BY MARTIN KICH
Empty Exercises in Planning without Much Meaningful Preparation
Francois Furstenberg, a Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, has written an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education that is one of the most lucid and impassioned dissections of what’s wrong with American higher education that I have ever read—and I have been immersed in this stuff for almost two decades now.
Titled “University Leaders Are Failing: The Pandemic Reveals Ineptitude at the Top. Change Is Needed,” the article begins by asking rhetorically how it is possible that an elite and extremely wealthy university such as Johns Hopkins should be imposing draconian measures to meet a potentially catastrophic financial situation just months into this pandemic. Furstenberg emphasizes that although no one could have predicted this particular pandemic, Johns Hopkins and other institutions with long histories have survived all sorts of political, economic, social, and cultural turmoil. Such challenges are to be expected and planned for. Indeed, our universities went through the Great Recession little more than a decade ago. And faculty at Johns Hopkins, whose work is now widely being cited and relied on in this current crisis, have been urging greater preparedness for an inevitable pandemic of some sort—apparently to little effect, even within their own institution.
I will add that what makes this incomprehensible lack of foresight especially maddening is that the emphasis on “strategic planning” has been one of the most conspicuous aspects of corporate practice adopted by our colleges and universities. The running joke, however, is that most of these extensive exercises in planning result in large and beautifully formatted documents that end up in a drawer somewhere until the next president gets hired. About the time that I was applying for promotion and tenure, our new president engaged our campus community in developing a 20-year plan for our university. But about four years into his administration and perhaps two years into the plan, he became terminally ill. His successor did wait about two years before initiating a new planning process, and someone made the mistake of appointing me to the planning committee. At its first meeting, I suggested that we could make short work of it because there was more than 15 years worth of plan left in the current plan and we were looking only for a five-year plan. It was the first and last time that I have ever been honored by an appointment to such a committee.
I will further note that, in my experience, the only time that strategic planning has had a direct impact on our academic programs, it has been used to justify changes in academic programs–“re-allocations of resources” and “reallignments of priorities”–to which faculty have raised objections.
Furstenberg details how the corporatization of the university, the monetization of just about everything within the institution, and the lack of meaningful shared governance have seriously compromised the core things that have allowed great universities to survive. Near the end, Furstenberg synthesizes his main points in this passage:
The crisis should serve as a moment of clarity. Even as they continue enriching themselves, university executives have revealed themselves ineffective in one of the most basic corporate responsibilities: managing financial risk. In a few short weeks, astonishingly wealthy institutions across the country were reduced to slash-and-burn strategies to maintain their solvency. Having consolidated power in their hands over the last generation, leaders of America’s wealthiest universities lacked financial reserves — while also squandering the reserves of their communities’ trust and goodwill.
A research university’s central mission is teaching and research and the production of knowledge. As faculty, students, and other essential constituencies have become sidelined, so have academic values and priorities.
University hospitals now operate as money-generating conglomerates, rather than for research, teaching, and public health. Degree programs are converted to branded and outsourced revenue machines staffed by subcontracted labor. Faculty research is valued for its potential to be monetized and commercialized. In short, our leaders have lost sight of an essential truth: A university exists for values different from those that dominate the for-profit world. A university governed by long timelines and long-term thinking grows conservatively and cautiously and prepares itself prudently for potential crises. If you turn a university into a giant corporation, on the other hand, it will rise and fall with the business cycle.
And the article closes with a demand for action:
As the financial tsunami washes over the landscape of higher education, we urgently need to ask whether we have the right leaders in place. Are university presidents, their cabinets, and their hand-picked boards of trustees—all of them so detached from the day-to-day work of teaching and research—in a position to confront the hard choices that lie ahead with wisdom and prudence? Can they act with their eye to the long term? Can they resist using the current crisis to enact further assaults on the university’s central mission and its norms of governance?
If not, are we prepared to advocate for a change?
Reform should begin at the top. At a time when major politicians are proposing that corporate boards include workers, it is astonishing how few university boards of trustees have seats for faculty, staff, and students. From there, reform could work its way through the top-heavy and well-compensated layers of university administration who too often treat faculty and students like obstreperous nuisances rather than essential partners in university governance. The decisions we make in the next few years will have long-term repercussions on what kind of academic system we are left with when the tide recedes. Those who drove us into this ditch cannot be expected to pull us out.
P.S. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that Furstenberg does give a plug to the AAUP: “For years, the AAUP and other faculty critics have wrung their hands as norms of shared and deliberative governance disappeared, replaced by the consolidation of administrative power in the hands of corporate executives.”
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True, all true. There have been many warnings by teachers,students, etc – all ignored. Alas.
In my experience this scenario is accurate, but it is hardly a revelation. Moreover, Furstenberg’s essay is part “apology” public relations maneuvering, that uses a very traditional narrative of group solidarity appeals in order to assuage and deflect criticism of the institution. That is, Johns Hopkins has been at the center of serious public domain controversy concerning its long-standing institutional participation, funded in part by alumnus billionaire and former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg, in virus research, including the simulations that were written and run at Hopkins last year, detailing and testing various “spread” algorithms, including the cognitive aspects of rapid narrative dissemination and conditioning from the use of hierarchy authority testimony and symbolism (in fact, contrary to Furstenberg’s disingenuous assertion, the covid program was in fact utterly predictable; indeed it was predictable by design. Bloomberg moreover, is a dedicated if fanatical social engineer and is forcefully funding and influencing Hopkin’s research and virus narratology).
Readers may recall the sudden ubiquitous and steady media reporting, back in March, of university presidents (such at UTexas former president Greg Fenves and his wife), Hollywood actors (Tom Hanks and his wife), sports athletes, and other public authority figures that created the illusion that coronavirus was both real and terrifying, all while the CDC declared a “pandemic” with but a few hundred asserted infections, followed by immediate university institutional compliance in shutdown. This social network effect was modeled at Hopkins Furstenberg is merely an institutional asset seeking to “normalize the abnormal.” As for university administration, that is a symptom of governance capture (Trustee, Fellow, Regent and Corporation formats), combined with insulation from activism ownership remedies. Moreover, the administrative class comes from (and goes back to) the tenure class and the AAUP, so Furstenberg is hardly a neutral, fair or unbiased reporter. Regards, University of Chicago, ’96.
I don’t really reply to this sort of nonsense, but since you have layered it with all sorts of fancy jargon, I will take the bait.
And, let me be clear, I am not offering any sort of blanket defense of the program at Johns Hopkins or Michael Bloomberg. Neither is probably beyond some sort of criticism or other. Moreover, I don’t really know anything about the program at Johns Hopkins, and there has been a good deal of criticism of Bloomberg, some of which is undoubtedly warranted as it is for any public figure with a long career.
But this spinning of the pandemic as some sort of vast elitist conspiracy is itself a common and ongoing feature of all Far Right narratives, one that has become much more common since Trump became a presidential candidate, never mind the president. Despite obvious evidence, it’s an outrage that Trump or anyone in his orbit should be investigated for anything. Any investigation is automatically evidence of a conspiracy against him–a ongoing coup. And yet, any assertion that he or one of his defenders makes, however tenuously connected it is to actual evidence, must be taken as true until–and even after–it is shown to be completely baseless. For if the evidence isn’t actually there, then someone must be concealing it.
The only reason that everything in the U.S. had to be locked down is that for several months nothing was done to prepare for an escalating number of cases or to mitigate the spread of the virus. Because of federal inaction, the lockdown became the only alternative to hundreds of thousands of deaths. That the death toll has not been even more obscene means that the lockdown was somewhat successful and not that it was unnecessary. Your charge against the CDC echoes Trump’s initial repeated assertions that the virus was nothing to be concerned about. Well, this weekend, the death toll will reach 100,000–and counting–because the “re-opening” is a repeat of the non-preparation. Yet, Trump is now attempting to turn the record on its head–asserting that all sorts of other people are responsible for the lack of preparation for the pandemic, the danger of which he was one of the earliest to recognize. But the haphazard way in which the “re-opening” has been pushed politically undermines that narrative and is evidence that he has learned next to nothing from this public health and economic catastrophe.
Lastly, there are documents, now published and readily available, showing that several well-funded Far Right groups have been organizing the “spontaneous” demonstrations at the statehouses around the country–especially in states with Democratic governors. But, I am assuming that those documents are all forgeries and that the real diabolical plan behind the so-called pandemic is in those missing Hillary e-mails or in some trove of documents that will soon be revealed as part of the Obamagate investigations.
This article has been making the rounds because it captures so well what many of us have been thinking and feeling upset about. But how can we get out of this mess? How do we convince those faculty who are simply worried about keeping their jobs that all these bigger issues are connected? To whom do we appeal to protect the academic mission during inevitable budget cuts? What specific types of action are needed and can be taken? What might the AAUP do on behalf of faculty everywhere?
AAUP is a bottom-up association. The national office and some of the state conferences may be able to offer significant assistance, but you (plural “you”) have to organize your fellow faculty. In Ohio, we have a strong conference because we have collective bargaining chapters at eight of the public universities and three of the community and technical colleges. (Two other universities are affiliated with OEA, and about half of the other community colleges are affiliated with OEA or OFT.) But we also have advocacy chapters at about a dozen and a half private institutions, as well as increasingly active advocacy chapters to Ohio State, Ohio U, and Miami of Ohio. The chapter at Miami, in particular, has demonstrated that simply having an organized voice, even if the faculty are not unionized, can have some impact. It’s often a tough fight that sometimes seems never quite to end, but as difficult as our three-week strike at Wright State was last year, the preservation of many key elements of our contract has prevented our administration from simply doing whatever it wants in response to this crisis. If you don’t resist, the abuses tend to escalate because there is no cost to doing so.