BY HANK REICHMAN

Ohio State University professor emeritus Harvey Graff, who occasionally posts to this blog, has a smart and entertaining piece today in the Washington Monthly on “The Banality of University Slogans.”  You know, the kind of mindless “branding” pablum like, “Here, everything is possible!”  It brought to mind the time when my university, California State University, East Bay, from which I’m now fully retired, adopted a new motto, “per aspera ad astra.”  It was adopted, we were informed, after an allegedly exhaustive but also, of course, fully inclusive process and meant, “from aspirations to the stars.”  Our department’s medievalist was quick to point out that actually, the Latin better translates as “from hardships to the stars,” something that can readily be confirmed via no less an authority than Wikipedia.  In any event, it’s a common enough phrase employed by universities world-wide, and, after all, many of our students certainly came from hardship, occasionally worse than I can imagine.  On the other hand, I think most would be as content simply to be ensured a secure and meaningful life as to “reach the stars,” whatever the heck that means.  In the end, no one really cared very much and, as far as I can tell by a quick look through the university website this morning, the motto no longer occupies much space in the school’s public relations efforts, if it ever did, although it remains on the official university seal.

Still, as Graff’s piece shows, this sort of silliness is not without significance, often disguising incompetence and failure, or worse, bad intentions.  The very banality of such slogans, he writes, has all too often “inculcated a feeling of accomplishment without accompanying results.”  Graff’s main example is, naturally, Ohio State and its former presidents Gordon Gee and Michael Drake, the latter now president of the University of California system.  As a Cal Berkeley PhD who has lived most of his adult life in the physical and intellectual shadow of that latter institution, I feel obligated to quote verbatim Graff’s paragraphs on the legacy of Drake’s work at OSU:

Michael Drake, OSU’s president from 2013 to 2020, gave us a “Strategic Enrollment Plan,” which, unfortunately, greatly damaged enrollments, budgets, faculty numbers, and course offerings in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences by its poorly planned and enacted revisions to undergraduate admission mandates.  Over-admitting business and STEM students ignored the rising numbers of applications in the arts and humanities and swamped the teaching resources of the Fisher College of Business and the College of Engineering.

Drake’s rhetorical but only partly enacted “Vision 2020: Access, Affordability, and Excellence” never resolved its internal contradictions.  It translated into freezing in-state tuition, increasing the privatization of major assets, offering small grants to undergraduates, and creating “economies and efficiencies.”  Purchasing toilet paper from a single vendor and double-sided color-copying were mentioned most often.  Unacknowledged were substantial staffing reductions and overabundant, overpaid administrators whose reduction was promised but not realized.  Staff and faculty salary increases continue at lower than national and peer-institution levels. Administrators’ salary hikes eclipse others.

Drake’s “vision” was expansive.  “Ohio State is everywhere,” he told ColumbusCEO in 2015. (Substitute “Michigan State” for this, and you see how banal it is.)  “I think the real story of Ohio State is that we’re an important university for this region, for central Ohio and Ohio, but also for the United States and the world.  We have relevance and connectivity with the whole global economy and with people around the world on a daily basis,” Drake said.  Faculty, staff, and students were surprised to learn this.

Drake’s retirement in 2020, one year earlier than his contract expiration, coincided with the national-attention-getting scandal over the men’s wrestling team physician Richard Strauss’s sexual abuse of male student wrestlers.  As hundreds of credible allegations and indisputable evidence of OSU’s complicity emerged, Drake had little to say.  A university spokesperson stated that Drake’s retirement had no relationship to the Strauss scandal, and Drake claimed that his retirement had been long planned.  But shortly afterward, he accepted an offer to become the president of the University of California University system.  As he left, he accepted a 15 percent post-OSU presidency bonus.

I might only add in closing that several decades ago I made a donation to the OSU History Department in honor of the late Russian historian Allan Wildman, who had passed away at far too young an age.  To this date I continue to receive regular appeals for donations from Ohio State, with which I have no other affiliation, often jam-packed with the kind of empty sloganeering Graff bemoans but without a single reference to the History Department.  You should read Graff’s article, if only for the laughing-in-your-beer amusement it provides.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom has recently been published.