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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Leadership Paradigms


Ideal Paradigm



UT Administrative Paradigm

28 comments:

umbraged said...

I'm afraid I have to take issue with the UT Administrative Paradigm seen here. As depicted here, it's balanced and standing on a solid base. I think we all know that's not the case at UT.

Anonymous said...

Spin artists?

Anonymous said...

Pooh U.

Anonymous said...

It's all just a game to them--playing with UT people's lives as if they were a toy.

Anonymous said...

The Blade ran the following article on 7/7: "Napoleon to add solar panel plant
Spanish firm plans factory in Henry Co., up to 330 jobs." While Mr. Stansley is quoted as saying that "the university's solar program has offered support to Isofoton," it is interesting to note that UT was not able to get this plant in Toledo, nor in the large and mostly unrented spaces that UT designed for just these kinds of opportunities. I wonder why Mr. Stansley wasn't successful...
See the full article at http://www.toledoblade.com/Energy/2011/07/07/Area-to-add-solar-panel-plant.html

Anonymous said...

UT didn't even use solar panels in its own buildings--when I asked about it regarding the renovation of the Field House a couple years ago--why they weren't using solar panels for those huge ceiling panes--I was told they were too expensive. (Of course I can't say if this was true or not, it's just what I was told.) Too bad UT couldn't invest in its own future with the solar panels it likes to brag about.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like solar panels lose money almost as quickly as the football team. UT's publicity choices are unbelievable, but consistent.

wv: amess. That's UT alright.

Bloggie said...

A slightly edited comment follows....

Good Lord! [a new "excellence officer"] is now coming to main campus! The ultimate YES MAN to power. A real astronaut hole to those below. I have heard him called the "concierge" on the HSC but to make him a vice president? We are really in for it now. Nice lobbies will take priority over everything else. This reemphasizes everything we know about our leader here. If you say "yes sir" and never raise questions, then you get promoted (see: C. Lehnert). If you challenge the powers that be, you are an ex-employee. What a way to start the day!

End of Comment as submitted.

Bloggie asks, is it true, then, we have another vice president? Apparently one cannot have enough of them.

Anonymous said...

Unfortunately, the situation at UT is not just farce, is is also melodrama. The recent administrative realignments are directed at the future: a future with the UT-AAUP broken, tenure abolished, a reduction in faculty and UT as the Ohio flagship for the Kasich charter university fleet. Come election time we will see if there's any hope of slowing the process. If Senate Bill 5 is not defeated at the box office in November then what we are seeing now is nothing compared with what will follow.

Anonymous said...

Yes, Bloggie, it is true. Currently there is a Director of Customer Service (Susan Andrews) on the Main Campus. Will her position "disappear" when Ioan Duca from HSC is officially VP?

Anonymous said...

Embrace the Pooh

Anonymous said...

The PLAN: Phase One: reduce staffing of targeted ("irrelevant") departments. Phase Two: reduce classes and programs at targeted departments. Phase Three: reduce faculty at targeted departments. Phase Four: redirect funding. Phase Five: walk off into the sunset. Job well done. Every department that has seen staff reduction should be prepared for additional cuts in programs and faculty. UT is cutting staffing in targeted departments in anticipation of reduced staffing requirements in those departments, i.e. in preparation for the axe that's about to be dropped on them.

Anonymous said...

I'm currently reading about 20th-century Chinese history--Chairman Mao, the Cultural Revolution, etc. Do I see parallels, or do I see parallels?!

Anonymous said...

An article about this at Inside Higher Ed today: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argues_bloated_administration_is_what_ails_higher_education

Anonymous said...

I think our administrators are worth at least a pair of dimes, don't you? I'd pay them 50 cents to go improve some other humans' conditions, maybe more.

Anonymous said...

Did anybody notice the caps got raised in all the English classes? Just what we need -- more students in writing classes, and consequently less time per student per teacher.

Can you imagine what would happen if the class sizes were reduced, and teachers had the liberty to really pour into students, instead of this factory education nonsense they are pushing down our throats?

I am sad at what is happening to our university. Three cheers for all the teachers who are soldiering on, working even harder, despite the increasingly insane demands from the increasingly insane administration. And three cheers for the students we serve with all our hearts.

Anonymous said...

nside Higher Ed caught up with Ginsberg to ask him about his book and the impact he hopes it will have.

Q: Most of your scholarship has been about political science. What made you want to write about higher education?

A: I’ve been in the university for 40 years -- 20 years at Hopkins and 20 years at Cornell -- and I’ve observed the university changing quite dramatically. As a political scientist I was very sensitive to issues of politics and struggle. And I’ve increasingly seen the same tactics at work in universities that we see here in Washington.

Q: In your book, you refer frequently to "deanlets and deanlings." Can you please tell me a little more about what you mean?

A: I wanted to emphasize a major shift that’s been underway for several decades. Deans have an academic background. Years ago, they were part-time and always part of the faculty. This is extremely important because, like the faculty, they saw the university as an instrument of teaching and scholarship. Today, we have a cadre of professional administrators. I called them deanlets to give emphasis to the difference. They either have no faculty background or they decided early in their careers that their talents lay elsewhere. To them, what used to be the means is now the end. Instead of an institution serving teaching and scholarship, teaching and scholarship serve the institution.

Q: Many administrators do, in fact, come from an academic background, including some presidents who have been locked in bitter disputes with faculty. And if these academics-turned-administrators change, some might say it's because they are confronted with decisions that they didn't necessarily face as faculty members. In your view, what's the dynamic? Is it a case of the wrong people going into these positions, or is the system itself bad?

A: It’s both. Years ago, administrators tended to be a bit older. The typical administrator was someone who had been an academic for a number of years and saw administration as an honorable way to close out a career. The administrators today tend to go into administration at a much younger age -- often they are people in their 30s who either have not had an academic career or whose academic career was unsuccessful and they now see an alternative career path. The first set often accomplished a lot in their lives. The second set have often never done anything. It’s not their orientation; they’re bureaucrats. That’s not all of them; some of them are quite good. Even those who are good are often reshaped by the system. This would probably happen to me. We are all easily led astray. Even someone with the best of intentions, if they commanded a legion of deanlets, they would find themselves pursuing bad ideas.

Anonymous said...

Second part of the interview:


Q: You describe administration as, like many bureaucracies, a kind of self-perpetuating entity that seeks to expand as a way of justifying its own existence. What are the most egregious examples?

A: In the book, I provide a number of examples. I tell the story from my own experience of our summer program, which had one administrator and 400 students. It was given over to a professional deanlet. It soon had 400 professional staff members and one student. And no one seemed to care.

Q: What factors led to this state of affairs?

A: It’s like a rerun of "Law and Order": you have to look for motive, means and opportunity to solve the crime. The motive is that you have some ambitious university presidents and provosts who sought ways of enhancing their own power. We see that all the time in every bureaucracy. The opportunity was given to them by two factors: one is that faculty would prefer to work in labs and classrooms, so they’re easily circumvented; two is the rise of professional fund-raising. To my mind, professional fund-raising is the worst thing that ever happened to the university. If the university is dependent on revenues from federal grants and tuition -- revenues from doing things -- then it has to rely on faculty. The revenue base is under the control of the faculty. But professional fund-raisers allow them to circumvent that.

Anonymous said...

Third part of the interview:

Q: You are highly critical of strategic plans, administrative retreats and workshops and committees attended by administrators. You point mockingly at such examples as the Administrative and Professional Staff Advisory Committee or the Process Management Steering Committee. Of course, the same tactic is also deployed by faculty critics who list the names of courses that sound ridiculous to outside ears. What makes this critique valid when leveled against administrators?

A: If you look around the typical university, 1 to 2 percent of the courses are silly, but it’s a small number. In my 40 years in academics, the number of truly silly courses is very small. But when I look at administrators, I’d argue that the bulk of activities is quite silly, such as the war zones task force which met and concluded that students should be discouraged from entering war zones. More generally, I look at strategic planning that takes enormous energy for no reason. Many of these could just be copied; the end result would be the same. The process of putting these plans together is designed rather like elections in the Soviet Union: the process is designed to give people the impression that people care what they think. I also looked at the minutes and agendas of administrative meetings. When administrators and staff get together, they mostly talk about prior meetings and plans for future meetings.

Q: You recite a litany of administrators who lined their pockets or burnished their own images at the expense of their institutions. Why do you see these examples as reflective of a systemic problem rather than a case of a few bad actors?

A: There are very few controls in place to prevent it. Virtually no university has systems in place to monitor and check the behavior of senior administrators. If some poor student is accused of plagiarism, that’s a federal case. There are all sorts of systems in place. If a faculty or staff member is accused of sexual harassment, there are normal systems in place. If an administrator cheats and steals or presents phony credentials, there’s nothing in place to stop it.

Q: What impact do you hope this book will have?

A: I hope to wake up the faculty. We’re like the residents of a Japanese city living next to the ocean and thinking the tsunami won’t affect us. I also hope to alert university boards. When they read the administration's propaganda organs, I want them to understand that the institution they love needs their help. They didn’t come to Hopkins or Georgetown or Princeton to work with our deanlets. They came to work with our faculty.

Anonymous said...

As might be expected the petition in support of the Foreign Languages secretarial position fell on deaf ears. As of July 1, the Jacobs plan was this: a secretary from English, who had previously been in full a time position (for say the last 20 years or so), was going to have her position redefined. She would have 20 hours in Foreign Languages as a meet/greet secretary, and then have the remaining 20 hours for administrative work in both English and Foreign Languages. The secretary in question, however, has gone on an extended leave of absence. So now both Foreign Languages and English are left out in the cold. Let me say that if you dig around in this mess you would find all sorts of culpability to pass around. Certainly the bean counters at the very top were the catalyst, but then the Dean and the respective chairs played their part. In other words, Jacobs is being assisted in his makeover all the way down the line. No one is standing up to his team, apparently because they all fear losing their own higher salaries. Are chairs resigning? threatening to resign? deans? they are all protecting their positions and going along with the changes. In fact, it seems many of them, and many faculty, see Jacobs as a career opportunity. If you can come up with some half baked idea that looks to reduce staffing/faculty/expenses, chances are Jacobs with go for it and make you an instant minor dean with all the attendant benefits. Faculty and minor administrators at UT who used to think of themselves in dead end salaries are now salivating at the chance to "move up." This is the real tragedy at UT.

Anonymous said...

It is clear that the students, faculty, and staff are all here to serve an increasingly voracious and obscenely over-fed hierarchy of administrators. I feel as if we exist solely for their benefit.

Anonymous said...

Anon 940:You are so right! Another aspect of raising the caps: more students per class = "invisible" increase in workload for instructors, many of whom will be teaching the equivalent of an extra class without getting "credit" for it--so 4 classes that count as 3--then they get another "real" one added to it. Unbelievable, undefendable.

Anonymous said...

Many at UT regard what's happening as some kind of natural disaster - like the current heat or a flood or a tornado - against which they are powerless.

Anonymous said...

Several comments in one post:

Anon 7/19 5:00 pm: The new development with the "split secretary" is news to me--and I'm in one of those departments! How can news like that get to us, with no secretary to send it! First Jacobs breaks down interdepartmental communication by breaking A&S into 3 colleges--now he's breaking it down within departments. And he claims not to micromanage! No matter how much his pants burn, that nose keeps growing longer and longer.

Anon 7/19 656 pm: I think you'll agree, we did not come here "... to serve an increasingly voracious and obscenely over-fed hierarchy of administrators" or to "... exist solely for their benefit." This is the level to which the administration--the BOT as well as Jacobs and his more immediate underlings--has sunk UT.

Anon 7/20 915 am: Your point about an "invisible" increase in workload via larger classes is a good one that we shouldn't overlook--the administration will, if it suits their purposes.

Anon 7/20 947 am: Your comment about our feeling powerless is well justified. Whatever we try to do is simply ignored. And then we get punished somehow.

Anonymous said...

The AAUP sent out an email today notifying everyone that the govenor is expecting a proposal for charter universities by August 15. Everyone at UT can expect that UT will be offered up as one of the first sacrifices to this "vision," inasmuch as Jacabos has championed it for a year now. What this means is that even if Bill 5 is defeated in November, UT will still lose its bargining rights once it becomes a charter uni. It also means that the administration will assume complete control of academics, workplace (including workloads, class sizes), everything. You won't even be able to file freedom of information requests. The admin at UT will be in control of everything and even be responsible for policing itself.

Anonymous said...

Not everybody has received that AAUP e-mail; where can we see it?

Anonymous said...

http://ocaaup.org/charter_toolkit

scroll down to:

What is going on with Charter Universities in Ohio?

Anonymous said...

hey UT, thanks for firing my former boss, Tom Trimble...he worked at UT for 33 years and LJ didn't even know who he was!