In the aftermath of Labor Day I’m also thinking of my former staff colleagues at the University of North Texas who are now subject to an employment-at-will policy instituted last summer after a sham consultation period in which staff concerns were largely ignored. UNT President Lane Rawlins has claimed that the new policy contains “checks and balances” that “will protect employees from arbitrary and unwarranted actions,” but his own description of the policy belies his claim.

I wrote about this last year, before the policy went into effect. UNT (which I still think of with some affection as North Texas) is operating under a new corporate structure headed by a chancellor, Lee Jackson, who is a political appointee, a structure very like that at the University of Virginia which recently led to abuses of authority widely aired in the national press. (I wrote several blog posts about events at UVA. You can find them listed under “Recent Posts” in the sidebar.) Here is what Chancellor Jackson said about at-will employment at UNT when he first announced that the new policy was in the works.

I am revising our employment policies because I believe improvement is needed. With enhanced training and by working together, I believe we can place a higher priority on the quality of our workforce and support for employees.

This is bureaucratic doublespeak. UNT officials never explained to staff why the change was needed or what “improvement” was being sought. Indeed, if reports are true, the meetings that were held to allow for staff “input” were exercises in administrative stonewalling and more doublespeak.

Of course the real meaning of the change is that UNT is simply following suit. At-will policies are now in effect throughout the Texas system of higher education as that system bends to the determination of Republican governor Rick Perry “to re-engineer Texas’s leading public universities to become more like businesses, driven by efficiency and profitability,” as reported in The Washington Post. The Post also reports that

Texas A&M University, ha[s] compiled a spreadsheet ranking faculty members according to whether they were earning their keep or costing the school money. The university already had rankled professors with a program that paid bonuses based on anonymous student evaluations.

Universities pay faculty members? What a novel idea! Nevertheless, at-will employment was once the norm in American law. A contemporary defense of the practice represents a nineteenth-century court’s view of the matter as follows:

May I not refuse to trade with any one? May I not forbid my family to trade with any one? May I not dismiss my domestic servant for dealing, or even visiting, when I forbid? And if my domestic, why not my farm-hand, or my mechanic, or teamster?

There is a gathering effort in our national life to reverse protections for workers and reintroduce older practices affirming master-slave relationships between those who labor and those who own or supervise. In the background of this one should recall how much of this country’s wealth was created by slave labor conscripted from Africa and Asia, as well as the history of repression of (and violence against) workers that accompanied the rise of the labor movement. To indicate how far we have gone towards reinstituting the practices of the bad old days, it is now claimed that worker’s rights enslave owners and managers.

Scarcity is the natural state of mankind. Abundance, on the other hand, only comes about after people have applied their labor to their natural surroundings. In other words, scarcity is held at bay only by productivity or “work.” Therefore to assert that a man’s sustenance—his freedom from scarcity—is a basic right necessarily implies that another man must be forced to provide it whether he wishes to or not. If he does not wish to, then the “individual freedom” of the first man can only be bought at the cost of some degree of freedom from the second, who must be coerced, by threat of force, to provide for the first. Indeed, this is tantamount to slavery.¹

The incoherence of this argument is so clear as to need no comment, but it reflects the way in which the politics, say, of Paul Ryan appeals to some popular sentiment. On Labor Day, Eric Cantor tweeted: “Today, we celebrate those who have taken a risk, worked hard, built a business and earned their own success.” Perhaps Cantor would defend his callous disregard for the history of Labor Day by reference to an ideological position such as this one:

Government efforts to hamper an employer’s freedom owe much of their intellectual foundation to the old Marxist assumption that employer and employee interests in a free market are opposed. But this is not true. Employers seek profits; when they find them, they bid laborers and other resources away from other employers. This promotes new opportunities, higher real wages, higher productivity, and improved living standards. Hampering labor markets may have emotional or voter appeal, but it is counterproductive and corrosive to genuine human freedom and prosperity.²

Free-market ideology is falsified by so much empirical evidence that its durability is surprising. Its grassroots appeal ro rugged individualism is not only incoherent but cruel as well. Ask public workers in Wisconsin who have recently lost collective bargaining rights as well as jobs, benefits, and wages. So far Scott Walker’s cynical appeals to greed and selfishness have succeeded in turning many private-sector union workers against public-sector workers and their unions.

That Walker’s scorched earth policies have not produced significant job growth should surprise nobody. Those policies were designed to produce short-term political gains for the Republican party—they were never designed to create jobs. And the at-will policies that have been forced on Texas universities have nothing to do with improving efficiency or productivity. I expect to see large-scale staff cuts in Texas higher education, which will be justified by economic exigency. Faculty rights will be next on the chopping block.

There’s a new Pew Research report entitled “The Future of Higher Education.” It’s a flawed report in some ways. But the guts of it, particularly the contributed statements of academic professionals, are often pretty striking. One of my colleagues at Howard Rheingold’s Brainstorms community, Bryan Alexander, describes a future for Higher Education that I think is likely as well. Bryan is a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. Here is what he says:

By 2020 we will see: 1) A split between teaching and research faculty. Teaching faculty will largely be part-time, ill-paid, and expected to do no research. Research professors will teach little (perhaps the occasional grad student) and focus on grant-funded research. 2) Distance learning will be normative. A majority of students have taken at least one online class by age 16. The default for learning is online at this point. 3) Number of college campuses will dwindle. Those that survive will emphasize: face-to-face experiences; campus grounds (beauty, history, charm); charismatic teachers; a sense of tradition (meaning mid-20th century, but aiming for an older time).

I don’t think this future will be achieved by 2020, but I think it’s a reasonable expectation, given present trends. The expansion of higher education that took place as the baby boomers went to college isn’t sustainable. On the other hand, the idea that universities should hasten towards this brave new world has the potential to create great economic dislocation and suffering, as well as a lot of silly and shallow academic programs. If Institutions like UNT and others that are following Rick Perry’s lead, continue on their present course of attempting to impose “reform” from the top down instead of following the more prudent example of Teresa Sullivan at The University of Virginia, they could wind up looking a lot like the State of Wisconsin, and like Wisconsin have nothing to show for it.

Notes

¹Arthur Foulkes, “In Defense of Employment-at-Will,” Ludwig von Mises Institute.
²Ibid.