This is a classic in the admin bullshit arsenal, the old “here’s the strategic action document that will be implementized [oh, you think that’s an exaggeration of admin-speak? I see you haven’t gotten a “communiqué” — yes that’s the word they chose of their own free will– from the LSU admin] come hell or high water, it’s a fate accompli [get it? Who said admins don’t have a sense of humor?], but we also want to insult your intelligence, so we’ll invite comments [chuckles, sneers, and high-fives among the adminbros]: “There is no truth to the claim that we were attempting to hide the documents from anyone,” he said. “When the strategic planning process was complete, we released the documents to the entire campus and invited comments.”
Posted in Oh, FFS
14 responses to “You know they laugh at us, don’t you?”
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I don’t really need to provide a link, do I, as each and every one of us has seen this move many times, with just about the same wording. Is there a play book for the adminbros? But if you insist, here’s the link.
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I’m starting to realize that all of this “assessment” stuff actually serves the institution very well by keeping superfluous administrators and staff busy doing things that makes no difference whatsoever. The price of making the rest of us go along with it is a small one to pay compared to these kind of shenanigans.
I also love how “faculty input” is achieved by putting together a quisling committee to rubber stamp whatever’s already been decided upon.LikeLike
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It is kind of nice to see adjunctification in action.
Too often it’s presented as some sort of naturally occurring thing like tectonic plates shifting.LikeLike
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Hi Jon @2:, yes, I was shocked, shocked to find gambling here too: “Of faculty concerns, Egginton said: “Faculty were engaged in planning these reforms from the very beginning. A 12-member advisory board on budget and strategic planning, drawn from all divisions in the arts and sciences, reviewed the strategic plan and recommended the adoption of these measures.”
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I’m a little bothered by the tone of this (I take it my not-a-concern-troll credentials are secure enough to say things like this? 🙂 ) I know plenty of people in various university admin roles at Oxford and while I often strongly disagree with both their actual policies and their means of policy-making, I’ve never come across any hint that they’re actively malevolent, or consciously see themselves as putting one over academics, far less laughing at them. In fact, I’d have thought what’s really worrying about the various problems in university governance is that they’re probably the result of people who see themselves as acting in disinterested good faith, and so seem to be more about institutional structure than about individuals – if they really were the result of cackling schemers it would be rather easier in some respects.
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Hello David, I completely agree with you about structure versus personality. I was just indulging in a bit of snark.
I am very put off by the worse-than-empty gesture of “inviting comments” on already-decided plans, and “assuring faculty input” through hand-picked committes (chaired by administrators), but that could be expressed non-personally.
Still, I do think there is some condescension in admin dealings with faculty members: inside jokes about “herding cats” and so on.LikeLike
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“Condescension” sounds fair enough, yes. (Though I think it exists in the other direction too!)
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Haha, of course, as this post well exemplifies!
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I agree with you to some extent, but I don’t know how much.
In general I think you are absolutely correct; it’s extraordinarily important to assume a priori that someone you disagree with is of good will and doing their best in a difficult situation.
On the other hand I have two worries. (1) I don’t think Oxford is very representative of higher ed in this manner. Many U.S. politicians and the donors they appoint to ruling boards really do actively disdain intellectuals. Consider the Bush administration figures who openly mocked people with PhDs; they were representative of a wide swath of pseudo-populist anti-intellectualism that governs American life. This trend of anti-intellectualism is so extreme that I have friends who don’t tell strangers they teach college.
The higher administrators in most public American universities are hired and fired by these very politicians and their donors (who get put on the governing boards), and faculty governance usually has zero say in the matter. [Note that this form of academic governance was known as the “Fuhrerprinciple” during the Third Reich, and Heidegger disgraced himself by championing the overthrow of faculty’s ability to elect administrators in the name of it.]
Independent of Oxford, I don’t know how analogous British schools generally are to American ones. Maybe more than I might otherwise have thought. From various Dummett introductions I know Thatcher did things to tenure. And I’ve been assured by people who are otherwise trustworthy that New Labor’s idiotic (even they meant well) fetishization of rule by “experts” who have no particular expertise in anything (google “management myth”) ended up producing a huge amount of make-work in every area of British life that doesn’t serve any purpose (isn’t there some thing where every British department is ranked by publication numbers?). And now the liberals and conservatives aren’t doing anything meaningful to address New Labor’s depredations, and have in addition made things worse through self-defeating austerity measures.
This leads to my second concern. (2) Aren’t people who believe stupid and harmful things just because they happen to be in their interest at some level culpable? Isn’t this a moral failing?
Even if it is a moral failing, that doesn’t dictate how the rest of us should behave with respect to it. But in my experience sometimes faculty mobilization is easier to achieve if the policies are clearly viewed as pernicious and the people pushing them as being morally culpable for doing so.
Getting “faculty input” not through proper Faculty Senate channels is at the top of my list of such perniciousness.LikeLike
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I think “top down management” is enough; no need to go into Godwin territory.
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From my old blog, after one of those “soliciting faculty input” shows:
There was a big deal last week when LSU administration figures presented the faculty with a fait accompli reorganization plan. Now I don’t want to get into the details of the arguments over the content of the plan. From my perspective, there was nothing prima facie irrational about the plan, though I would certainly be happy to listen to people who have specific disagreements.
What I would like to talk about here though is the process. Many faculty members were very unhappy with having been excluded from the process. But why? Here’s my take on it.
When we say we’d like to be included in the decision-making process, this is not a negative position, seeking to preserve faculty rights, but a positive position: how can LSU benefit from the enormous resource that is the collective intelligence of the faculty?
But how do we organize this intelligence? I agree that time constraints can make this difficult, but the challenge of the faculty and the LSU administrators should be to figure out how to use email / internet polls / bulletin boards and so on, in combination with the existing departmental and Faculty Senate structure, to solicit faculty input along the way and so take advantage of both our collective expertise and our desire to help.
Again, this is a positive outlook: we want shared governance in order to help the university become better. We don’t want to be included to protect turf; we want to be included to help the administration protect and advance the institution to which we’re devoting our careers; and by extension we want to continue to serve the people of the state of Louisiana, whose community project LSU is.LikeLike
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Another aspect of this issue. If the admin assumes faculty are rational egoists (“herding cats”) then one designs from top down for both efficiency sake and for the sake of justice (by way of exempting the admin from the presupposition that they are rational egoists — hence precluding an analysis of admin rent-seeking, power consolidation, managerial class solidarity, résumé-padding, and so on — see David’s correct claim that admins have a self-image as disinterested seekers of the common good). The presentation of a fait accompli plan leads to the apathy and cynicism — the stance of the excluded rational egoist — of the faculty, thus justifying, by producing the reaction it assumes, the initial choice of the top down process.
Elinor Ostrom has worked on this issue: http://www.protevi.com/john/Morality/Ostrom.pdfLikeLike
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The answer to the problem posed in 12 is the principle sketched in 11.
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The Ostrom article is buttressed by the many studies that show that extrinsic motivation is not as effective as intrinsic motivation. The latter, of course, is ripe for shaping in various more subtle power relations, but I’ve found among students I’ve taught that the very notion of wanting to do something because it was rewarding to do it as such was completely alien to their experience. Not all or even a majority of students, but a shockingly large minority. Intrinsic motivation, conceptualized perhaps in different ways, is at least more open to direct self-shaping that can make more space for interesting relations to self and others. Turning all of our social experience into a mirroring of the principal-agent relation in the context of an etiolated social and psychological model is what ultimately drives the assessment craze in the UK and the “business approach” common in the UK and gaining more and more traction in the US.
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