I had posted this as a comment to another post a few days ago. A colleague requested that I post this again as a main post so that it would be more prominent and hopefully would draw some further comment of its own.
A colleague sent department faculty this letter to the editor which appeared in the March 13, 2008 issue of Nature. I think you’ll find it describes the situation at UT fairly well and that A&S faculty at other institutions are also battling the top-down corporatism the president displayed in his recent "re-engineering the undergraduate curriculum" address.
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How academic corporatism can lead to dictatorship
SIR — Michael Crow’s Book Review of Daniel Greenberg’s Science for Sale (Nature 449, 405; 2007) calls for a response because it reflects a worsening philosophical divide in US academia between those who regard universities as analogous to corporations and think they should be run that way (mostly career administrators) and those who see universities as primarily intellectual enterprises governed by academic core values(mostly line faculty). Asserting that the university is an idea — not an ideal or an ideology — Crow, who is president of Arizona State University, plays down or ignores most of the dangerous consequences of campus capitalism.
Faculty members would generally hold that universities represent ideals as well as ideas. These are manifest in a value system that is among the first casualties of academic corporatism. Derived from political corporatism, academic corporatism is an administrative strategy that is antithetical to the spirit that academics hold dear —including openness, transparency, collegiality, meritocracy, rule-governed procedures, balanced curriculum, a level playing field for probationary faculty and participation by faculty in governance.
Like its political counterpart, academic corporatism often results in dictatorships, with ideas originating only from the top and nothing going the other way. Academic assemblies, unions and senates are eviscerated, neutralized or eliminated altogether. Faculty members are disenfranchised. There is a chilling effect on free speech and the notion of an open marketplace for ideas.
This can wreak havoc with a university’s curriculum, jeopardize its intellectual and educational missions and compromise its future. As former Harvard president Derek Bok said: “The end to which this process could lead is not a pleasant prospect to behold.”
G. A. Clark
Department of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution and Social Change,
Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona 85287-2402, USA
NATURE|Vol 452|13 March 2008|p. 151
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You can post this a thousand times. It gets better with every read.
What is truly interesting about the fiasco at UT is that nothing in the State's strategic plan requires or even hints at the dictatorial crap that we face day to day, though everything they're doing is supposedly linked to the state's new strategic plan. Indeed, it calls for strong liberal arts, consultative leadership, and explicitly for thinking of "areas of excellence" as complementary to--not exclusive of--traditional areas of scholarly activity.
A&S Council would do well to invest in nice printed copies of the state's strategic plan for every member of the college. It might actually save us.
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