UNC Board's Review of Research Centers Is an Assault on Academic Freedom

The UNC Board of Governors recently convened a panel to review the system's 240 research institutes and centers. The stated goal of the panel was to find ways to divert state money away from these institutes and centers to other system priorities. On Wednesday, the panel released a draft of its final report, which recommends closely reviewing or terminating 16 institutes or centers. The three institutes or centers on the chopping block are:

East Carolina University's North Carolina Center for Biodiversity
North Carolina Central University's Institute for Civic Engagement and Social Change
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill's Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity

In addition to terminating these three institutes or centers, the report recommends banning university-backed political advocacy. To be fair, this recommendation simply extends to all employees of institutes and centers a pre-existing UNC system restriction on political activity while on duty. Moreover, some of the panel's recommendations, such as encouraging better coordination among similarly themed centers, strikes me as logical. But there are also political machinations at play in the panel's review process and recommendations. By now, it is clear to me that no change in North Carolina's education system is free from politicking. Setting aside momentarily the political motivations of the panel, the UNC Board of Governors's efforts to restrict the free inquiry of tenured faculty at colleges and universities is an unabashed assault on academic freedom.

Let's stop to consider the meaning of academic freedom. Robert O'Neill reminded us over a decade ago that the American Association of University Professors' 1940 "Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure" has undergone little change and, within the insular confines of higher education, "remains almost as nearly as inviolate as the U.S. Constitution." The Statement protects faculty in three areas: freedom in research and in the publication of results, freedom in the classroom when discussing course subject matter and expressing themselves as citizens, and freedom from institutional censorship and unwarranted sanction. This, of course, is more of a professional meaning than a legal meaning. Nevertheless, it is widely accepted in academic culture and has long been considered an essential feature of higher education. It refers not only to the rights of faculty, but also the rights of students to freely exchange ideas, regardless of how they affect administrators' or politicians' delicate sensibilities.

Because the UNC Board of Governors disagrees politically with several of the system's institutions and centers, it is using the review process and its increasingly interventionist approach to governance to censor faculty and students and subject them to unwarranted sanction. In particular, the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity has been frequently targeted by conservatives in the state. The director of the Center, law professor Gene Nichol, has been criticized by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, a conservative think tank with ties to Republican leadership in the state. Simply put, the Center is facing termination because conservative politicians and their allies on the Board of Governors find its work offensive. Although the panel claims the decisions are primarily financial, closing the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity would save the system no money--hence, the unwarranted sanction. The Center is privately funded. Indeed, the state has already slashed appropriations to institutes and centers by 40 percent since 2008. It is difficult for me to believe that such attention would be directed at a research center that receives no state funds were politics not part of the equation.

Academic freedom exists precisely to protect against silencing free inquiry because it is deemed offensive by those in power. Moreover, academic freedom is necessary in order to allow for healthy critique of government and its functionaries. In other words, we should encourage faculty at universities to engage in political activity and criticize the government. Without this protected voice, where else can we turn for social, political, and economic critics that can check the unbridled power of politicians? Of course, we should recognize that the institutes and centers being scrutinized by the Board of Governors were not founded for the purpose of critiquing the state's elected officials. Instead, they serve marginalized communities, promote the conservation of global biodiversity, and address injustices. I would argue that these institutes and centers are not politically targeting conservatives--they are the victims of political censorship. Nevertheless, the ability to engage in critique is essential and something we should want from higher education institutions in a democracy.

The UNC Board's assault on academic freedom is not limited to the centers and institutes under review. In many ways, it serves as a prior restraint on academic freedom. In my college, it has had a chilling effect on our aspirations to launch a collaborative, interdisciplinary research center. My colleagues and I had initially discussed launching a research center that promotes the excellence of public education at all levels in the state. The center would involve undergraduate and graduate students in research and might even produce regular policy updates for our community stakeholders, such as principals and other school leaders. We have abandoned this idea in light of the Board's hostility to institutes and centers that may in any way be labeled political. Instead, we are forming a research network, which at the moment has no stated goal or purpose. We are scared that anything we create will be scrutinized by the state, and administrators are hesitant to fund anything that will be dismantled or criticized at a time when we are already under the microscope.

In other words, the UNC Board's review may result in the termination of a few centers, but the effects could limit free inquiry at many institutions for the foreseeable future. There may not be an explicit policy of censorship in the UNC system, but my college is self-censoring out of fear.

The Institutional Man: In Defense of Service in Academe

When I started my faculty job, I received the some advice that I believe to be common in academe: "focus on your research and teaching. Those are the only things that truly matter."

In this context, "matter" equates to "counting in you tenure case." I appreciate this advice on some level because the underlying message, one that I have heard many times now, is that my colleagues want me to stick around for the long haul. They want me to be successful here. In their eyes, they are protecting me from onerous service and providing me space to establish my research program and become comfortable teaching. They have instructed me not to volunteer to serve on any committees for as long as I can. "Enjoy being new," they tell me.

What no one explained to me was how isolating and, at times, utterly devoid of meaning it can be to spend entire days researching and preparing classes with minimal engagement with the wider institution. Don't get me wrong. I feel enormously privileged that I can freely pursue research topics that interest me. No one seems to mind if I do that in my office or in a local cafe (where I am ridiculously more productive). I get a great deal of satisfaction out of interacting with my students in the classroom and during office hours. I'm not tucked away in a dark, damp, tiny office with no human contact. There has been a plethora of coffee and lunch meetings with colleagues. And, yet, I sorely miss being anchored--thoroughly connected--to the institution. It seems I am an institutional man (I recognize my language here is gender-exclusive. It's a play on Whyte's The Organization Man.)

By "institutional man," I mean that part of the reason why I love working in academe is contributing to the betterment of the institution. I don't think of a university as simply a platform to do my research. I like being involved in shaping the institution's present circumstances and future possibilities. I'm the person who in graduate school served on the university senate and eagerly read about task force deliberations. I studied my university's history, knew the location of every building on campus, and walked each day through the quad with a sense of my place in the networks that made the institution function. Work assumes new meaning when you feel weaved within the institutional fabric. Having only worked at my present university for about one semester, I recognize it will take time for this type of connection to develop. However, it seems much more difficult to accomplish this when the predominant narrative I hear is: "serve yourself and stick to your tribe."

Herein lies the problem for me with avoiding service. I know that research and teaching should be prioritized over service. However, I feel strongly that service and an affinity with the institution could enhance my research and teaching. In what may become a (dangerously) recurring trend, I have ignored common advice for junior faculty members. I started volunteering for committees. I reached out to others who, from my vantage point, are both successful scholars and people who serve the institution. Those people who lead workshops on applied learning, facilitate mentoring through the Center for Teaching Excellence, and serve on the faculty senate. Many of these people are not superstars with national reputations. They aren't "publicly engaged" scholars. They do their work and strive to make the institution better.

What I'm learning is that, as a junior faculty member, there isn't a set formula to follow. You make choices based upon your values and cobble together a trajectory. In so doing, you sometimes have to shrug off advice that doesn't work for you. For me, that advice was to shirk service at all costs. I'm consciously making space in my career for service because, despite what colleagues say, it matters--it matters to me. I'm willing to accept that it may consume time that I would otherwise spend doing my research or preparing for classes. Managing trade-offs seems to be half the battle in academic life. My hope in writing this is that other junior faculty members reflect on the aspects of the job that are most meaningful to them. Create space to emphasize those things, even if they are at odds with prevailing wisdom.

What Role Do Faculty Play in the Corporatization of Higher Education?

Yesterday, I wrote a post about recent claims that administrators in higher education increasingly have corporate backgrounds. This trend, it has been argued, explains a range of phenomena related to the corporatization of higher education, such as treating students as customers and hiring adjuncts. I challenged this argument in two ways. First, I gave reason to question the idea that administrators increasingly have corporate backgrounds. We don't actually have data (to my knowledge) that confirms this. Second, I suggested that while presidents are easy targets, responsibility for the corporatization of higher education does not fall on the shoulders of a single actor. Instead, I offered that all of us in the academy are complicit.

David Perry, an academic and writer whose work I admire, read the post and took issue with this last point. He tweeted:

@kevinrmcclure Again, I'm with you on not simply blaming presidents.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) September 16, 2014

@kevinrmcclure I just think the "we're all guilty" needs more exploration if you want to make the claim.
— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) September 16, 2014

In particular, he thought the argument would be more compelling if I could cite concrete examples of faculty contributing to the corporatization of higher education. So, I decided to think on it and write this post. What role do faculty play in the corporatization of higher education?

First, let me get all dissertation-y and provide a working definition of corporatization. I think of corporatization as an example of privatization within higher education (as compared to privatization of higher education, in the sense of state liberalization of a largely public higher education sector to allow for private providers). Bruce Johnstone provided one of the most comprehensive definitions of privatization within higher education. It's a good working definition for this post. He wrote:

Privatization...refers to a process or tendency of colleges and universities (both public and private) taking on characteristics of, or operational norms associated with, private enterprises. Although the term is not a precise one..., privatization connotes a greater orientation to the student as consumer, including the concept of the college education as a "product"; attention to image, competitor institutions and market "niches"; pricing and the enhancement of net earned revenue; and aggressive marketing. Priviatization also suggests the option of management practices associate with private business, such as contracting out, or "outsourcing"..., aggressive labor relations and minimization of payroll expenditures, direct decision-making and "top down" management, widespread use of audits and accountability measures, and an insistence that units...contribute to profitability.

Scanning through this definition, most of the practices seem far removed from what we typically associate with the academic profession. Faculty members push against any effort to think of students as customers, they lash out against "top down" management and promote shared governance, they question the utility of many of the products purchased to improve workflow, and they frequently don't champion accountability measures (think of post-tenure review). So, at first glance, my colleague is probably right to say that faculty should not bear responsibility for changes they did not enact. If anything, many faculty should be recognized for their efforts to oppose corporatization. Such opposition helps explain the irrefutable and mounting tension between faculty and administrators.

Yet, I still had the nagging sense that pointing the finger at administrators--and often a single administrator--is too simplistic. So, I offer here some tentative explorations of how faculty share some responsibility for corporatization. These ideas, many of which are inspired by higher education research, have been in my brain oven all of 12 hours, so feedback is heartily welcomed. I'll state here and reiterate that my position is not that faculty are to blame for corporatization. Here we go...

1. Faculty are administrators, administrators are faculty - Despite claims of the CEO-as-administrator, many leaders in higher education still follow a trajectory that started on the lowest rungs of tenure-trackdom. The administrators that are so heavily critiqued by faculty were often once faculty themselves. This means that either: a) some dramatic transformation happens when faculty become administrators that alters their thinking and precludes any identification with faculty or b) conditions in higher education create challenges and constrain possible solutions, meaning corporatization arises as faculty-administrators try their best. In any case, the point is that it's difficult to draw a clear line between faculty and administrators.

2. Faculty are people, people like nice things - This may rub a few people the wrong way, but the amenities arms race has been going on for a longer period time than many faculty realize. I wonder if opposition to new buildings was as vociferous when funding was more generous. I've heard plenty of faculty complain about their offices and classrooms. I think many would welcome the opportunity to work in new facilities, even if this required a tuition or fee hike. I went on a campus tour with new faculty once, and they were just as giddy about new recreational facilities and Starbucks in the library as students. In other words, faculty enjoy and come to expect amenities on campuses just like everyone else.

3. Faculty research, research requires money - Faculty are status addicts. The one activity that almost universally delivers status in the academy is research. In order to fund their research, faculty have courted corporate donors. Now, this is not true of all faculty. I'm in education - ain't no corporations funding my work. Select faculty members have also oriented their research to intersect with market demand. They view their discoveries as intellectual property that can be protected through patents. And they look to license these patents or use them to create spin-off companies. Although we are still probably talking about a minority of faculty at certain institutions, data shows that the number of faculty-entrepreneurs is rising (shout out to Slaughter and Rhoades).

4. Faculty are no strangers to adjuncts - To say that the adjunctification of the academy is a purely administrator-driven process is ludicrous. Faculty vote on professional degree programs taught by adjuncts. Faculty buy out courses knowing the courses will be taught by adjuncts. Faculty become department chairs and even hire adjuncts. Faculty marginalize adjuncts. (All the preceding, it should be noted, creates a distinction between "faculty" and "adjuncts." I don't agree with this distinction, viewing all faculty as faculty, but I use it here for clarity.) I've read article after article about how faculty know about the treatment of adjuncts, realize the number of adjuncts is rising, and do nothing.

These are just a few ideas. Again, my point is not that faculty are to blame for corporatization. Rather, my position is that this has been a group effort, born of a pervasive mindset--what many have called neoliberal governmentality. We can think of corporatization as a car speeding down the road. Faculty aren't in the driver's seat, and they may even be in the back urging the driver to slow down, but they are still in the car with everyone else. A response to my argument might be that faculty are simply reacting to conditions they did not create. There is validity to this response, but I think it too easily absolves us all of some part in the changes to higher education. Others might suggest that while faculty are complicit in corporatization, just like administrators, students, parents, and staff, they have played a smaller role. I think this is also true but doesn't take them out of the show altogether.

If we want to prevent the corporatization car from speeding down the road, we can't simply point a finger at the driver. Nor can we swap out the driver and put a faculty member in their place. It'll require a group effort because it was a group effort that led to the journey in the first place. In the words of the late Howard Zinn: you can't be neutral on a moving train.

The Former CEO as College President? Not So Fast

Are America's colleges and universities increasingly run by former CEOs? The answer is: honestly, we don't know. We don't have the data. However, that hasn't stopped a number of observers from suggesting that higher education has gone to hell in a handbasket chiefly because its leaders are introducing norms and practices derived from time spent at corporations.

For example, in her recent piece for the National Post, Rebecca Schuman included the following as one reason that, since the late 1990s, higher education has been in a precipitous decline:

...universities — especially public institutions, ever-starved of tax revenue and ever-more-dependent upon corporate partnerships and tuition — started hiring CEOs as administrators, most of whom gleefully explained that they would start running these public, nonprofit entities like businesses.

She linked the rise of the CEO-as-administrator to treating students as customers and adjunctifying the academy. Consequently, luxury dorms have been built in response to customer demand and academic freedom has been dismantled as more and more work is completed by faculty outside tenure-trackdom. In other words, two of the most controversial developments in higher education in the last decade, namely the amenities arms race and the increasing reliance upon contingent academic labor, are products of the encroaching presence of former CEOs in leadership positions at colleges and universities. Schuman is not the first and probably won't be the last to make this claim.

Now, it's certainly possible that there has been an uptick in the number of institutions recruiting people with business acumen for leadership positions. In fact, it makes perfect sense. Given that institutions increasingly must consider marketing, branding, and making money to compete and meet rising costs, there are obvious advantages to hiring someone who was previously responsible for marketing, branding, and/or revenue generation at a large organization in a competitive marketplace. Many academics have never done these things. This has not stopped several institutions from demanding that their next president come from the ranks of the faculty. And it should be noted that, even if said president were a historian of the nineteenth century south, faculty members have made fantastic leaders for as long as higher education has existed. But I digress. 

While I agree that the employment backgrounds of college and university leaders can help us understand the nature of change in higher education, we should be wary of easy answers. Before we jump to conclusions about the CEO-as-administrator, we need to collect data. (*Dibs* I'm planning to do this in the near future.) Even armed with this data, however, we can't claim, as so many do, that former CEOs are the cause of corporatization and its attendant maladies. In the short term, we might be able to assess the degree to which a certain employment background (academic v. private sector) among administrators relates to variables like the proportion of part-time faculty. All of this is a long preface to this key point: corporatization is absolutely an issue in higher education, but I'm not certain we should look to the employment history of administrators as an explanation.

I would, rather directly, look to strings attached to money coming from corporations. For example, the Center for Public Integrity has been reporting about large sums of money that the Koch brothers have donated to various colleges and universities nationwide through their charitable foundation. The money has often gone to fund research centers or faculty positions that promote free-market ideology and the shortcomings of government intervention. I would look to the political economy of education policy-making, which has subverted the notion that higher education is a public good that demands investment of public funds. And I would look to the pervasiveness of market rationality in virtually every facet of the academy. 

This last point merits reiteration. Although presidents are easy targets, the reality is that all of us are complicit in the corporatization of higher education. It is, by now, a deeply ingrained mindset. Which is to say that change is going to require a great deal more than ensuring that college leaders are not corporate big shots. It is going to require a long, hard look in the mirror. 

The "All-Administrative" University: A Faculty Invention?

I recently read Benjamin Ginsberg's The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University. The rising number of administrative employees in higher education and increasing costs attributed to administration are hot topics. Many observers bemoan bloated mid-managerial ranks and obscene compensation for executives. They link excessive spending on administration to cuts in instructional expenditures, as evidenced by the now routine reliance upon contingent instructors. I've been knee-deep in these issues as part of two initially unrelated research projects on part-time faculty and administrative costs at public comprehensive institutions.

Ginsberg's claim is that in the 1960s and 70s, colleges and universities were directed by the work and concerns of faculty. Teaching and research were ends and institutions of higher learning existed to achieve these ends. By contrast, today's colleges and universities are dictated by a growing number of full-time professional administrators, who view management and institutional advancement as ends. Their primary objective is increasing the reaches of their authority and increasing the number of people they supervise. Shared governance is eroded as power concentrates in the hands of people who are far removed from classrooms, laboratories, and libraries.

The data that Ginsberg cites certainly raises questions:

• Over the past four decades, the number of full-time professors has increased about 50 percent, keeping pace with growth in student enrollments. During the same period, the number of administrators and administrative staffers increased by 85 percent and 240 percent.
• Between 1947 and 1995 total university spending increased 148 percent. Administrative spending, however, grew by 235 percent.

These figures are perhaps not surprising to anyone familiar with higher education. It is less clear why the number of administrative employees and why administrative costs are rising. Several explanations have been proffered, but few of them have been systematically researched. These include:

• Spending money to make money: in the wake of state budget cuts, universities have invested heavily in administrative units that generate revenues.
• Mission creep: colleges and universities strive to be like the most prestigious institutions, and the most prestigious institutions are research-oriented. Shifting to a research orientation requires different spending priorities.
• Administrative lattice: faculty focus on the things that advance their careers, meaning they increasingly abandon administrative tasks, requiring more administrative staff.
• Regulatory burdens: colleges and universities are now required to comply with a range of regulations and provide regular performance reports, all of which require staff and money.
• Growth in enrollments: there are more students to serve, and the services they require are more costly than in the past.

Ginsberg largely dismisses many of these explanations. He contends that the explosion of administration in higher education is internally-generated. He believes that administrators are motivated by the desire to self-replicate. In order to advance their careers, they must put all emphasis on image polishing, money making, and vision setting. The larger their fiefdoms become, the better their prospects for promotion up the ladder. In order to ascend the ladder, administrators must constantly chip away at the power of faculty members. They do this through a variety of strategies, including commissioning studies and task forces, invoking strategic priorities, employing managerial buzzwords, and favoring a demand-side view of curriculum development. The latter technique basically means making curriculum changes based upon what they perceive student-consumers want.

These ideas are persuasive on some level, as I saw the palpable conflict between administrators and faculty during my time working in a provost's office. The techniques of administrator power-hoarding were also evident to me. Yet there are two problems with Ginsberg's notion of a self-propagating administration at odds with the faculty. First, he doesn't actually provide evidence that this is happening. Aside from disproving, in his eyes, external sources of administrative growth, he does not show through data that administrators are simply interested in expanding their spheres of influence. Second, he does not adequately address the fact that the line between administration and faculty can be a fuzzy one.

Indeed, the managers he derides often come directly from the ranks of faculty. While it is true that some institutions are hiring outside academe for top-level positions, many--if not the majority--of vice presidents, vice provosts, deans, associate deans, and so on were once faculty. This means that the "all-administrative" university was not invented out of thin air by a group of management obsessed outsiders. It came from former faculty forced to make decisions in difficult times. Some of these individuals were interested in prestige and advancing their own careers. However, many of them simply wanted to do good work and return to their academic posts after serving institutions they love. 

The golden age of higher education, according to Ginsberg, was a time when there were more faculty than administrators, and administrators tended to be part-time (keeping one foot in their departments). Not coincidentally, this was also a time when institutions were expected to do a lot less, and higher education was far less accessible to vast swaths of the American population. To buy Ginsberg's argument, we need more evidence, which is precisely why a colleague and I are undertaking our research. Some of this research should tackle the administrator-faculty separation assumed in Ginsberg's book. For the "all-administrative" university to be a tenable concept, we need to see proof of a substantial shift in motivations and perspectives as faculty become managers--such a sizable shift, in fact, that they can no longer be identified as faculty.