Category Archives: education

Where do we go from here?

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Valerie Strauss has struck a hopeful note in her post today about the reinstatement of Teresa Sullivan as President of the University of Virginia. But the victory, if there has been one, isn’t exactly a victory of the 99 percent, as Strauss suggests; though she is right to point out that without the pressure generated by powerful constituencies within the univrsity the board would likely have had its way. Indeed at many large public universities of today a board that fired the university president would not be seriously challenged. When the Chancellor of the University of North Texas, my former employer, forced the resignation of popular president, Gretchen Bataille, in 2010, the regents stonewalled, though the story was well reported on campus and off. No significant opposition developed, and the next issue of the UNT alumni magazine carried a nice photo of Bataille together with a story commending her service to the institution.

This is how such things are usually done, with plenty of hypocrisy to go around. What is remarkable at Virginia is that a president who respected the institution’s history of shared governance was willing to put her career and her reputation on the line in its defense and was in the end rescued by the very shared governance she understood and defended. It’s a sad fact of life in many universities now, both public and private, that shared governance has never existed or has been intentionally destroyed by corporatization. An acquaintance who is an employment lawyer is fond of saying that many universities are modeling themselves after the worst for-profit corporations. This is not to say that universities aren’t businesses, but it is to say that universities, as businesses, are different from for-profit corporations in that they may not put mission aside in pursuit of institutional advancement.

But the temptation to put mission aside is not uniquely felt by university administrators. Faculty careerism and self-preoccupation also impede mission in a time like the present when all universities, except perhaps the very richest of them, are scrambling for resources and constantly attempting to do more with less. Tim Burke’s blog today features a thoughtful piece full of helpful suggestions for faculty in institutions where shared governance allows them to participate in the making of budgets and the allocation of resources. One of Tim’s suggestions to his colleagues is “Teach more, research less. I will now be entering the Witness Protection Program.” It’s a mournful fact that in many universities, as opposed perhaps to liberal arts colleges with strong teaching traditions, professional faculty disdain teaching and the burden of instruction is carried by graduate students and part-timers, who are looked down upon as the academic lower class; though in many institutions, part time, informal personnel make up the great body of the teaching faculty. This point has been made forcefully over the past twenty years by Marc Bousquet, most recently in How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low Wage Nation.

Cary Nelson’s preface to Bousquet’s book hopefully envisions a brighter future through “theory.” That doesn’t seem very likely to me, nor does the possibiility of a solidarity movement on campus. Unions generally are worse off than universities. The fact that Ward Churchill has recently been the AAUP’s poster child for academic freedom is unhelpful. I think the plight of universities, like many other present social ills, is being driven in part by our disfunctional politics; but I also think universities and those who represent them in the public sphere are often their own worst enemies. As I read the comment threads attached to various news stories about UVA over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been struck about how much wrong information about universities is out there. Much of this stuff comes from ill-informed popular media accounts; but a significant amount of it comes from sources “within the academy.” Perhaps UVA will be a laboratory not only for some fresh thinking about “what is to be done” but also an opportunity for some good, honest reporting. Both things might help to decenter some of the mythology in circulation about higher education.

The public sphere . . .

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Valerie Strauss’s blog today features a post by David Shreve that connects the firing of UVA President, Teresa Sullivan, and the flawed thinking that led to it, with currently popular ideas about the governance of universities, regressive tax policies in the states, and the right wing attack on American public life.

Professor Shreve dismisses Rector Helen Dragas’s message, to which I have referred in my last post:

Dragas’s defense and the “new model” it recommends in place of the old, is based upon a serious misconception, derived from faulty economic theory, an almost complete ignorance or misreading of economic history, and a shallow appraisal of the “virtues” allegedly carried by the “new model.”

I expect Professor Shreve refers to the document’s naive valuation of online instruction in part of this, but his most important point is likely this one:

The simplest and most critical misconception of all is the notion that state tax systems, including Virginia’s, cannot be expected to yield much more revenue than they presently generate without also imposing great costs upon the state’s economic vitality.

Professor Shreve’s answer to Helen Dragas and others who would have the university “sell itself into risky “pay-to-play” schemes, into a tacit endorsement of ‘benefactors’ whose fundamental practices benefit few or none, or into a deep financial dependence upon the kind of wealth that depends itself upon an ultimately self-defeating model that treats up as down, inequality as efficiency, and value extraction as value-added” is a return to sensible state funding models for higher education and to the sensible, progressive tax policies that formerly underwrote such models.

It is quite simply a boost in state general fund appropriations generated by economy-enhancing tax reform, a boost that would simultaneously enhance funding adequacy and stability . . .

—It’s refreshing to read such a spirited defense of the public sphere.

The principle of the thing

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In regard to the continuing tragedy of The University of Virginia, Terry Newell has praised President Sullivan’s leadership in the Huffington Post lately but has also suggested that Sullivan may have been less effective in managing up than she was in working with faculty, students, and other administrators.

She expressed total surprise at her ouster, which either shows that the board was deceptive as well as secretive in their communication with her over the past two years or that she missed important signals and the need to manage up, not just down, in the university hierarchy.

Newell suggests as well that Sullivan “may have neglected building the external bridges she needed to sustain her program of change,” and that “most political leaders in the state have stayed on the sidelines since her ouster” as a consequence.

Perhaps—but it seems undeniable from the reporting I have read that the board’s secretive behavior was intentionally deceptive and that board members who participated deliberately kept Sullivan in the dark until they were assured of enough votes to force her resignation. That they confronted her without a formal meeting or even a poll of the entire board indicates bad faith to me. And Rector Dragas’s formal statement about the matter, intended I suppose to declare that the cabal’s intentions were honorable, simply doesn’t ring true.

Nor does Dragas’s claim that she and her board colleagues did the right thing in the wrong way. It’s not possible to separate the board’s action (and the “deliberations” revealed in the email correspondence that has been unearthed) from their manner of proceding. This is not a case where action and process are separable, and the action was a violation of the board’s frundamental responsibility to the institution it is charged with governing. If one seeks a reason for President Sullivan’s “surprise,” one need look no further than this fact, it seems to me.

Many commentators have pointed out that the firing of President Sullivan proceded according to a script that is commonplace in the corporate world. If this true, it ought not to be; though one must acknowledge that in times when cutthroat capitalism is popular, as it is today, profit is taken to justify all sorts of human abuse. But the principle involved here is the fundamental assurance that every member of a university community is entitled to take for granted, of equal membership in the community and due process if that membership must be challenged or qualified. This assurance is built into the university community’s fundamental “mode of self-presentation,” to borrow a phrase from Stanley Fish, and it is in no way abridged by that community’s various hierarchical arrangements.1

Without this principle students would have no reasonable expectation of fairness in grading, and faculty (tenured or not) and administrators would have no reasonable expectation of the fairness of peer review, nor could they be required to do their jobs any more than students could be required to perform assignments. The entire system, in which reasons are given for actions and evidence provided for judgments and conclusions taken, would turn out to be based on something no more substantial than whim.

Rector Dragas’s list of challenges she contends face the University of Virginia (and her claim that these challenges justify her cabal’s acting to fire a president they did not believe up facing them) is in no way original. In fact it could have been cribbed from University Administration for Dummies, if such a manual existed, since the same or similar challenges face all but the most prestigious private institutions nowadays.2 I’ve noted with relief that the cabal’s interim president designate, Dean Carl P. Zeithaml, has removed himself from consideration for the present and stated that he is opposed to the firing of President Sullivan.

Zeithaml’s action is appropriate and commendable in light of the fact that the UVA board will now meet to consider reinstating the president as requested by all other university deans, the faculty, and most students. It is also at least interesting that Governor McDonnell of Virginia, for whom I don’t have a great deal of respect, has given the UVA board an ultimatim, resolve the leadership crisis or be removed for cause. I expect he just wants the whole thing to go away, and since reinstating Sullivan seems to offer the only resolution acceptable to the university community, I am expecting the board to offer to reinstate her.

Interesting, too, that we now have reached that inevitable point when the story becomes the news. Apparently we’re all appealing to Mr. Jefferson, on all sides of this.

Notes

1I am borrowing a phrase from something Professor Fish says in a different context and do not mean to claim that he would agree. The idea, itself, may be traceable to Jeremy Waldron, whose book Fish reviews in the piece I cite; though ultimately I think it comes from Kant.
2One might compare a list of recommendations “made for institutions, presidents and governing boards” by a group of former university and college presidents. Valerie Strauss lists them here.