About that Abyss that's Gazing Back at Us

According to the editorial board of our student newspaper, "too much homework has real post-graduation consequences," and they respectfully suggest that professors assign less "homework."

The editorial neatly sketches the abyss into which public higher education is teetering:

1. A college education exists to help you get a good job after graduation.

2. Anything you do while going to college that will help you get a good job after graduation is worth spending time on.

3. Anything you do in college that doesn't help you get a good job is a potential waste of time.

4. Most college courses do not train you for a job. 

5. The things that you do outside the classroom in order to learn the content of your courses (e.g., "homework") are a waste of time.

6. Therefore, the work of learning the content of your courses should be subordinated to the things that will get you a job, like extracurricular activities, internships, and part-time paid employment (which also helps to alleviate your student debt burdens).

Of course, as the students point out, the abyss also looks like this:

Often, students must take on extra jobs and excel in multiple internships to be competitive candidates in their desired fields.From a financial perspective, students often need to work one or more part-time jobs. About 30 percent of students at the University work one or more of these jobs because of the high price of college.With the hefty costs of tuition in mind, students need to maximize their time at the University so that their jobs after graduation can pay enough to help repay their debts.

In my current position, helping English and Creative Writing majors prepare for post-graduation employment, I'm often the one nudging students towards this abyss, urging them to pick up jobs or activities that will help them build their applicable skills and demonstrate them to employers. Our alumni generally seem to get good jobs that they like, but it can take them a few years of floundering first, and our students are more likely to get good jobs upon graduation if they do some of that floundering while they are here.

So my dismay is not directed at the students who are trying to live in this world. It's not even directed at the forces (public divestment in education, funding gaps that are increasingly filled by corporate encroachment, exploitative student debt practices) that have created that world. I've been dismayed by those for a long time, as any reader of this blog knows.

Rather, this editorial gets under my skin as evidence of how lousy public higher education in Illinois has been at pushing back against those forces, how little scope we've given the students--even at the state's flagship institution--to recognize that colleges and universities exist to do anything other than train an entry-level workforce. The DI editorial board has internalized an understanding of higher education that the university itself increasingly puts forward. That's the abyss.

Putting the "Public" Back in "Public Employee"

"This great university system is not in danger of shutting its doors, but..." the wheels are off the bus, the train is off the rail, and the slow-moving wet garbage fire of the Illinois state budget is emitting ever more toxic smoke. We need new metaphors. Even more, we need a plan of action.

President Timothy Killeen domesticates the sh*t-show in today's MassMail. The doors will not shut.he reasssures us, while inviting us in to share his humble meal of advocacy: "significant cost-saving initiatives, structural reforms and prudent financial management." Our place is set, however, with a dire future:

All options are on the table as we go forward – layoffs, reductions of academic programs, closure of units and cuts in a health-care enterprise that provides critical care to underserved populations in Chicago. All would damage the very core of our mission to serve students and the public good, and erode a rich, 150-year legacy of academic excellence and economic impact that would be far more costly to rebuild than sustain.

Well.

The imperative to say something doesn't always mean that there is something to say. Let us grant that this particular MassMail is among the most straightforward administrative writing most of us have ever seen from the upper level of U of Illinois administration. Yet the core is hollow, and it doesn't need to be. "Tim" ends the MassMail as follows:

We will continue to do everything in our power to preserve the world-class quality that is synonymous with the University of Illinois, ramping up efforts that have been underway for well over a year to advocate at every turn for the interests of our students, our employees and the people and families of Illinois. I hope all of you will join us, and I will update you as the budget process unfolds.

That "we" again. Apparently the "we" that advocates for the university in Springfield differs from the "you" that receives MassMails. Yet as this MassMail boomerangs around academic Illinois Facebook, the solidarity is palpable. It is, after all, "our misson" under threat as faculty and staff share the link and the alarming "on the table" pull quote -- not just our livelihoods and benefits, not just our investment as Illinois citizens and taxpayers. We do our work because it matters.

"I hope all of you will join us"?!? We're in.

Now what?

An Interesting Thing Happened on the Way to Graduation...

Last year, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign started collecting information on what all its graduating seniors were planning to do next. A few colleges and schools had been collecting such data for a while, but this was the first effort to tap all students on their way out the door to find out what their plans were.

Some of us were sort of dreading the outcome, for all the reasons you might think: our majors have a reputation for having a hard time landing jobs, we've heard the tales of graduates floundering for a few years before landing in a career, we know students who defer job-hunting until finals are over. We wished that the data could be gathered six months after graduation, when our students have had some time to get settled into post-graduate life.

Turns out, we didn't need to worry.  This is what the data looks like:

How about that.

Three caveats here. First, employment data is not broken down by quality of employment, so a student who plans to scoop ice cream all summer while applying for professional jobs looks the same here as the student who is headed directly to a high-paying consulting job.  Second, the respondents may over-represent students with post-graduation plans, as they would be more likely to complete a survey like this than students with no plans. Third, this is the first time we've done this--there are no doubt bugs to be worked out in framing the survey and encouraging full participation.

Still.

Looks like an English or literature/cultures/linguistics major is about as employable as an economics, math/statistics, or political science/global studies/area studies major.  The English major is about as likely to still be seeking employment upon graduation as a chemistry major, and less likely to be seeking employment than the earth, society and environment major. English majors are far less likely than psychology majors to be headed directly to graduate school; on the other hand, they have a much higher rate of initial employment.

There is certainly room for us to do better channeling traditional humanities graduates into employment (yes, I see those numbers for history and philosophy vs. communications), but this is hardly the dire picture painted by media outlets and popular wisdom.

Even our own student newspaper, The Daily Ilini, claimed in a recent editorial that "now, it seems an undergraduate degree outside of STEM fields carries hardly any more weight than a high school diploma." The editors go on to argue that "lowering the cost of tuition or the interest rates on loans would allow students to choose their majors unburdened by financial or societal pressures," which is certainly true. The nationwide decline of state support of public universities threatens to turn them into employee-farms for corporations, not institutions that educate citizens for the full range of occupations in a functioning, healthy society.

But please, can we stop telling people that English majors don't get jobs? It's just not true.

The Mission, Not the Budget, Is in the Red

UPDATE (since I'm getting some readers from the shout-out on Inside Higher Ed): for information about the non-tenure-faculty labor action at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, see the student newspaper's coverage, the local newspaper's coverage, and the union website.


The strike vote was tallied last night for NTFC Local 6546, and the members authorized the union leadership to form a strike committee and take labor action.

It's still not about the money.

Although the union's wage proposal does include a salary floor, the key issues over which negotiations have collapsed are not salary structure: it's job security, academic freedom, and shared governance.  NTFC wants to have structures in place that will hold NTT faculty to the guiding values listed in the university's mission statement:

• Aim high
• Strive to control our destiny
• Be accountable for our actions and exercise responsible stewardship
• Be inclusive, treat each other with dignity and respect and promote citizenship
• Value excellence, quality and service
• Foster innovation and creativity

Except that, in a state currently undergoing budget meltdown, everything is always going to be about the money. All the regional state universities are in funding freefall as a result of the budget stall-out, and (one is given to understand) even the state flagship will soon be suffering--all of which makes a certain intuitive sense, until you look at the numbers.

The state's support for the U of I has been steadily declining for years now, prompting the U of I to steadily increase tuition. Tuition is now 300% of what it was when state appropriations started falling, and the institution now has more money coming in than it would have if state appropriations had stayed steady.

Money talks, and in a manufactured crisis, the lack of money talks even louder. NTT faculty are often brought on board to fill in the gaps that (one is, again, given to understand) can't possibly be filled by creating a tenure-stream line.  Those gaps get wider all the time as the numbers of NTT faculty grow, and with them the absurdity of their year-to-year positions. Some members of NTFC have been "visiting" faculty for upwards of a decade; many more have been on de facto multi-year contracts that get parceled out one year at a time.  As the administration uses the state's budget woes as an excuse to enact large scale changes, these situations will multiply.

The administration wants to negotiate a contract in which NTT faculty must "aim high" in their teaching and scholarship without institutional agreement about the extent to which they can count on the protections of academic freedom, in which NTT faculty can only control their destinies by finding work elsewhere, and where "accountability" depends solely on the initiative and good will of the individuals empowered to hire and fire them.

In no way do the administration's proposals convey an institutional commitment (which some think NTTs should have faith in, in place of a contract) to treat NTT faculty with dignity and respect.  NTT faculty continue to provide excellence, quality, and service because they are professionals who take pride in their work, even if the university doesn't. Does any of this foster innovation and creativity? Again, innovative and creative professionals will go on doing what they do--but excellence in spite of institutional neglect is not what the U of I should be striving for.

You Want to Know the Really Crazy Part?

Pushing for collective bargaining concessions when the state budget is in free-fall and other public institutions are preparing to be mothballed is insane.  Right?

The back story: NTFC Local #6546, the certified union that represents non-tenure-stream (NTT) faculty on the University of Illinois flagship campus, has been trying to bargain its first contract for more than a year. Faced with yet another round of negotiations in which the university resisted moving forward, NTFC called for mediation last week, and yesterday had the second session with a mediator.  Short version: things are not looking good, and there will be a strike vote next Tuesday.

There's a part of this that's even crazier, though: it's not about the money.

If it were, we wouldn't even be in this position right now.  Shortly after NTFC was certified as a union, the university froze its wage program for NTT faculty.  Making up collective bargaining rules as they went along, they declared that they could not go ahead with the proposed wage increases while negotiations were underway and then refused to begin collective bargaining. Nearly two years later, wages remain frozen. If union members were in this for the money, the organization would have collapsed by now. It's been a long time, and whatever wage increases one might expect a contract to yield are not going to be big enough to offset the loss of planned raises these past two years--particularly since (as everyone points out) it's not clear these days where the money for anything is going to come from.

Besides, contract negotiations have not even broached the subject of wages yet.  Really.  After 29 bargaining sessions, wages remain in the list of matters still to be discussed.

It's not about the money.  It never was.

This is not a line of work that people go into if they're motivated by money.  People with the smarts and stamina to earn a Ph.D. or other terminal degree can generally find an easier path to a large salary, if that's what they're after.  People go into college level teaching and continue to do it as NTTs because they care about the subject matter they teach and want to impart it to others.  Furthermore; many NTTs pay for themselves: the tuition dollars their teaching brings in dwarves the cost of their salaries.  The university isn't going to make a additional revenue by diminishing the professional role of these faculty members.  

Don't get me wrong: NTT faculty have the same needs as everyone else.  Who couldn't use more money? If a fiscal fairy godmother suddenly brought peace and compromise to the Illinois statehouse and showered public higher education in Illinois with money, NTT faculty would cheerfully accept a salary bump.  But negotiations haven't ground to a halt because NTT faculty are greedy; they've ground to a halt because the administration refuses to make the concessions that are necessary for NTT faculty to do their jobs, regardless of what they're paid.

These faculty are not the mythic tweed-jacketed, six-figure-earning, never-darkening-the-door-of-a- classroom, retiring-on-a-bloated-pension, ivory-tower figures that haunt comment threads on higher education.  If you've been a student in at the University of Illinois, NTTs are the faculty who marked multiple drafts of your first-year-composition papers, got you through a required math course, taught you a foreign language, lectured in fields ranging from political science to computer science.  They might have worked with you on an honors project, written you recommendations, and talked with you in office hours.  If you're not sure which of the faculty you encountered during your four years here were NTTS and which were on the tenure stream, there's a reason for that: NTT faculty do much of the same teaching work as tenure-stream faculty, only for less money with less job security and fewer resources.

NTT faculty know they're not going to be tenured, and they aren't looking for equivalent salaries to tenure-stream faculty.  They do, however, want the current hazy and capricious set of hiring and promotion guidelines to be replaced by procedures that hold both themselves and the university accountable.  Annual reviews--of all things!--have been a sticking point in negotiations.  Some NTTs get them; others teach here for many years without any evaluation of their work by a superior. One would think it would be in the university's interest--as it is in the interest of most employers--to make sure employees are meeting their standards on a regular basis, particularly when (as is currently the cases) NTTs are on year-by-year contracts.  But providing this minimal quality control is not something the university wants to do. 

Note those words, "others teach here for years....," above. Even though many NTTs have committed themselves to this state and these students, and bring a wealth of institution-specific experience to their jobs, the administration is loathe to codify and regularize the hiring and retention practices that, in fact, structure much of the teaching faculty of the university. NTFC Local 6546 wants it to be the case that five years of proven, documented success on the job lead to a two-year (as opposed to one-year) contract.  It's not a lot to ask, and it would improve Illinois teaching if the faculty that departments rely on didn't have to spend part of every year preparing an exit strategy, and if retention decisions were based on quality.

The issues at stake go beyond these matters of working conditions.  As the ongoing budget crisis increases the institution's reliance on NTTs to fulfill the university's teaching mission, they want the guarantees of academic freedom and shared governance that are central to fulfilling that mission. It's not overreach: NTTs are happy to refer the question of how much academic freedom and what role in shared governance to the fellow faculty who adjudicate these matters.  NTTs are asking for a seat on the Committee on Academic Freedom within the faculty senate, and within a year of the negotiated contract they want individual departments and unit bylaws to include language that explicitly addresses NTT roles in shared governance (or lack thereof). But again, the administration is reluctant to apply the principles of good educational practice to the special case of NTT faculty: even as the budget crisis swells the numbers of NTTs doing the teaching work of the university, the administration does not want those faculty adhering to expectations that are meant to hold their teaching to the highest standards of academic excellence.

Want Low-Cost, Performance-Based Higher Ed? Give It a Contract.

Here are some of the radical things that NTFC Local 6546 wants in a contract:

• regular performance reviews
• consistent, enforceable standards for promotion
• multiyear contracts
• a wage agreement

Here's what happens when non-tenure-stream faculty don't have those things:

• employees have no idea from year to year whether they're meeting performance expectations -- or even what those expectations are
• employees devote time and energy that could go into teaching to preparing a yearly fall-back strategy, so that if they are not rehired at the end of one academic year, they will have another job to begin in the following fall.
• decisions on retention from year to year reflect everything BUT teaching excellence: the vagaries of enrollment patterns, the wish to employ favored graduate students, spousal accommodations (yes, I am a spouse who benefits from the current system), department politics 
• the salaries that teaching NTTs earn bear no relation to the tuition dollars they draw, particularly relative to the salaries of tenure-stream faculty with similar teaching responsibilities.

If higher education in Illinois can only be preserved by replacing the shattered remnants of the pre-Rauner way of doing things with a "performance-based" system of funding, then supporting an agreement between the NTT union and the University administration is a step towards that bold new world of fiscal responsibility and financial stability.  An NTT contract would do what the present system does not: build accountability into the work of much of the teaching faculty and reward the ability of NTTs to fulfill the fundamental teaching mission of higher education without the high overhead of equipment like telephones, laptops, books, and internet connections (many teaching NTTs, lacking these amenities in their offices, do much of their work from home where they pay for them themselves). 

Oh, right: except that Gov. Rauner is holding the entire state budget hostage to the dream of eliminating collective bargaining. So much for NTTs leveraging their very cost-effectiveness into a better education for the taxpayers of Illinois.

The point is, when NTTs jostle and agitate for a contract agreement, they're not pulling the state deeper into the red. NTT teaching faculty already operate in the black and they want to hold their institution accountable for the instrumental role they play in upholding its mission to educate the students of Illinois (as well as the out-of-state and international students who also help to balance the books).

Winter is Here

The signs are unmistakeable.  Chicago State University is cancelling spring break, in an effort to race to the end of the semester before the money runs out.  The governor vetoed funding for MAP grants. Eastern Illinois University recently had to lay off 198 civil service employees.  Southern Illinois University is bracing for an additional $40 million in budget cuts.  Kishwaukee College will be laying off 17% of its workforce.   Parkland College is hiking its tuition 11.4%.

Even here at the Casterly Rock of Illinois higher public ed, we're feeling the chill winds. So frightening is the impending budgetary catastrophe that the our new president's draft strategic plan has attracted less snark than such documents usually do (although some of us will always rise to the occasion).  Credit where it's due: there's only a thin layer of bureaucratic cant and no tired metaphors (no loops, boxes, envelopes, peanut butter). The cringeworthy phrases are too oblique to make good targets ("lifewide learners," "innovation clusters"), and the tagline ("optimizing impact for public good") is too clunky to yield ironic variants but not inherently risible enough to amuse by itself.  

So we are left with the substance.  

As one of my faculty friends on Facebook wrote, 

is that document supposed to be meaningful? It seems like a crass collection of obvious platitudes put together to speak to the state legislature. I mean, fine, I guess, if we need something like that, but surely actual people who have actual jobs to do in the university aren't supposed to treat it seriously, are they?

After all, the presidents gets the six-figure salary, the house downstate, the condo in the big city, the country club memberships, and the various other perks of the office, so that he or she will use these accoutrements of power, and the dreadful corporate jargon that goes with them, to lobby the state legislature while we get on with our work.  In these dire times one would prefer to just leave him to get on with it and fire off the occasional "crass collection of obvious platitudes" as circumstances require.

The reason why I can't let it alone, though, is that public higher education is being redefined.  Crass platitudes are no longer simply repackaging "actual jobs...in the university" so that legislatures will continue to fund them; documents like these represent our upper administration's best effort to preserve our ability to keep doing what we do in the face of public pressure that is fundamentally reshaping the institutions in which we do it.

I prefer to believe, for now, that our new president is committed to a vision of public higher education that most of us would sign on to.  That's why this draft strategic plan is depressing as hell, and something we all need to think about.

In a recent blog post, I pointed out that we who teach and advise students

need to keep clearly in mind that our duty is to our students, many of whom will change careers several times in the course of their lives, and many of whom just haven't lived enough yet to know what kind of job will give them long-term satisfaction.  Our duty is NOT to corporate employers who would prefer to offload the training of an entry-level workforce on to institutions of higher learning.

The draft strategic plan lays out a diametrically opposite set of priorities.  Item 1, under the first "Strategic Goal" ("A Healthy Future for Illinois") on the first page of the document is

1. Prepare a “Next Generation” Workforce

U of I will identify the most critical current and future workforce needs of the State and build programs to prepare our students with the knowledge and competencies necessary to meet this demand while satisfying their professional and life goals. 

How are students to identify their "professional and life goals"? How are we going to help students respond to a changing world and not just the "changing demands of the workplace"?  What scope do we have to educate students for a world that exists beyond the workforce needs of the State of Illinois?  And who, exactly, gets to decide what those workforce needs are?

One looks in vain for evidence that a public university is the place to ask those questions.  Item 3 does, to its credit, set the goal of building "Strong Civic Engagement," but since it comes after enabling "Powerful Research and Development Partnerships," one can reasonably wonder who will get to decide what counts as "civic engagement." The state's "public, nonprofit sectors" do get named as potential partners, but these are the same sectors that are also getting starved by the current budget impasse.  It's seems unlikely that they will exert a pull equal to potential private partners.

"We are thus accountable to our students first and foremost" this document declares.  On page five of ten.  Strategic Goal II is "An Institution of and for Our Students."  We will do a lot of good things for the next generation workforce.  We will "create an inclusive community" and "build connections" to "nearby immigrant and minority communities."  We'll also make it easier for students to transfer between campuses.  Will we teach them things other than how to be part of a workforce?  They'll get "global competencies" and "pedagogical innovation" will be "brought to scale" so that everyone can get the benefit of it.  There will be online tools and university-wide databases.

But will they get better at being smart human beings who can think for themselves?

Hard to say.

In a sop to something or other we are told that "We will...Celebrate the human condition through innovation and creativity in the performing arts and humanities."

I'm not sure how much time my humanities and fine arts colleagues spend "celebrating" the human condition.  We contemplate it.  We study it.  We try to get students to understand themselves and their mounting student debt as part of a historically contingent reality that explains but also extends beyond immediate exigencies. We expose them to the variety of ways that people have sought to make sense of themselves and their worlds and we encourage them to value these four years as a time to explore realities other than the ones they know intimately and those determined by their life circumstances.  It's not just the work of the arts and humanities to encourage this kind of broad and open-ended thinking; science teaching does it, too.  It also gets harder all the time.

Documents like this draft strategic plan don't help.  It balances the purpose of the university on the training of an entry-level work force and justifies its public value as a monetizable one.  If it is meant to be a Trojan horse hiding an older alternative understanding of public higher education within a gift that will please our state legislators and their constituents, that hatch in the belly is well hidden indeed.

Not every public institution of higher ed is giving up quite this completely.  Compare the "Announcement of Comprehensive Planning and Analysis Process" issued by the Berkeley campus of the University of California system.  Granted, it's a campus and not the university as a whole, and granted, they offering transparency in an ongoing process, not demonstrating the leadership of the new executive in a shaken institution.

Still.

Berkeley frames the need for a strategic plan not with the putatively inexorable need for the public university to be "an engine of for economic growth" but by frank acknowledgement of "a substantial and growing structural deficit, one that...does not reflect a short-term dip in funding, but a 'new normal' era of reduced state support."  Berkeley, like the University of Illinois "must focus not only on the immediate challenge, but also on the deeper task of enhancing our institution’s long-term sustainability and self-reliance."  However, unlike Illinois, Berkeley recognizes an inevitable cost, and certain values that must be maintained:

This endeavor must not be interpreted as an abandonment of our commitment to a public mission nor to our efforts to advocate for increased public funding for higher education. We are fighting to maintain our excellence against those who might equate “public” with mediocrity, against those who have lost faith in the need for higher education to serve as an engine of social mobility, and against those who no longer believe that university-based inquiry and research have the power to shape our society and economy for the better. What we are engaged in here is a fundamental defense of the concept of the public university, a concept that we must reinvent in order to preserve.

Throughout the state of Illinois, the public university (and the community college system that feeds it) is getting reinvented out from us.  The concept of the university that gets preserved may have little to do with the values that we were trained to uphold.

Leveraging Contemplation

(with apologies to W.H. Auden, The Musee des Beaux Arts)

About education they were never wrong,
The crafters of strategic plans: how well they understood
The human condition; how it must be celebrated
While someone else is leveraging technology or enabling potential partners or just
Doing some civic engagement;
How, when the citizens of Illinois are reverently, passionately waiting
For a state budget, there always must be
Corporations who are happy to build their headquarters elsewhere, sipping coffee
In the innovation food court.
They never forgot
That students must get something in return for their tuition dollars
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the instructors flash Powerpoints on a wall and grade papers
in the glow of laptops not paid for by the university.

In The Public's University: A Framework for the System Strategic Plan, for instance: How everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the citizen may
Have heard the system power off, the final "ping,"
But for him it was not an important failure; the lights stayed on
As they had to in the rooms where economic growth gets
Stimulated; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, the life of the mind as a public good,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

What's Next?

Everyone around here spent the weekend reading the FOIA'ed emails on the Salaita case, the College of Medicine, and James Kilgore (not familiar with what's going on? backstory here).  Last night, my department head, Michael Rothberg, posted the following question on Facebook: "What’s next?"  

bargaining team in situ, NTFC Local 6546

Though he was crowd-sourcing the question, he also had some ideas to frame the discussion, which I quote in their entirety below, with Prof. Rothberg's permission (which is in no way meant to imply his endorsement of anything I have to say about them).  

I think it is important for those of us at UIUC to clarify what our goals are after Wise’s resignation and the release of the emails. I post these reflections as part of an open-ended, non-dogmatic effort to clarify my own thinking and to invite others to join me. 

For the purposes of this discussion, I’m leaving aside Salaita’s own claims—reinstatement and financial compensation. These are crucial, but I believe they are going to be settled in a legal forum where we have no influence. In any case, in addition to continuing to support those claims, we need to transform our local context: the UIUC campus and the Illinois university system. 

I’m curious to know what other people think our priorities should be. Here’s a first attempt to draft some priorities (I am not proposing that these are definitive or complete, and they are not meant to be in rank order): 

Want to Be My Provost or Chancellor? Quote a Poem I Don't Already Know by Heart.

When I first started blogging about Salaita, one of several questions that baffled me was why STEM faculty seemed so indifferent to the issues raised by his unhiring.  It seemed continuous with a humanities/STEM divide that had emerged in the course of faculty unionizing, but it was also different in important ways: different stakes, different consequences, different collective action.  I expended a lot of bandwidth trying out different formulations: dead canaries, boiled frogs, competing polarities.

A year has passed since the unhiring news broke.  My job duties have changed, and I now spend more time with administrative professionals from various campus units, less with fellow humanities faculty.  The issue now looks much more straightforward to me, but also much bleaker.  The corporate university has won.  The humanities and interpretive social sciences linger on as quaint vestiges of the ways things used to be done, but nobody who isn't us really knows why they're still here or what they're for, apart from supplying certain service courses.

After any meeting with my non-LAS counterparts, I find myself feeling as if I'm living in an inverted, nightmarish, gruesomely distorted version of Plato's cave: my tenure-stream colleagues, inside the cave, continue to watch their shadows on the wall, blissfully unaware that the cave is about to be razed to create a techno-shopping-R&D-corporate park, where a Liberal Arts Museum Boutique will allow some of them to continue to play with their shadows.

No Downside

The dream of an engineering-based medical school on the Urbana campus of the University of Illinois has been around for a while now.  For a long time, my reflections on the issue looked something like this: Sure, some of our aspirational-peer-institutions don't have medical schools (looking at you, Princeton); yeah, it is a little odd to have a state flagship that only houses the offshoot of a prestigious medical program housed elsewhere.  Be nice not to have to travel to St. Louis or Chicago if I or my loved ones came down with some grave or complicated illness. Whatever. Smart folks who know more about the relevant factors than me are figuring it out.

Then I found myself at a campuswide faculty meeting last fall.  Can't remember which one--there were several.  I was there for the debate about the Salaita un-hiring, union issues, and racism on campus, but I stayed for the rest, so I was there when our provost, Ilesanmi Adesida took the stage.  I had anticipated that only my "it's rude to leave a meeting halfway through" instincts would keep me there, but his astonishingly tone-deaf greeting immediately pinned me to my seat.  To a roomful of people seared by the impassioned commentary from the floor that we'd just heard and the impassive response of the administrators they were speaking to, Ade's enormous smile and "It's a GREAT day for Illinois!" were just--unfathomable.  Had he been listening to anything?  Apparently not.  With no acknowledgement of the hostility, anger, and incomprehension radiating from the faculty whom he is supposed to lead, with no recognition that entire departments and programs were reeling from an administrative body-blow, he told us about the plans for the engineering-based medical school.  We were invited to meditate on that term "engineering-based medical school"--and presumably let its glory fill our souls.  

The Waiting Game? Already Lost

"Waiting room icon" by PanierAvide - Own work.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

"We, politically progressive members of universities and college should no longer wait. We should step up our game and move to other more effective modes of action."  I didn't click on the link until about the fifth time I saw it posted on Facebook: "'Waiting in the Neoliberal University: The Salaita Case and the Wages of an Academic Boycott."  This essay from my colleagues Ellen Moodie and Martin Manalansan IV appeared first in Savage Minds, now it's on Academe Blog.   Tl;dr (as the kids say): we need to keep doing what we've been doing, just more of it.

Were we still "waiting" for anything?  The Urbana campus of the University of Illinois is officially censured by the AAUP and Prof. Salaita is off to Beirut for a year.  The outcome of the lawsuit still lies before us, and a few more anger-bombs may detonate as additional FOIA'ed documents come forward, but it's been over for a while.  Moodie and Manalasan gave us some bones to pick over: Is academic freedom inseparable from the BDS movement?  Was the boycott prompted by forces inside or outside the university?  These have been rich talking points on Facebook this past week.

I'm more interested in what can be salvaged from a fight we've already lost.

Who Decides What the Money is For?

This line from Mad Men has been haunting me, ever since a friend brought it to my attention:

An alternate title for what follows: Why Sara Goldrick-Rabb's Professional Obligation is to Future UW Students, not UW, which Should Be the Same Thing but Isn't.

In academia, the salary or per-course compensation, that is, the money, is for the teaching.  That goes for everyone who gets paid to be faculty.  And also for the things that go with the teaching (research, if you are salaried in a tenure-stream faculty appointment): the preparation, the ongoing engagement with the field, the creation of new knowledge.  And also the things that go into sustaining the department that sustains the teaching (more of these, generally, if you're noncontingent faculty): the service, the committee work, the administrative appointments folded into a faculty workload.

The academic equivalent of that uncompensated space where Peggy finds herself is growing.  As higher ed ceases to be a public good, paid for by tuition rather than state appropriations, the expectation grows that public university faculty will not just teach, serve, and do research for the benefit of the citizens of their state.  Excellence has become too expensive to speak for itself.  Faculty now must be willing to contribute to the PR effort to package those activities as part of a "brand" that can be sold for top dollar to out-of-state and international students.

Unfortunately, state legislators, the upper echelons of academic administration, and the faculty in front of classrooms have very different ideas about what that "brand" consists of, what they are willing to work to achieve that isn't necessarily covered by their compensation.  It's not exactly the "thank you" that Peggy is looking for, but it's in the same realm of ineffability.  For people who aren't paid-to-teach, it's a certain kind of prestige, name-recognition, newsworthiness.  For those who are, it's those moments when, as a result of their work, something exists in the world that wasn't there before: a student's ability to think a complex thought through to uncomfortable conclusions, an online classroom discussion forum where students spontaneously wield arguments borne of evidence they've gained in the course readings, students who didn't think they could do X and who learn that they can. Or beyond the classroom: a new idea, a paper that gets people in the field talking, a book, a discovery.   It's not necessary that these two concepts of surplus value be in conflict in higher ed.  But they are.

In the nonacademic world, most people in the course of a career will find themselves on both sides of the Mad Men conversation: perceived as demanding recognition before they deserve it, withholding recognition that is warranted.  In academia, the conversation of what gets paid for and why is increasingly in the hands of Don Drapers who, unlike this fictional character, are profoundly detached from the creative process, and Peggys who have few options for selling their considerable talents to less complacent buyers.

The Silence of the Brands

http://identitystandards.illinois.edu/
graphicstandardsmanual/generalguidelines.html

First, a few words about the current state of play:

The AAUP voted yesterday to censure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  It feels anticlimactic, much like final BOT approval of a tenure and promotion decision: everyone knew it was coming, but now it's officially official.  And as with that final stamp of approval on the tenure decision, everybody is at a bit of a loss.  The big surges of emotion at various stages earlier in the process have left little in the reservoir for this moment.  Any sense of vindication is cancelled out by a profound sense of "now what?"

Tenure brings with it less ambient anxiety but more service and higher expectations.  Censure brings with it...well, what really?  Life goes on as it as for the past year, except that our local crisis over academic freedom has been overshadowed by threatened catastrophic budget cuts and the demise of tenure in Wisconsin.

Saving the Humanities One University at a Time

I offer some ideas on how to do that over here.

Addendum on the Dream of Teaching-Intensive Tenure

Over at Bardiac, there's a fine round-up of the blogospheric response to Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth's proposal for a teaching-intensive tenure-track. (http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2015/06/metablogging-conversation-about.html?m=1) Yes, it quotes the Good Enough Professor, which makes this post meta-meta-blogging.

If anecdotal data like mine suggests a general trend towards creating some middle ground between tenure and rank exploitation, that seems like a good thing.  Non-exploitative working conditions are better than exploitative ones.  There's a bigger problem, though.  Without provisions for academic freedom, shared governance, and  grievance procedures these improvements will hasten the decline of higher education.  Instructors who, however well-paid and professionally validated, are beholden to the administrators who hire them and not the faculty peers qualified to evaluate their teaching and research, will not sustain the mission of higher education as many of us understand it.

These Deck Chairs Aren't Going to Rearrange Themselves

As commenters have been pointing out, the teaching-intensive tenure track is already a thing: at any number of non-R1 institutions, tenure is already based on teaching.  But as Michael Berube and Jennifer Ruth emphasize, it is also the norm at many institutions for the heavy-lifting of a department's teaching workload to be performed by contingent employees who lack livable salaries, job security, benefits, a voice in their departments, procedures for evaluation and promotion, and institutional recognition.  And then of course there are a lot of institutions making unwieldy and incoherent compromises between those two extremes.  Issues of department service and governance are particularly vexed: the self evident truth that "shared governance" ought to give those fulfilling an institution's mission a voice is at odds with the hierarchical boundaries that define academic life.

AAUP Censure: Now What?

As I was writing this post, I got word that the AAUP has voted to censure the University of Illinois.

Will it matter?

Among the reasons that the Good Enough Professor went silent for a while in there was a change in my job duties.  I'm now doing less literature teaching, more helping-English-majors-get-professional-experience-and-find-jobs-after-graduating.  There has been a lot to learn, less mental space for blogging.

In this capacity, I've now found myself at various campus-wide events where, if I'm not the ONLY representative of the liberal arts, I'm one of, perhaps, two. Such events lay bare a truth about the university that I realize I've been blogging about for a while now: that nobody apart from liberal arts faculty themselves see the liberal arts as a critical part of the university's mission.

What I have NOT seen is a university eager to starve the liberal arts into irrelevance.  A lot of good people are trying to do right by their students and their colleges: where "do right" means establish corporate partnerships, supply ample opportunities for students to get professionally relevant experiential learning, supply employers with a deep talent pool, and help their students transition into successful careers.

Are these university staff thereby trying to edge out the parts of the University where the primary goal is, say...learning?  No.  They just don't know anyone here might be trying to do anything else.  Many of them don't even realize we're here as anything other than providers of gen ed courses.  "Wow, 400 English majors?" a colleague in career services at another academic unit said to me.  "I thought it was more like 40."

I would feel a bit like the last ibex wandering the Pyrenees, except that I know that I'm not.  That's a lot of majors.  My colleagues are out there--lots of them.  But our habitat is changing, and here the metaphor falls apart.  We don't need to change to survive, but we do need to make ourselves relevant in an environment that is largely indifferent to our existence.  Academics have more scope to do that than ibices.  L'Affaire Salaita has revealed that institutional features we thought would protect us--the university's mission, the academic senate, shared governance, formal procedures--are broken.   While we work to fix them, we need to also be mindful that our efforts may not, ultimately, matter that much.  The university is not what we thought it was, and we in the liberal arts need to find ways to be salient outside those protections.

When I signed up to attend yet another campus-wide event, the second annual University of Illinois Social Media Conference, I felt the pull of these two different conceptions of the univeristy. As someone who continues to follow the fall-out of Salaita's unhiring and who was acculturated to the critical approaches of the humanities, something calling itself a conference, here, on the topic of social media, that doesn't directly address Salaita's twitter feed comes across as risibly out-of-touch.  As someone who manages a social media account to make the work of my department visible to students, potential majors, alumni, other campus units, potential mentors for our students, and employers, this conference exactly as conceived covers topics and issues that can help me do my job better, and derailing it with the Salaita affair would be a pointless exercise.  It's taken me a scant six months to internalize a view of the university where work goes on while AAUP censure is something someone else has to worry about.  Granted, that internalized view is at war with every reason why I ever got into this higher ed business in the first place.  Also internalized.  Some ibices probably lost their footing and died while they tried to migrate to the flatlands while still yearning to stay in the mountains.

I want to be part of a university where vigorous and potentially uncivil debate flourishes--on social media, in student assignments, in classrooms, in conferences of all kinds--not because we're all upholding rules that protect it (although we should be doing that) but because

• our students
• their families
• the communities they come from
• the taxpayers of illinois
• our alumni
• our donors
• the stakeholders in the change we can help bring about

all recognize that such debate matters and that a vigorous education in the liberal arts is necessary to sustain it.  Fighting the AAUP/Salaita battle is necessary, but it's not going to bring that university into being.

Two Cultures, Shmultures

from http://theconversation.com/why-arts-and-
science-are-better-together-15004

A peculiar silence has descended over campus. Partly it's because the students have mostly left for the summer, but it's also the silence of a lot of people waiting to see what happens next. Whether one cares or not, the chatter that was raging last fall on all sides of L'Affaire Salaita has ceased.  There's not a lot to say at this point. Some minor ripples percolate through the humanities faculty as FOIA'ed emails from last summer bubble up to the surface, but all there is really to do is await the outcomes of processes beyond our control: Salaita's lawsuit and the vote on AAUP censure.  Meanwhile, we figure out how to move forward within an institution where academic freedom is a matter of profound indifference.

"Nothing to be done!" my friend, the Countess of Useful Research, said to me the other day.  "What do you mean, nothing to be done!  Now is the time for all of you to exert pressure on the Chancellor! NOW before the AAUP votes!  While there's still time!  She needs pressure from the faculty that she can legitimately succumb to!"

I was nonplussed.  MORE letters?  Emails?  Votes of no confidence?  Public meetings?  They didn't make a difference in the fall.  Why would they work now?  Maybe an illegal wildcat walkout action? Kind of hard to pull off now that classes are over...

"Well what do you have in mind?" I asked.  "Are you going to galvanize support among your colleagues?  How?"

"Oh no," the Countess explained.  "I don't care.  But you guys care.  You should do something."

The Countess's research really is very useful.  It's not going to make anybody money, and it's not so obscure that its connection to Real Things that Matter is only accessible to experts.  Trust me, you're glad that the Countess is here, doing what she does. But once again, I found myself peering across that chasm, the one that L'Affaire Salaita laid bare. It goes beyond, way beyond, CP Snow's "two cultures": a place where dear friends with identical values, mutual moral and intellectual respect, similar life experiences, and congruent professional goals find themselves talking at institutional cross-purposes.

Let me note that there's NO way to try to explain each side to the other without coming across as self-serving.  Also: offer to tell someone how you think they differ from you and the hackles go up.  But I can't seem to stay away from the challenge of trying to figure out how people with more in common than not and bound together in a shared institution find each other so fundamentally puzzling.  

My latest in a series of theories about why the liberal arts and the remainder of the university (including the STEM fields) miscommunicate: practitioners of the liberal arts are unaccustomed to explaining themselves.

With no market forces to justify or sustain them, no corporate support, no significant funding agencies to supplicate, the liberal arts have historically depended exclusively on the widespread public recognition that they matter. And, frankly, they're pretty cheap: no need for labs, equipment, staff, space, material.

While there is widespread public recognition that other university entities matter (particularly the STEM fields), their work tends to cost more and there is the expectation that outside entities (public or private) will fund it, particularly in those cases where it has market value.

As a result, faculty outside the liberal arts are accustomed to a relentless grind of self-explanation, to a variety of audiences with a stake in their work.  Being called upon to justify themselves is just a routine part of doing business.  Liberal arts faculty, on the other hand,--apart from isolated bids for fellowships or occasional grants--are accustomed to explaining their work to each other and their students.

Everyone is feeling the constriction of publicly funded higher education.  As grant money dries up alongside state budgets, STEM faculty and liberal arts faculty alike are coping with dwindling resources. The difference is, non-liberal-arts faculty confront this reality with the tools they already have ready to hand: the capacity to explain why people should pay for what they have to offer.

The problem is not that liberal arts faculty have no such case to make--but the justification of a public good tends to inhere in the assumption that the public already recognizes it and values it.  The very fact of becoming a hard sell diminishes its intrinsic worth.  We offer a vigorous alternative to the stunted values of the marketplace, but we have yet to find a persuasive way to communicate that frame to the marketplace itself.  We who make living confronting the paradoxes of human life struggle to live within this one: the impossibility of asserting our relevance without validating the norms of relevance that we seek to transcend.

The Day the Liberal Arts Died

Just to be clear, it was a long, long time ago.  The fatal wound took place in the Reagan era.  What we're observing now is not even the death throes.  It just took some of us longer than others to realize we were dealing with a corpse.  L'Affaire Salaita, if nothing else, laid that truth bare.

A certain forensic fascination remains in picking through FOIA-ed emails, the way we close-read tweets last summer.  Was Salaita subject to procedural irregularities?  Yup--procedures are, as a result, being altered to it easier for those outside the faculty chain of shared governance to intervene when necessary.  Did administrators lie?  YES!  They lied.  Will we be censured for their malfeasance?  The official decision still lies a few weeks away, but it looks like, yes, we will be censured.  Does anyone care?

Well, that's the thing.  Some people care very much.  They read my blog and my live-tweeting/facebooking of the relevant meetings.   They ask the probing questions at these events, they make their anger known, they speak to colleagues elsewhere who decry what is happening here.

They attended last month/s IPRH event to discuss the likelihood of AAUP censure and they were eloquent in their shock and dismay.

They asked trenchant questions at the first Town Hall with the new University of Illinois President, Timothy Killeen, and they elicited stirring boilerplate from him about the centrality of the arts and letters and the importance of academic freedom (even if the real questions remained unanswered).

What becomes increasingly clear, however, is that none of this matters.  There may have been a time when these stalwart voices from the liberal arts lay at the core of the university's purpose and mission, but that time is long past.  All year the administration has granted us, and we have supplied ourselves with, echo chambers in which to hear ourselves amplify our outdated convictions about our significance--senate meetings, academic freedom symposia, town halls, colloquiums, meetings.  Over and over we've seen representatives of the administration--Chancellor Wise, most notably, but also, at the IPRH symposium on AAUP censure, the outgoing academic senate chair, Roy Campbell--nurture our illusions by allowing us to vent our impotent rage at them.

Meanwhile the real work of the university, the grantsmanship, the corporate partnerships, the entrepreneurial endeavors, the channeling of state funds into lucrative endeavors, goes on.

What happens next?  I don't know.  But a meaningful answer that changes things can only come from us.