This week's images of the corporate university turn out to be pretty indelible. Once seen, they are impossible to forget.
Like everyone else, I have been reflecting on the events at Penn State, Berkeley, and now Davis that have shaken U.S. higher education. Everyone knows the problems at these places and elsewhere—the continuing decline of public investment in research universities; the moral evacuation of such institutions in favor of business and athletics; the disappearance of a future for the cynosure of a responsible society, educated young people; and the unjustified attacks on faculty and student demonstrators who "occupy" Berkeley, Davis, and other campuses in protest of their university's complicity in the disempowerment of the middle and working classes.
What will happen next? I have no better idea than anyone else, but I can suppose one lesson that should come out of what we're seeing, the discrediting of the professional administrative class in higher education. One video, made today at UC Davis, tells the tale.
The context is, first, the shocking display of violence this week by a UC Davis campus police officer in spraying peaceful student protestors with pepper—a gesture that has since been defended by the chief of police; and a few days earlier, the no less astonishing reaction by UC Berkeley police to a mostly pacific demonstration by faculty members and students, in which (among other events) the director of Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities, Professor Celeste Langan, was pulled to the ground by her hair and arrested.
There are many issues here, including the paramilitary character of the police tactics that have come to seem normal even on college campuses. James Fallows observes that "this is what happens when authority is unaccountable and has lost any sense of human connection to a subject population." I want to dwell on one academic version of this unaccountability.
In the video here, the Chancellor of UC Davis, Linda Katehi, walks through a large group of students who confront her silently and with arms linked. Any educator would grab a microphone and try—at the least—to address the jagged differences in values that are palpable even in a video. But Katehi does nothing except walk to her car with a frozen look on her face.
Katehi's detached air, and most of all her silence, is the creepiest thing I have seen in these several weeks of tumult. The protestors' silence is a statement; Katehi's is an abdication.
Like Berkeley's Chancellor Robert Birgeneau (who waited four days to watch the videos of the demonstrations on his campus), Katehi is responsible for misconduct by campus police in the face of peaceful protest. They were obliged to brief their police officers on the limits of force, not only generally but in light of recent events that presaged peaceful but vivid protests at every campus. I suspect that Katehi will resign under pressure within a week or so, after she pushes out the officer shown in the video and the Chief of Police, Annette Spicuzza.
Katehi, Birgeneau, and former Penn State President Graham Spanier (as well as UC President Mark Yudof) have at least one thing in common: they belong to the class of professional administrators who have largely taken over public (and many private) American universities in the past twenty years.
Whatever they might have been earlier in their careers (in most cases, highly distinguished professors), these people are no longer really educators, scholars, or citizens of their communities. They are the hired agents of corporatized governing boards, moving from one university to another in search of some grail of ambition. It's not uncommon for presidents and chancellors to have held senior administrative positions at three, four, or five institutions. As far as I can tell, the four leaders mentioned above have had, among the lot of them, senior administrative roles at 14 universities in the U.S. and Canada. (Spanier's 16 years as president of Penn State was a long tenure, but it was his fourth high-level administrative job.) Having been everywhere, in another sense these people belong nowhere. They have been hired for certain things at which they excel: fundraising, cultivating outside constituencies, dreaming up new names for declining fortunes (this Partnership or that Compact), and remaking the "brands" of their campuses.
Beholden to the business interests that dominate governing boards, and steeped in the conventional wisdom of the higher education establishment, these professional administrators lack the connection to the everyday work of their institutions that would let them produce, as Cathy Davidson proposes, a "Gettysburg Address" to confront the moral challenges of this moment. The most junior faculty member at one of these campuses would be better prepared for such a task. The unaccountability and lack of connection remarked by Fallows in police officers—and which could just as well be said of the athletic scandal at Penn State—starts at the top of these institutions.
The "Occupy" movement will have its successes in society at large, but on American campuses it might have one salutary result: to show governing boards that these itinerant professional administrators can't be entrusted with the future of our institutions. They may know how to run a campus day to day, but when some unforeseen event profoundly disrupts the life of a university, they tend to lack the capacity to respond as almost any regular professor would, with care and decency. Their first answer is silence—followed by rushed statements that temporize and obfuscate.
The silence is not strategic or rational, even from a legal standpoint. It is, I think, plain befuddlement at a world gone awry from their plans and programs. It is the cognitive crisis of the corporate university—and I suspect we will see it more often in the months ahead.
Universities such as Berkeley, Penn State, and Davis have legions of brilliant, passionate faculty members who deserve better leadership than what these figures provide. Each such campus includes a handful of faculty leaders—everyone there knows who they are—who could serve as presidents or chancellors right now.
It's time for trustees to bring a halt to this aspect of the corporate university in favor of local, indigenous leadership—and maybe, under a different kind of leader, other elements of corporatization would be called into question. (For example: why the budgetary crisis at Berkeley and many other places does not embolden administrations to reduce or even cancel intercollegiate athletics, I don't understand. The outcry would be unprecedented, but so would the resulting conversation about the priorities of a university.)
The silence of the presidents before crime and injustice reveals the failures of the model of corporate leadership into which many schools have sunk by degrees. Will some videos help to change that?
Since I wrote this post last night, Professor Cynthia Carter Ching of UC Davis has published this letter, which makes a similar point from the perspective of a Davis faculty member.
Cynthia Carter Ching's point is similar, perhaps, but stronger. You rightly point out a failure of leadership. Ching points out faculty complicity in that failure and calls upon academics everywhere—not trustees but professors—to recommit to shared governance.
She writes:
The silence of the presidents is matched by so many other silences. They are in many ways understandable, and predictable. But the silence of the UC Davis student protesters as Chancellor Katehi walked to her car is the only admirable one among them.
I am struck by the huge moral distance between the brave and incredibly constrained behavior of the students and the insulting and condescending actions of the UC Davis Chancellor (I decline to give her name because to me she has ceased to be a person and is now simply a function). The best it could do (after offering a truly insulting-to-the-intelligence first response) was to convene, what else, a committee to decide whether the police acted appropriately. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is clear on this: "In Headwaters II, we held that police officers employ excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment when they use pepper spray upon an individual who is engaged in the commission of a non-violent misdemeanor and who is disobeying a police officer’s order but otherwise poses no threat to the officer or others" (p 16465, 16). Why waste more taxpayer money on a bogus "investigation"? Like the UC Berkeley Chancellor's argument that linking arms is not non-violent protest, UC Davis's asks us to suspend our rationality, and, as I said in my Arcade post, our critical judgment (what we are in fact supposed to be teaching our students to employ). These "people" are, as Roland Greene says, trained creatures who are as morally bankrupt as the officer who blithely and illegally inflicted harm and pain upon a few unarmed and un-armored twenty-year-old students. His actions had nothing to do with protecting the public, they had everything to do with punishing people of conscience--they should know better than to challenge the incredible inability of their campus leaders to focus their energies in actually leading their institutions and defending their academic mission. The protesters are our one greatest hope. Their self-control, passion and compassion are evident as they shamed the police into backing away.
Somewhere in the upward movement from simple faculty member to university administrator, something happens--compromises, rationalizations, out and out abandonments of principles seem to be part of the grooming for leadership process.
Many years ago, Larry Summers was chief economist at the World Bank. A memo he wrote was leaked in which he said the problem with pollution was that there was too much of it in the first world and not enough of it in the third. He reasoned that since life expectancy was much lower in the third world, they could stand to take some of our pollution--they were not long for this world anyway. Later on, I was having dinner with Homi Bhabha in Cambridge--he had just accepted his position at Harvard. I told him the story. He said, incredulously, "And he was appointed President of Harvard in spite of that?" I replied, only somewhat facetiously, "He was hired because of that."
We as faculty have a professional and moral duty to teach our students; in this case, they have much to teach us.
David, I really like your point about the "investigation." What's to investigate? Especially since (I'm happy to report) the UC Davis protestors are planning to pursue legal action.
Thank you for this powerful statement, Roland. But the agency to remake the university does not belong even to the trustees, though they may hold the formal authority over university presidents. It belongs to students and to faculty and, in public institutions, to the public itself.
A few years ago Harvard's faculty instigated the ouster of Larry Summers with a vote of no confidence, forcing the hand of the nominal ultimate authority, the Harvard Corporation (the name is appropriate). For a notoriously individualistic faculty, it was a startling--and no doubt fleeting--moment of collective action. I expected more faculties to learn from that example who the actual constituents of the university are.
removed Lincoln Gordon from the presidency, though I don't know quite why (I was an undergraduate at the time).
What other cases do we have in the past 50 years of faculties removing presidents?
...Brandeis did.
Sounds a bit like complaints that large businesses are no longer run by excutives who've come up though the ranks and actually know something about the business, whether it be automobile manufacture, packaged foods, package delivery, or what. Instead, they're run by a class of professional managers who know about management and about $$$$.
So, the world's being run by professional managers who care mostly about $$$$ and we've got a widening rift between the 1% and the 99%. Those professional managers are in the 1% and a significant fraction of the 1% consists of financiers who've commodotized every financial instrument known to humankind.
From the staff side, let me remind those of you with tenure that I've watched many small-scale violences against staff members at universities go by with faculty often not saying a word. Why? Because to say something would have broken the unspoken rule that one does not call a fellow faculty member out publicly on bad behavior. So yes, the corporately managed university is a critical element in play here, and it is great to see that being discussed. But, seriously, if you want a climate of responsibility, while you take on the management (Lord knows the staff can't,) also please realize something the headmaster of my prep school used to tell "the boys" all the time: with great privilege comes great responsibility. The most telling part about the Penn State mess to me was that two janitors felt they couldn't say anything about what had been seen, and it drove one of them crazy, literally. And they weren't wrong to fear that they would have lost their jobs for intervening. The only people with job security in universities are tenured faculty. Please use that privilege now.
I agree with Charley Sullivan that Faculty, specifically tenured-faculty, should be at the forefront of defending speech rights and reporting abuse. I've been shocked again and again (as a newly tenured faculty) at the state of fear that staff live in, even in rather non conflictual departments. This atmosphere of fear has only been aggravated by the economic meltdown and the real risks to lose one's job.
Coming from a country with strong unions and workers' laws, it is hard not to notice with shame the obvious caste system that American universities rely on. Why would staff positions not be more secured, since Universities work only thanks to their hard work and dedication? It sickens me that this caste system is on top of things implicitly based on the distinction between who yields and who doesn't yield the sacro-saint sword of knowledge. Positions of authority earned because of intellectual capital do not differ from those earned because of financial one when they become abusive. And the strongly felt sense of hierarchies on campuses can only lead to abuse, small and large, and to a sense of disconnect between different classes of citizens, if there is no balance of power and real system of accountability embedded in the organization.
And this makes Nathan Brown's open letter to U.C. Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi all the more courageous, given his untenured status.
Roland, thank you so much for this post. It's hard to make any sense at all (even separately, let alone together) of the atrocities at UC Davis and Penn State, but you've helped me see one way to understand how the silences became possible.
Just to follow up on one point you made, it appears that a good 61% of the athletics budget at Davis comes from student fees. Davis did cut four sports in April 2010, but still spent $21 million on athletics in 2010-11. At 61%, that's nearly $13 million paid for by students.
Roland,
Thank you for this post. It puts into (beautiful) words many of the things on which I have been reflecting--worrying about even before the spectacular administrative failures of the past few weeks.
One thing you don't say, however, that needs to be said: the flip side of itinerant administrators is the increasingly itinerant lower-level university worker. I mean, of course, the contingent faculty member, the adjunct. Completely unprotected, disenfranchised, and without benefits or university buy-in, this group of workers (in some cases a faculty majority) is the most vulnerable (perhaps even above the students, who can withhold tuition, should they choose, by not matriculating) and can do very little about it.
This is another aspect of the corporatization of the university. A large, non-voting contingent labor force attenuates faculty governance because it reduces the potential body of governors to a minority. And it is, with very good reason, scary to speak out as a contingent faculty member.
I have no answers, but I think this issue needs to be part of this specific conversation.
Kara
Thank you so much for raising this issue in this context. The silence on the issue of contingent faculty has been very noticeable in discussions of the student protests (though, I was glad to see, the Davis General Assembly statement did mention it). Indeed I find even this short "hear, hear" comment quite difficult to write. The reason is simple: whereas it's perfectly conceivable, and even desirable, that the student tuition crisis can be resolved while conserving the position of ladder faculty--or, one hopes, by empowering them further--resolving the question of contingent faculty will almost certainly involve asking ladder faculties to relinquish some of the privileges they presently enjoy--lower teaching loads, less "service" teaching, higher salaries--by virtue of the cheapness and flexibility of contingent teaching labor. (The utopian solution of "converting" every adjunct to tenure would require an astonishing communal commitment to redistributing university resources to teaching.) Enfranchising the contingent teaching force would "dilute" present faculty votes in all matters. The silences and symbolic hierarchies of the university Charley and Cécile discuss above make it even more challenging to construct the solidarities we desperately need in order to promote reform.
Lots to comment on here, but first, I agree with Kara. The rise of itinerant administrators has been accompanied in many places (not coincidentally) by the part-timing and disenfranchising of the faculty. The latter abets the former, and both trends accommodate the urge of some tenure-line faculty to be insulated from administration (a point to which Professor Carter Ching's letter spoke) and the teaching of basic courses.
Where do we start to fix all this? People with better institutional minds than mine have despaired over a solution. My piece was a kind of thought experiment, proposing that we, the tenured faculty, take back administration at those places where it has been handed over to a professional class.
Your post articulates what most needs saying –– elegantly, forcefully, and without equivocation. Thank you for writing it. The violence with which the police have repressed the occupy movement at UC Davis and Berkeley and the complicity of the senior administration with that violence lays bare the self-interest and corporate interests that hold sway over universities. At the same time, the strength with which UC students, faculty, and their many allies have responded to these violations of rights and to the wider defunding (or mis-funding) of public education suggests we just might have a fighting chance of restoring the public university's mission to advance not only knowledge but also the lives of citizens.
between Athens Polytechnic in 1973, where Linda Katehi was a student, and UCDavis now:
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/22/athens-polytechnic-comes-to-uc-davis...
There was an uprising in 73 which lead to the military coming onto the campus of Athens Polytechnic and killing a number of students.
Katehi is one of the signatories on the report.
Roland Greene expresses eloquently what I have been mulling over these past few days and I thank him for his post. Especially in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, American universities have become even more steadfastly than ever before like the ground zero sites of corporatized America. As the principles of knowledge production and the sharing of knowledge for the benefit of our shared social life become secondary to the financial sheets of these supposedly not-for-profit entities, scenes such as those at Penn State, UC Berkeley, and UC Davis – all in different ways – underscore what is at stake, namely, a struggle over the purpose of our research and teaching. I think that the purpose of our research and teaching is to help create the conditions for the critically reasoned well-being of our communities. And it is the responsibility of the tenured faculty to hold university administrations responsible for their failure to support that critical function. When presidents and other administrators remain silent on these matters, the faculty cannot. Knowledge belongs to all of us, and just not for the benefit of the 1%. It is ours to occupy. Ramón Saldívar Hoagland Family Professor of Humanities & Sciences Departments of English & Comparative Literature