university up on its offer (academic freedom, and political rights). The "bottom line" is simple enough to state and implicit in the University Business article: the voluntary retirement device is an excellent way for administrators to avoid responsibility for significant change (furthering the "blame the system" mentality that has become standardized in university administrative cultures), but in a way that presents significant traps for the faculty tempted to take the university up on its usually much less valuable than advertised benefit. Faculty should be wary about accepting such "benefits", university faculty senate's should take a more aggressive position in examining the institutional effects of these programs, and university administrators should be held to a higher degree of account for using this indirect lever to remake the institution in a manner to their liking.

Unionization Comes to the Learning Factory: The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Graduate Workers of Columbia– GWC, UAW. Case 02–RC–143012 (August 23, 2016)

Once upon a time, the University was a well ordered enterprise for knowledge production and dissemination.  But it has fractured and been reconstituted along corporate lines as education has become a commodity and the university a factory for the production and deployment of revenue and influence. The two categories--faculty and students--have also fractured.  Faculty have been divided into distinct classes whose politics has substantially eroded both shared governance and the effective protection of academic freedom.   But students have fractured as well.  Where once students were the objects of knowledge dissemination, they are now broken into at least three categories.  The first are the traditional consumer of the university's educational commodity. The other two are deeply transformative.  The first are the student athlete--who provide a valuable source of revenue to the university as a corporate owner of talent exploited in markets for sports entertainment.  The second are student consumers who are also  employed in the knowledge production and dissemination business of the university--the research and teaching assistants who perform much of the lower status research and teaching at the university.  In this capacity they serve simultaneously as a consumer of product (leading to the award of a degree) and as a factor in the production of knowledge or of teaching revenue to the university. 

It should come as no surprise, then, that as the university in transformed into a business, its productive forces would seek the protection of law to enhance their positions as employees or otherwise as holders of valuable commodities (teaching and knowledge) that are inputs in the production of university revenues. For students, protection against exploitation and bargaining for the protection of their interests have taken the form of efforts to unionize--efforts that have been vigorously resisted by the university (as they might by any other business enterprise).   In the efforts to unionize student athletes see here, here, here and here. Indeed, with the 2015 decision of the National Labor Relations Board dismissing efforts of student athletes to forma  union, the idea of the dual status of students within the university--as consumers and as labor--appeared to be rejected.

But the efforts of graduate and undergraduate students to unionize appears to have succeeded where the student athletes failed.  In August 2016, the "National Labor Relations Board issued a 3-1 decision in Columbia University that student assistants working at private colleges and universities are statutory employees covered by the National Labor Relations Act." (NLRB Press  Release). The NLRB holding on Columbia University was clear:

Thus, we hold today that student assistants who have a common-law employment relationship with their university are statutory employees under the Act. We will apply that standard to student assistants, including assistants engaged in research funded by external grants. Applying the new standard to the facts here, consistent with the Board’s established approach in representation cases, we conclude (1) that all of the petitioned-for student- assistant classifications consist of statutory employees; (2) that the petitioned-for bargaining unit (comprising graduate students, terminal Master’s degree students, and undergraduate students) is an appropriate unit; and (3) that none of the petitioned-for classifications consists of temporary employees who may not be included in the unit. Accordingly, we reverse the decision of the Regional Director and remand the proceedings to the Regional Director for further appropriate action.

The issues are far from a stable resolution.  Universities and their lobby will no doubt work the back rooms of legislatures, and the courts have yet to speak.  But it has become increasingly difficult for the university enterprise to run a business--athletic and knowledge based--without the obligation to recognize the character  and identity of its labor force. The fact that students might simultaneously serve in two capacities--as consumers of university products and as the labor used to produce that product--must be recognized and embraced. There are lessons as well here for faculty, especially as the university effectively dismantles shared governance and threatens academic freedom. 

The Press Release issued by the National Labor Relations Board follows along with links to the decision and the documents of the parties.  The decision--The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Graduate Workers of Columbia– GWC, UAW. Case 02–RC–143012 (August 23, 2016) can be accessed HERE.