doing the wrong thing for the wrong reason

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The Philadelphia Orchestra’s bankruptcy filing is worse than unfortunate. Orchestra management is seeking to dump its pension obligations in the lap of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, and potentially in the lap of of the generality of taxpaying citizens who may be called upon to make up PBGC’s deficit. That’s bad enough, but the move will harm Philadelphia’s musicians and staff first, many of whom are owed more than the federal guarantee allows in pension payments. And the orchestra further seeks to shed its obligation to the American Federation of Musicians and Employers Pension Fund, a move which will harm other orchestras, though Philadelphia management denies that its actions will have that result.

Two principles of present life seem to be involved. The first is that economics trumps ethics, a notion so widely accepted in today’s society as to be axiomatic. And the second principle is that where philanthropic institutions are concerned survival supersedes mission. What is perhaps more interesting than Philadelphia’s crass disregard for the welfare of its musicians and staff is its apparent disregard for the social contracts to which it is party and for its own artistic future. The New York Times quotes Philadelphia’s management as follows:

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s president and chief executive, Allison Vulgamore, took strong exception to the notion that the move might harm other orchestras. “The Philadelphia Orchestra is managing its own situation with choices that are available to it,” she said. “I would not say that anything that is happening translates to other orchestras. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous.”

Choices that are available—no mention of ethics. So again we are confronted by the spectacle of a socially constituted not-for-profit corporate entity, whose actions should be above reproach, behaving like Wal-Mart.

“I would not say that anything that is happening translates to other orchestras. I wouldn’t be so presumptuous,” says Ms. Vulgamore. The issue is not whether other orchestras will rush to shed their own pension obligations in a rash of bankrupty filings, but that other orchestras will now find it difficult to maintain the American Federation pension fund, particularly if the bankruptcy judge allows Philadelphia to default on its $35 million debt to that fund. It’s worse than sad that such cynical business practices should come to represent a once great institution.

holiday surprises

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As protesters are everywhere being evicted from parks and other public spaces by representatives of officialdom, I’m reminded of a cynical technique we recognize at a university with which I am familiar as the holiday surprise. When the university administration does something to which there is sure to be “principled” opposition, the action is announced on the eve of a holiday.

Now is the perfect season for the series of evictions that is taking place around the country. People’s minds are preoccupied with holiday matters, with shopping and the festivities that go with whatever holidays they may be celebrating. Nobody wants to give much attention to politics, particularly not to its grittier aspects. Thus, public opposition to the use of force against peaceful protesters is rendered less likely by the press of holiday cheer.

The death of a friend and colleague surprised us on Thanksgiving day. He was Donald G. Brennan, former dean of SLU’s graduate college and of the College of Arts and Sciences as well. Don was much loved. He had served Saint Louis University as a dean for more than twenty years, and it isn’t true as his obituary claims that he stepped down at the end of his career in order to return to teaching. He did return to teaching; that much is true. But the graduate college that should have borne his name no longer exists; albeit one suspects that it will soon be reconstituted with a new dean whose popularity will not threaten a university president whom the students call Il duce.

At Don’s funeral the college church was packed with better than a thousand souls to celebrate his life. The line the evening before at the visitation had stretched all the way down the aisle and out the church doors for four hours as people came to pay their respects.

Don represented Saint Louis University at its best. He was in every way a Christian gentleman and a serious lover of the academy in which he had come up. His career had been distinguished and honorable. It’s good that such an outpouring of affection and respect as came to him in death should solidify public remembrance of his life.

In downtown Saint Louis, in Keiner Plaza where the Occupy protesters were evicted last week, a Christmas tree now stands festooned with lights and other stuff. What message that tree symbolizes, given its history, is another of the many ironies of this season of holiday surprises.

UNT contemplates at-will policy

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I’m distresed today to learn that my former employer, the University of North Texas, is planning to implement an employment at-will policy with respect to staff. Some staff members at UNT (and others in the community around the university judging from the comments attached to this report from the Denton Record-Chronicle) are understandably disturbed and have publicly wondered what problem the new policy is intended to address.

My guess is that there is no problem. The new policy is being promulgated by Chancellor Lee Jackson, a Rick Perry appointee, who recently fired former university president, Gretchen Bataille. My guess is also that UNT is following the same style of corporate consolidation that is transforming many American institutions of higher learning. But the goal at UNT, which I still affectionately think of as North Texas, seems not merely to entail transfer of power from the traditional entities of academic governance into the hands of administrators and their corporate cronies in the profit-making world.

I’m thinking that the agenda at North Texas, as at other Texas state institutions of higher learning (though this is not happening without dissent), is to politicize the university system, to redefine educational objectives in favor of producing docile workers (who will likely vote Republican) rather than critical citizens, and to redefine university research agendas to support economic development and the business interests of wealthy corporations. It’s too bad. I used to love North Texas. Now, I suppose my employer of twenty-five plus years will become as remote to me as my Alma Mater, Southern Methodist University, which renamed the building I lived in as a freshman Clements Hall, in honor of a man who (however much he may have represented the Dallas business elite) did SMU a great deal of harm, though he’s now dead.

More recently, SMU has solicited and won the opportunity to house the George W. Bush Presidential library and its partisan think tank, over strong but poorly organized protests from faculty, staff and student groups, as well as Methodist ministers, and local interest groups.

I remember a number of conversations years back with the late A. C. Greene, who was a UNT faculty member for some years in the 1980s and 90s, in which A. C. expressed the conviction that UNT should form stronger alliances with Dallas business, establish a Dallas presence, and perhaps eventually move to the city. All of these things have now taken place, though UNT’s main campus remains in Denton; but I can’t imagine A. C., whose roots were in the same West Texas town as mine, countenancing UNT’s present top-down reorganization strategy, any more than I can imagine Willis Tate, who was SMU president when I was a student, tearing his shirt for George W. Bush.