Americans have an image of the ideal college or university: set among grassy lawns, in an architectural style from the past, away from the roar and bustle of the city. Princeton University, for example, with its gothic-wannabe buildings, situated in a sleepy and picturesque town.
It is easy to think that colleges and universities are much more than bureaucratic organizations employing faculty and staff members, marketing their services to prospective students, and harvesting contributions from alumni. No, they seem to be communities, families even, to whom it is easy to have strong emotional loyalties. Students are there to learn, professors to push back the frontiers of knowledge, as universities have been doing since their fraternal origins in medieval Europe.
Administrators, at least, have every incentive to promote this image. They are more likely to get away with crowded dormitories and bad dining-hall food if they can portray college as a kind of initiation into the "community of educated men and women." They can pay lower salaries to those who are proud to be part of such a great tradition. And they can keep away unions as a threat to the greater community. With the possible exception of the military, I cannot think of any other modern institution that arouses such morale and respect among those who are part of it.
This is not necessarily good.
Because every formal organization has its own interests. It protects its reputation, its finances, its continuity. These interests are not identical -- and sometimes don't even overlap -- with the interests of individual scholars or the groups of scholars we refer to as professions and disciplines. Nor does bureaucracy always encourage good teaching. When things are going smoothly, academics tend to forget about this divergence, lulled by the term "administrators," which has a more benevolent tone than "managers." Some administrators have emerged from academic ranks, so it is possible to think they are just like the rest of us. But they no longer are.
Every once in a while something happens to remind us that, whenever our interests clash with those of our college or university, we're in trouble. We may be denied tenure on the basis of the college's financial priorities, not because of our career's relative merits. We may be accused (perhaps quite unfairly) of some legal breach, and suddenly the university is not a neutral judge but our persecutor because it is under pressure to crack down, or fears a lawsuit. We are sued for something we have written or said. We complain about the conditions of laboratory animals, and suddenly our university can no longer find space for our research projects. We take the losing side in the battle for a new dean, and are punished for it. These shocks go beyond the normal headaches of life in a bureaucracy. Institutions serve all sorts of important social functions, but protecting individual employees is not one of them.
Not all tenure denials ignore the merits, just as not all charges are unwarranted. But our institution is not concerned with distinguishing the truth in any of these cases; it wants to protect itself. In many cases it is not even possible to discover how it has made its decisions, meaning there is no opportunity for rebuttal. Professions have standards of behavior that normally guide how academics act. But we are not only members of professions, we are also employees of large bureaucracies. The two often conflict.
When I was denied tenure at New York University, I petitioned the grievance committee of the Faculty of Arts and Science to investigate. (I also asked the American Association of University Professors to investigate, but a phlegmatic fellow there advised against it, as NYU was already under official censure for a similar tenure case a few years before.) After a lengthy investigation, the campus grievance committee found entirely and strongly in my favor.
One of its members was so indignant that he wrote his own long letter to the dean of arts and science on my behalf. The dean wrote the committee members a letter thanking them for their report, then decided to ignore it. He was under no obligation to provide any explanation to them or to me, and he did not. I appealed the dean's decision to the universitywide grievance committee, full of impressive people from the medical school and the law school among others. In reporting to NYU's president, they too found in my favor, adding some criticism of the dean for ignoring the advice of his own grievance committee. This panel, too, was merely advisory, and the president decided to ignore its advice. Why? Who knows! I sure never found out.
And yet the president did respond in a way. He and the dean apparently parted company, because several months later the dean stepped down after nine years of service. I'll never know for certain whether my tenure case had anything to do with it, although I've been told that it played a role in his departure. It gave me some small satisfaction to see that the dean was just as expendable as I was, both of us victims of the bureaucracy's concern to protect itself.
You may have wondered why professors almost universally despise the deans who have power over them. It is not that unusually nasty people are hired to be deans. Rather, the self-interested logic of the organization, and those who run it, is alien to the relatively meritocratic (and in that way egalitarian) logic of professionalism among colleagues. As scholars, we expect to defend our claims against critics. Deans don't have to, and prefer not to.
To be fair, administrators have valid interests to look out for. They must keep the interests of the whole organization in mind. They must raise money from outsiders. They play to different audiences than professors do. But because their activities are inevitably at odds with what professors see as the legitimate teaching and research functions of the university, deans are (in the words of the anthropologist F.G. Bailey) "inescapably polluted by what they do."
It's best to learn lessons about bureaucracy from other people's unfortunate experiences, to feel their shock through empathy rather than directly. But our urge to see our university as a community is strong.
Too strong. If you want to be loved, be nice to your spouse and children. You can count on them to return your love. Your employer will not.
