Between "dismal" and "abysmal"

This week’s “Chronicle of Higher Education” (April 4, p. A15) under the “Money & Management” section ran an article titled “Ohio’s Governor Presses Plan to Overhaul Higher Education” in which President Jacobs is quoted to have said “’What higher education has lacked and continues to fail at is to develop measurements, ... what you can’t measure you can’t fix’.”

Obviously President Jacobs, Provost Haggett, Dean Lee and (sad to say) my own departmental chair are presently in robotic lockstep with Governor Strickland’s business-driven numerical goals and their mis-measures of "success" and "efficiency" in public higher education. It seems that every aspect of the University of Toledo is now being measured except A&S faculty moral -- which on my meter reads somewhere in the red between “dismal” and “abysmal”! Poor faculty morale impacts directly on our students in the classroom (though -- gee whiz -- perhaps not so much in Distance Learning courses).

Although the UT administration has worked very hard over the last decade to shamelessly adopt the “business model” without remorse over collateral damage to more lofty goals and principles, and has meanwhile attempted to drive a thick wedge between A&S faculty and students, the unexpected events of this past two weeks indicates a sudden setback and perhaps a reversal (dare I say “tipping point”) for this administration’s long-term heavy-handed abuse of our faculty and students. The most recent Independent Collegian coverage and editorials suggest that many students are wise to this administration’s word games and subterfuges that have deliberately and deviously attempted to alienate them and their support them from our dedicated faculty. This administration’s drumbeat “student-centeredness” sham was not working fast enough for their timetable of creative destruction, so they had to invent “EXTREME student centeredness” as their desperate stratagem to speed things up! Give me a break!

Our students won’t be easily fooled by these blatherings of administrative blurts and adverts because we have taught them to be critical thinkers. The Administration has seriously underestimated the intelligence and power reserve of A&S students and faculty. When we A&S faculty and our students finally combine our creative forces and turn our full attention as a body of resistance to UT mismanagement and its destructive, dictatorial and abusive practices, we can then attempt to educate and reform these bullies, or throw them out (as we have done before), and to return to our traditional and sacred missions of higher education teaching, learning and service.