BY RACHEL IDA BUFF
This post is excerpted from the introduction to volume 11 of the AAUP’s Journal of Academic Freedom. The entire volume will be available on September 22.
The managed campus and the governed campus represent opposing visions of higher education. In practice and by definition, the managed campus is antithetical to both academic freedom and faculty governance. In its extreme manifestation, the managed campus is a graveyard for academic freedom. And it may well lead to the early graves of faculty, staff, and students forced to return to campus without adequate protections.
During the spring and summer of 2020, while I was working on this year’s volume of the Journal of Academic Freedom, colleges and universities across the United States struggled over questions about campus reopening for fall. In the midst of the still-raging COVID-19 pandemic, the prospect of a physical return to campus involved myriad issues, including mode of instruction; availability of testing for the virus, socially distanced classroom space, and appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE); mask requirements; and occupancy of dorms and offices. The grave implications of such a return elicited alarm from many faculty, staff, students, and parents.
Debates around returning to campus took place in the context of a protracted fiscal crisis resulting from decades of public disinvestment in higher education, administratively imposed regimes of austerity affecting public and private institutions alike, and the economic distress accompanying the pandemic. Such fiscal realities compelled administrators to consider opening to the fullest extent possible, because their institutions rely on tuition dollars as their primary source of support. Many administrators feared that students and parents would hesitate to pay full tuition for another semester of online instruction. Further, the noninstructional side of higher education requires the physical presence of students and staff to generate sorely needed revenue from student service fees, dining halls, dorm rooms, and parking spaces.
After the police killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, a widespread uprising against police violence took place around the world. Protesters responded to the deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and thousands of others, as well as the long-term assault on Black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities through a white supremacist system that includes a school-to-prison pipeline facilitated in part by public austerity policies impacting K–12 and higher education. The ongoing revolution led by the Movement for Black Lives impacts struggles over academic freedom and democratic governance.
The combined effects of the pandemic and austerity pose a mortal threat to academic freedom. But this summer’s historic protests also point to new ways of using this freedom. Attending the claims of this global uprising on campus requires the creative, collective reinvention of what these terms can mean to the dismantling of white supremacy.
At this moment, higher education is impelled by friction between the managed and the governed campus, between democratic practices of academic freedom and governance and the managerial imposition of practices that make campuses less accessible and less responsive to the needs of their constituencies. On the one hand, the managed campus may yet be the death of meaningful academic freedom, to say nothing of its faculty, staff, and student practitioners. On the other, yet to be fully realized practices of democratic governance and academic freedom offer paths to challenge white supremacy and other forms of oppression.
On the managed campus, administrators and their henchpersons, often in the form of external consulting agencies with six-figure contracts—a heavy and recurrent expenditure of public funds in a time of austerity—operate with little input from or serious accountability to their faculty, staff, and student constituents. Public relations offices highlight “diversity” by disseminating glossy brochures festooned with images of multiracial groups of students cavorting on campus. In contrast, the efforts of faculty and students towards equity and justice often go unattended.
Combined with the ongoing fiscal crisis of higher education, pandemic panic occasions radical austerity measures on campuses across the country. On some campuses, administrators have announced the complete shuttering of their institutions. Emergency austerity policies on public and private campuses alike include furloughs, layoffs, and program closures. The threat of such measures hangs over all conversations in higher education, from curricular matters to hiring to the recruitment and retention of students, faculty, and staff.
In contrast to the operation of the managed campus, administrators on a legitimately governed campus would be compelled to respond to and engage with the perspectives and priorities of their constituencies. As stipulated in the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, faculty exercise “primary responsibility” for decision-making on academic matters, including “curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.” In some areas, administrators have the final say, but only after joint deliberations through the processes of governance. Further, this statement advises that “the strength, freshness of view, and idealism of the student body” have a voice in institutional deliberations.
Many of the areas of “faculty responsibility” explicitly mentioned in the 1966 statement are precisely the ones swirling at the center of the reopening dilemma. On the governed campus, faculty, staff, and student governance bodies would be full partners in parsing the difficult questions of whether and how to reopen campuses during the pandemic. The “idealism” of students could become a grassroots guide to campus diversity efforts.
Concern for community wellness and collective survival articulated by students, faculty, and staff are often inaudible on the managed campus. Instead, administrators generate seemingly incessant prose about “acceptable risk” and “best practices.” Their broadcast of managerial priorities drowns out voices of dissent and thwarts the process of democratic faculty governance.
Given the ascendance of the managed campus in the past two or three decades, it is sometimes hard to imagine the governed campus. Issues of governance are central to and entwined with practices of academic freedom, because, aspirationally, the governed campus is a space of workplace democracy. The governance process endows the voices of faculty, staff, and students with power. Without governance, dissenting perspectives become just noise, regardless of their level of expertise.
Where the governed campus depends upon and supports academic freedom, the managed campus disregards it. On the managed campus, administrators respond to issues of academic freedom with feckless affirmation of the tenets of “Campus Free Speech” policies propelled by the right-wing Goldwater Institute and affirmed by presidential executive order in March 2019. These policies have a disproportionate impact on BIPOC, LGBTQ, and first-generation students, broadcasting the message that “free speech” protects the voices of hatred and hamper the kind of organizing that led to the founding of ethnic studies program around the United States.
The upcoming volume of the journal illuminates the grave implications of the managed campus for academic freedom and democratic governance as well as campus and civic health. While it may yet be a graveyard for all these things, and some of us as well, there is still considerable room for organized interventions against the managed campus. Focusing on the collective well-being of faculty, staff, and students against the austerity-drive exigencies of forced reopening and managerial prerogatives is a good place to begin.
Rachel Ida Buff, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, is the faculty editor for volume 11 of the Journal of Academic Freedom.
