Crossposted from howtheuniversityworks.com
Let’s say you own a house. It’s your only asset, but you own it outright. Five years ago, that house was worth $200,000. But then a big employer came to your town, and your home gained 50 percent in value. You congratulate yourself on your investment choices and you tell the kids: “Guess what? We’re worth $300,000.” You feel rich and maybe you buy the large size of popcorn at the movies for a while.
But then the big employer pulls out, or a farm is sold to a developer, and in a matter of weeks or months, your house plummets to $200,000 again.
Then what? You’re ticked off because your investments have “crashed” to a previous valuation. You’re determined that your net worth must be $300,000 at all costs.
So you put your kids on a diet of peanut-butter and jelly — no sports, no new clothes, no movies — total austerity, until you’ve made up the “crash” with a hundred grand sweated out of your kids.
Sound like a good plan?
Well, that’s the logic of austerity driving such measures as freezes in campus salary. When the administration felt flush, did they hand out extra dividends to campus employees? Nope.
They cried poor — “oh, 99 percent of our fake operations budget is completely eaten up by greedy faculty demanding to be paid almost as well as bartenders — and did you hear, some of the lecturers make almost as much as janitors!”
All the while spending lavishly on buildings and “market-smart” disciplines, and jacking their egos playing venture capitalist. To cover up the lavish spending, they kept multiple sets of books (playing hide-the-sports-spending and oh that? it’s our entrepreneurship fund!) and most years had to pretend there was a crisis.
Now, in some cases recent financial events have meant the postponement or alteration of administrative plans — a big new stadium or other building might be delayed, or a new assistant provost’s position left unfilled.
Mostly not, though.
Mostly the crisis has meant administrations doing things they’ve always done — squeezing faculty and staff salary — just without faculty and staff opposition: “Oh, no raises this year? No problem! It’s really a crisis! We’ll pitch in!”
In some cases, far-sighted administrators are getting stuff they wouldn’t have gotten away with in a fake crisis.
I’m talking seriously great stuff. Stuff they always wanted and didn’t quite have the nerve to try before — things like cancelling sabbaticals, raising course loads, or making cuts in adjunct pay.
Does cancelling sabbaticals for 60 faculty at Kent State actually save a ton of money? No, because the pay for faculty serving contingently is so poor that all of the cancelled sabbaticals barely paid for the new administrator they hired.
By the same token, cutting the salaries of contingent faculty by 7 percent doesn’t save enough money to pay the bean counter administering the pay cut.
So why do they do it? Why take seven percent of your peanut-butter sandwich when it won’t even solve their money problems?
Perhaps you already know the answer in your heart.
They exist to squeeze you, to demean your work, suck the pleasure and life out of it, and give control of the curriculum to their masters among the trustees, and take the bread from your children’s mouths (while telling you much they appreciate your sacrifice). And they will squeeze you until you fight back.
Perhaps I’ve been reading too much Jack London. But maybe not — what do you think management means when they say “crisis equals opportunity” to each other on the golf course?
What is the “opportunity” that crisis represents in an economy where “innovation” means continuous reduction in labor costs? Squeezing!
And who is to be squeezed? Why, you.
So what to do? Crisis is an opportunity for you too — an opportunity to see that your troubles are shared — to exploit the administration’s vulnerabilities as well — to expose their greed and arrogance — to hold them accountable for the fact that we are failing our students.
I’ll be blogging irregularly until mid-April, but you might be able to catch me in person. And then I’ll begin to dig myself out of a hole of blogging promises that include about a dozen video interviews (Paul Lauter, Jane Buck, Gary Rhoades, Jamie Owen Daniel to start), analysis of why this season of Breaking Bad doesn’t seem as good as Season 1 (so far), the whole Hitler meme on YouTube, words I used to like but now hate since the policy cretins stole them (robust), and how sad I am that Paul Krugman and the folks at Meet the Press think I’ve been right about Obama all along (he’s pulling a Hoover, paying off the banks and making a stimulus-shaped gesture, rather than the kind of courageous, imaginative spending that is required.)
