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.