… mention athletics.
It’s by Paul Campos. An excerpt:
[W]hat exactly is [all the money Gee raised] supposed to be for? In theory, of course, it’s for “education.” In practice, a whole lot of it goes directly into the pockets of a metastasizing cadre of university administrators, whose jobs, as nearly as I’ve been able to determine after being on a research university’s faculty for nearly a quarter century, consist of inventing justifications for their own existence, while harassing faculty to fill out evaluations of various kinds (In a particularly Kafkaesque twist, many of these evaluations are supposed to be of the administrators’ own job performance).
In Gee’s own case, the sums of money involved are disgusting. At the time he was apparently forced out after having made a few tactless jokes in a private meeting, Gee was getting paid about two million dollars per year. This does not include the $7.7 million that the university paid for Gee’s travel, housing and entertainment between 2007 and 2012 – a sum which included at least $895,000 for soirees at Gee’s university-provided mansion, more than a half million dollars for private jet travel, and “$64,000 on his trademark bow ties, bow tie cookies, O-H lapel pins and bow tie pins for university marketing.”
… Universities are not businesses, and university presidents are not CEOs. These institutions exist for reasons other than to maximize their revenues and enrich their management class. That it is even necessary to point this out illustrates the extent to which we have allowed the mentality of what investment bankers call “the market” to invade every aspect of American culture.
June 6th, 2013 at 4:25PM
It very much needs to be said that universities are not businesses, and should not be run as if they are. So kudos to Paul Campos for that. However, in actual fact university governance is more and more in the hands of businesspeople and career academics who are not teachers above all else. At my own Ivy-League university, the battle seems to me to have been decisively lost by now, and was largely lost by the end of the 1980s.
During that decade I was for a while a member of the Board of the Friends of the University Library, an organization designed to generate support — financial and otherwise — for the Library. But the Board was chaired by a retired CEO of a major local industry, Brown and Sharpe. His chief concern at every meeting was that it cost more money to run the Friends than its membership dues brought in. Many of us objected that he should ought to reckon into his accounting the value of gifts (money, but chiefly donations of rare books) to the Library that the Friends’ activities attracted, but he wasn’t having any of that argument. He thought that the Friends’ activities could not possibly have had any influence whatever on wealthy donors and collectors — we as people were too insignificant for anything we did or could do to ever matter to the wealthy.
An odd duck: I could never understand any of his reasoning on anything, and he could never understand any of ours (the faculty on the Board). It was as though we came from two different worlds.
June 7th, 2013 at 12:15PM
There’s a certain inconsistency in UD’s attitude toward university finances. Particularly at public institutions, funds from state government have been in decline for decades, a decline which has accelerated, sharply after 2008. So where is the money to run the university to come from? Tuition can be raised to meet the declines in public funding, but UD disapproves of that. Universities can hire lots of professional fund-raisers, like Gordon Gee, to try to make up the difference, but that provokes extreme hostility from UD. Or, universities can try to cut costs. Libraries could eliminate journals subscriptions and book purchases. IT could become increasingly out of date, and computers could fall apart from not being replaced. Classes could be taught with ever more adjuncts and ever fewer regularly appointed faculty, as well as being ever larger , with instruction either online or with the help of TA’s and discussion sections. But UD storms against that as well. So, what exactly is to be done? Talk about the value of the life of the mind, and that universities are not businesses will not pay the bills.
June 7th, 2013 at 12:58PM
In the provinces: I’m not at all opposed to tuition or student fee increases, but if they go to things like luxury stadium seating, and more administrators, and public relations firms and lawyers in the aftermath of enormous scandals, they are pointless and destructive. Part of the job of a university president is to make the case to state legislatures that funding at certain levels should be maintained or increased. Legislators are increasingly able to say of mismanaged universities that they don’t deserve more money. I take your point that for economic reasons public funding has been imperiled; but that’s different from state to state (some states are pretty rich but still stingy with money for universities, either because they’re anti-intellectual or because they think – sometimes rightly – that their public universities are pointless money-pits). The question is not merely, as you say, where is the money to run the university to come from? The question is: How is the university being run? What’s being done with the money that is available? When your university is simply a scandal-magnet and/or a hotbed of excessive and overpaid administrators (see G. Gee’s salary), you lose the ground that legitimates your getting the money in the first place. Your examples of cost-cutting in your comment say nothing about the big money-drainers: sports and administrators. Talk about the life of the mind is exactly what will pay the bills. Talk that way long enough and some universities will begin to understand that vast and overpaid administrative staffs and vast athletic programs with multimillionaire coaches are not the life of the mind. (And yes, I realize that professors are expensive. But professors are the essential core of the university – their interaction with students IS the life of the mind that distinguishes a university from all other institutions.) Talk about the life of the mind long enough and some universities might reform themselves to become universities. Being a university is expensive, but it’s a good deal less expensive than being a semi-professional sports complex.
June 8th, 2013 at 5:21AM
Just wondering: what would happen if 50 or so dissident State U. profs proposed an “all-faculty” university? No administrators, bare-bones support people. Is the idea worthwhile at all, just as a thought experiment?
FWIW, there are conservativish folks (e. g., at the Pope Center) who argue that the academy’s unique mission (contrasted with vocational or pseudo-vocational training) is indeed the life of the mind, and I think what’s generally meant by that is the plain old arts and sciences curricula for young folks who have an aptitude and interest for it.
UD is right about “life of the mind”. Back around 2000 I attended a local state of the university address. I expected high-minded talk. All I heard was money and bureaucratic privileges.