BY RAPHAEL SASSOWER
It makes sense for an administrator to be sued in court for violating the law. As a suit proceeds against University of Colorado Colorado Springs chancellor Venkat Reddy, charged with violating the civil rights of an employee, there has been no word from campus officials. It also makes sense for a university not to speak about the case while the legal process is underway (since defendants are “innocent until proven guilty”). But what about violating the trust of those dependent on the competency of an administrator in financial matters? One hopes that in such a case—involving not a legal violation but one that inflicts just as much and perhaps much more damage and suffering—the court of public opinion will take notice.
Even when an administrator’s incompetence is in plain sight, who populates this court of public opinion? How are we to judge Chancellor Reddy’s actual and anticipated annual budget deficits, including some $4–6 million in the 2023–24 academic year, especially after he has been at the helm for five years, having served before that as the dean of the business school? It is now old news that “structural deficit” is the common name used by university administrators in search of a crisis (see, for example, Sarah Blackwood’s recent New York Review of Books article on English departments being driven to extinction). However, that members of the campus community—faculty, students, staff, parents, donors, and legislators (in public universities)—have no opinion or are too afraid to voice an opinion has become the scandalous new normal; anonymous review surveys whose results are not reported play painfully small roles in the maintenance or replacement of a mediocre administrator. The excuse of not understanding the ”budgetary matrix” with its complex algorithms is hard to believe for members of an institution of higher education. Admittedly, faculty are intentionally kept in the dark. Town hall meetings held on Zoom include some but not definitive budget numbers, but buzzwords such as “decentralization,” “entrepreneurial initiatives,” and “incentivization” are tossed around as if they speak for themselves.
The fear and shame associated with being singled out as “not a team-player”—that is, unwilling to make or support sacrifices such as not replacing retirees, removing permanently base funding from faculty “lines” (at UCCS, close to $900,000 in the College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences alone), increasing class sizes, reducing travel funds, and cutting scheduled courses—simultaneously applies to both the relatively well-paid tenured faculty and to those whose precarious teaching positions, if broken down by weekly hours, hardly provide minimum wages, with similar results of public acquiescence. Members of the administrative class close ranks behind the flunking administrator, worried they will be exposed as well or lose their jobs by vengeful superiors. Students are so removed from knowing anything about the budget, except for how their tuition and fees keep increasing, that asking them to form an informed opinion is unfair. And what can you ask of staff members who are by Colorado state law “at-will” workers and who fully recognize the Orwellian doublespeak of that legal term?
In short, if we who work at the university were active participants in the court of public opinion, how would we offer informed opinions about the incompetence of an administrator be voiced and to whom? And how informed can public opinion be when even faculty members on budget committees never fully see the budget, are never consulted ahead of time about budgetary choices or decisions, and are mere rubber-stamping pawns?
Administrators fail to balance budgets regularly, setting in motion crises that grant them emergency powers to cut programs and protect fiefdoms without any explanation other than “financial exigency”; they are not called to account for their inability to balance the budget according to the university mission, which is supposed to provide the means by which competent faculty (with the assistance of competent staff) can educate students to be competent members of their communities. None of this is new, so why do we still have to talk about this? Perhaps it is because it is much easier to go along to get along, never raising our voices to say that the emperor has no clothes. One step in the right direction is to hire a forensic accounting expert to trace the genealogy of the latest budgetary crisis: How did the administration get us there? What choices were made behind closed doors the effects of which we can now see with numerical clarity? This is what the UCCS AAUP chapter has decided to do.
Top administrators at academic institutions are by and large a sad lot. Next time you see an administrator making more than $100,000 per year (there are all too many of those on every campus, so it won’t be difficult to find one), ask them to provide evidence of their competency in furthering the mission of the university. Ask them to show you how they support faculty and students pursuing the life of the mind, because we are, after all, the “public” that constitute the court of public opinion.
Raphael Sassower teaches philosophy and was the founding president of the AAUP chapter at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
