Monthly Archives: March 2012

Juxtaposition is a wonderful thing and, sometimes, hints at something interesting. Here’s a set of fruitful contrasts. First is the story about the beleaguered U.I. president, Michael J. Hogan, confessing to what he calls a “communication shortfall” (“U. of Illinois President Acknowledges Communication Shortfall“). Among other things, these “shortfalls” may include asking his personal assistant, Lisa Troyer, to send faked anonymous emails “designed to sway a faculty governing body’s decisions on enrollment management.”

That’s seems a little beyond “communication problems.” Once the emails were discovered Troyer resigned and Hogan rewarded her for falling on her sword with a tenured faculty appointment. Meanwhile, over in the “Administration” section there’s a piece about proprietary school’s ongoing effort to buff up their image by changing their vocabulary (“By Any Other Name: For-Profit Colleges Watch Their Language“). Project Rose, as its called, is essentially a shift from corporate terms to traditional university terminology. It’s professional truthiness.

One helpful comment in the Hogan story points to a study called, “Narcissistic Leaders and Group Performance,” which suggests a link between an “arrogant and overly dominant” leader who’s perceived strengths actually result in communication problems.  Maybe. I’m thinking this is one of those “moral hazard” problems.  Hogan and his ilk know that there is no price on failure, beyond a temporary embarrassment. We’ll see how much he’s paid if he has to resign and who hires him next.

If people spend other people’s money on other people, they are not careful about the amount of money they spend, nor are they careful about what they spend it on. That is government.

“Evidence of Absence,” Donald Rumsfeld, Harpers, May 2011

I am always behind on my reading– unemployment, if nothing else, may fix that– and this morning I found this example of one of what Rumsfeld calls his  intellectual “snowflakes.” As Rumsfeld writes elsewhere in the same piece, “Before the thugs, go the liars.” Even if we disagree about how the money is spent, an ethical democratic government spends, by definition, our money on ourselves. The thuggery that follows this Rumsfeldian lie continues.

It always begins with de-funding: the more you cut back financial support for government services, the worst things work, and the worst things work the more you can claim that government doesn’t work well. The logical end of this process is dismantling, which is what is apparently being attempted at the University of Northern Iowa (“Cuts Ahead“).  This would represent a new, more profound stage in the class war facilitated by our ongoing economic problems.

It’s one thing to wonder how far the cuts will go, or to see how financial shortfalls are used to line the pockets of administrators and to undermine faculty and staff salaries.  That seems to be standard operating procedure. It’s another thing altogether to think that the ongoing fight against university labor and labor rights might go so far as to begin shutting down whole chunks of public universities.  Yet that is exactly what seems to be on the horizon.

I am always fascinated by the way the ruling class of academia, or its professional mouthpiece, the ACTA, manages to both invert common sense and to slyly inject a “market solution” into almost any debate without actually calling it a market solution. Orwell couldn’t have described it better. This week, in “Message to Senator Durbin: Level the Playing Field”  the ACTA asks the public universities to model themselves after Phoenix.

This isn’t a call for “fairness” in any sense, and it’s a proposal that would un-level the playing field in the same fashion that the public schools have been made profoundly inequitable through standardized testing, on the one hand, and by undermining the creative role of teachers, on the other. It also ignores the real inefficiencies, which lie in administrative costs. Why? Democracy is like learning itself: unruly and messy and difficult to control.

They’d rather have more control over how we’re educated and they’d rather weaken the public system– which by definition values people over profits–whenever possible. That’s why there’s so much interest in standardized forms of educational and institutional measurement and in the for-profit universities, which are allowed to experiment in reductive methodologies that are unacceptable– so far, anyway– in the public university.