In recent years, in my narrow experience, I’ve noticed an increase in a troubling attitude among professors in the humanities toward the administration. More and more, they regard themselves as employees of an organization whose center lies not in the classroom or in the library, but in the administration building. In their eyes, the college ”sits” most of all not in the course lecture, in office hours, in special collections, or in student study lounges, but in the dean’s office, the provost’s committee room, the meeting of the president with vice presidents.
That’s a mistake. College isn’t located in the administration building, and it’s not a turf thing. It’s an event, an activity, and it transpires when three parties interact — teachers, students, and subject matters. A professor’s encounter with a field through research and a student’s encounter with a field through course work make up the inquiry side, and the encounter of professors with students makes up the instruction side. These are the occasions for learning, and they occupy the primary purpose and existence of the college. Everything else is secondary. Everything outside those interactions is derivative, including the actions of administrators.
But I find that ever-fewer faculty members insist on their centrality. They do their work in the shadow of the bureaucracy, shying away from protest and pushback in spite of worrisome trends such as the rising costs and office space of the administration. They let administrators draft speech codes, open new offices and centers, set admissions criteria, and so on, and they rarely think that they should scrutinize the directives. Why?
Perhaps because a tight job market has obtained for so long in the humanities that professors feel so happy to have any job at all that they don’t want to make waves. They see an army of adjuncts, graduate students, and low-paid lecturers and think, “Boy, am I lucky. Stay low.” Why?
Perhaps because they spent so long as graduate students struggling to garner respect, as job candidates scurrying to win attention, and as assistant professors scrambling to earn tenure that they absorbed the identity of inferiors, believing themselves to be entirely dispensable in the eyes of the bureaucrats. They are deeply fearful of power, and they have no confidence in collective action.
Perhaps the nature of academic work — teaching your own class, setting your own research agenda — individualizes them so much that they aren’t disposed to conceive of their research and teaching as having more than an accrediting effect for themselves. It gets them rewards from the institution, rewards which do, indeed, appear to come through the final say of the administration. All the incentives push them into isolation, for instance, devoting three lonely years to a book on a subject that interests nobody else on campus.
In either case, the resulting attitude plays into some of the worst tendencies of bureaucracies and people within them, in particular the impulse of Leviathan to expand itself. Faculty members and students should resist it, adjuncts as well as senior profs, freshmen as well as alums, ever-reminding the desk people, “We are the college. You, Mr. President et al, are managers and facilitators, crucial to the college precisely because you help us do the real work.”
14 Responses to The College Is Not the Administration
t_paine - September 9, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Spot on, Mark. Thank you. I can teach for whole semesters and never even think of administration. I delete all those emails they send me. I teach Literature in the English dept (really, strange to say) and it takes all my time. But many of my colleagues who teach various “studies” are activists. They need things to be political, need to be oppressed, and must look to admin for this function.As you say, the center of the process is the book, the library and the classroom.
chuckkle - September 10, 2009 at 6:51 am
This column strikes me as reciting an old traditional prayer or knee jerk slogan in the face of tangible institutional power, priorities, and change. And just as likely to be effective.Without a basic institutional and economic analysis of how the modern university works (and there are many excellent books on the subject, starting with the classic Jencks and Reisman The Academic Revolution) mumbling comforting old saws is a religious act, not an intellectual one. Chuck Kleinhans
redweather - September 10, 2009 at 6:55 am
“Perhaps because a tight job market has obtained for so long in the humanities that professors feel so happy to have any job at all that they don’t want to make waves.”Uh . . . yeah, that might be one pretty good reason. Payback against faculty members via the administration is alive and well, Mark. Perhaps (good word) being a tenured prof at Emory means you’re just a tad out of touch, or worse, you’ve gotten pretty good at looking the other way now that you have nothing to worry about. It happens. “But I find that ever-fewer faculty members insist on their centrality.” Hmmm . . . I wonder why. Perhaps (I can’t seem to resist using that word) they don’t sense their centrality because so many of them are completely expendable adjuncts. I don’t let the administration affect what goes on in my classroom, and like t_paine I, too, teach literature (as well as composition) which takes up most of my time. Unlike t_paine, I do read the emails because some of them pertain to things like my paycheck. For instance, recently I learned that the administration had decided to “furlough” me for six days during the current academic year, furlough being a euphemism for “reduce my already meagre salary.”All of which must go to show that I’m guilty of playing into the worst tendencies of bureaurcracies. Mark, you remind me of people who have all the money they’ll ever need counseling others on the unimportance of money. Must be nice to be so worry free.
markbauerlein - September 10, 2009 at 7:28 am
I agree, Chuck and redweather, with your take on the realities of campus life and the powers of administration. What I don’t understand is why faculty members don’t join together and exercise their own powers. And they should include adjuncts, and students and alumni as well. Do you think the administration would be able to fend off a concerted, principled demand by the teachers?
goxewu - September 10, 2009 at 9:00 am
Why is it, then, that the administrations of so many colleges hire disproportionate numbers of additional administrators compared the numbers of additional faculty? At several colleges and universities with which I am personally familiar, vice-presidents, asst. vice-presidents, asst. provosts, deans, asst. deans, directors and “officers” are being added at a dizzying pace and the administrations are becoming even more top-heavy. The administration decides (a) how and where to spend money, and (b) what and whom to hire. So I’d say that the majority of the fault for the perception that “the college is the administration” lies with the administration.
redweather - September 10, 2009 at 10:21 am
Mark, I can’t say I’ve seen much evidence that faculty members are willing to join together to do anything. Maybe the climate is drastically different at Emory, but at the public institution where I teach in Clarkston the divide between tenured faculty and adjuncts is wide and not likely to be bridged any time soon.
markbauerlein - September 10, 2009 at 11:49 am
The thorough unconcern of tenured faculty for the situation of adjuncts, redweather, is one of the worst consequences of the individualization of faculty incentives.
_perplexed_ - September 10, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Faculty involvement in the operation of the university is diminishing in part because the loyalty and commitment of faculty is increasingly directed toward their research program and discipline. It is their research colleagues at other institutions who determine, via their reviews, whether a book gets published, tenure gets granted, or the proposal gets funded. Their are no instituitionally controlled rewards for faculty for actually concerning themselves with the university.
redweather - September 10, 2009 at 12:32 pm
You could no doubt write an excellent column on that. The utter lack of collegiality between tenured and non-ternured faculty is also quite astounding. Only once adjuncts become “members of the club” do they get their propers. Until then they are either routinely ignored or patronized.
redweather - September 10, 2009 at 12:40 pm
I was responding to Mark in the post above. In response to _perplexed_, faculty insularity is also part of the problem. More than once I’ve heard someone say, “I got a Ph.D. precisely so I wouldn’t have to organize like auto workers and coal miners do.” That kind of mindset speaks for itself (pun intended).
goxewu - September 10, 2009 at 1:18 pm
Who’da thunk it: “…worst consequences of the individualization of faculty incentives.” Can it really mean that Prof. Bauerlein–a rather emphatic cultural conservative and a still somewhat moderate political conservative–think that the collectivization of faculty incentives, i.e., union representation and collective bargaining, is preferable?*Early on in “Brainstorm,” back in the good old red logo days, there were several posts and hundreds of comments on the virtues and vices of tenure. One behavioral truth that emerged in it all (although it’s fairly common-sensible just a little observing while one lives daily life) is that faculties are a lot like frats or any other organization based on hazing. The active frat members (tenured faculty) get to haze unmercifully the pledges (the untenured faculty). When those pledges become active members, they can’t wait to haze the next class of pledges. Meanwhile, both pledges and actives look down with utter disdain at what, in my antedeluvian day, were called members of “Gamma Delta Iota,” aka GDI, aka “Goddamned Independents.” Those GDIs are, of course, adjuncts.(*I do, with maybe a little individualizationed icing on the CBA cake.)
markbauerlein - September 10, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Yeah, goxewu, I’m all for collective action by faculty when the antagonist is the administration. Bureaucracy has to be countered, especially when it has a tactic of divide and conquer, killing esprit de corps–which is one effect of making all rewards individually-based. Of course, collective action has its dangers when certain group dynamics set in (one of them being the hierarchy that sets adjuncts beneath notice), but right now those threats are nothing to the creeping bloat of the Blob.
goxewu - September 11, 2009 at 8:46 am
For Prof. Bauerlein:1. Are tenure-track/tenured faculty at Emory represented by a de facto union. e.g., AAUP, AFT, or the Teamsters?2. If so, can individual faculty opt out of paying dues to it?3. If there is a de factor faculty union at Emory, can individual faculty still negotiate substantial extra pay on top of what the union negotiates in the CBA?4. Who sets the pay schedules for adjuncts?5. What’s the “Blob”?
t_paine - September 11, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Chuck KleinhansI wasn’t mumbling. Not sawing or knee-jerking either. By all means, if you think we need a “basic institutional and economic analysis” go get it or construct it. If the traditional university shrinks back to it’s older elitist model for the few, I’ll still have my students. If the new university, responding to your analysis, becomes what it seems to be trying to become, a place for everyone, eliminating all ‘disparities’ then it’s not for me anyway. Both are likely to come to pass. It’ll be alright.