And Bloggie never knew that a budget was a game of "musical chairs."
And that administrative rhetoric could go so effortlessly from this:
"Under his leadership, the University, which operates three campuses and has an annual operating budget of more than $700 million, has enjoyed tremendous momentum, experiencing enrollment growth in the last three years to more than 22,000 students."
to this:
"Next week, UT will announce layoffs for employees across all campuses. We will have to say goodbye to friends and colleagues who helped improve the human condition in academics, health care and other areas of university engagement"
Bloggie wonders how many of these "friends and colleagues" will be high level administrators. But Bloggie must also admit that the practice of rewarding bad stewardship with big bonuses has become the standard in American business practices in recent times (e.g., AIG) and in this UT has shown itself as advanced as any of these cutting edge firms.
Maybe this is what is meant when the UT President wants to put more people with "business experience" in charge of UT colleges?
Poor Bloggie doesn't have a head for such business and cannot understand it.
14 comments:
Ruthless stewardship! President Jacobs' generic pink-slip letter mailed out yesterday clarifies what his ambiguous new word-toy "stewardship" means in practice. Jacobs' stewardship reveals how his unpopular and inept administration for the past three years has systematically entrenched and reproduced its centralization of power, thus "improving the human condition." What tripe! Quality education in the liberal arts is dying at UT under Jacobs' business model and heavy-handed administration. The letter -- so important a landmark document and yet so badly written -- boils down to this message: "You are all potentially fired if and when I say so, and for whatever reason!" Jacobs' ruthless stewardship is his promise to continue his pursuit of authoritarian rule on our campus through increasing surveillance, discipline and fear. How can quality education in the A&S College take place in such an Orwellian climate? It cannot. President Jacobs presumes and acts as if he has the right to increasingly inflict his bankrupt "values" and bureaucratic bloat on students, faculty and staff alike. What amazes me most is that some A&S professors continue to collaborate with this regime of ruthless stewardship through their justification of, and participation in, the A&S Roundtable farce, which itself began as a vindictive and expensive exercise in futility. These collaborators still call themselves educators and teachers, but they are increasingly an embarrassment, disgrace and threat to their (our) venerable profession. I hope these deluded and/or ambitious collaborators bail out of the Roundtable now to save their souls.
I don't understand the need for layoffs. Enroll ment is up, state subsidies are up. The excuse is that wages and benefits are also up. However, last years pay increase was to cover the increased share of health insurance. My net wages have been stagnant. All the administration did was switch the money they were paying for health insurance to us. So, I don't buy it.
Get of your tenured, union protected asses and do something more than whine about this evil administration!
Note the kind of comment above that the administrators send to us.
Dear Administrator. I work very hard. I spend more than 40 hours per week at work. I go out of my way to do jobs that no one else wants to do just because they need to be done. I go out of my way to be polite to students and administrators who should know for themselves how to do the things they ask. Your rudeness does not become you.
Dearest Bloggie, please don't equate my frustration with the faculty as agreement with the administration. Far from it. My heart and soul are with the faculty. Having said that, what the hell are you people doing? You have tenure and a union. If any one group can stand up to the administration and their short sighted, neo-con, pro-capital crap it is the faculty. Do you? You photoshop cute pictures and whine. Meanwhile the University is being slowly dismembered.
Hello Anonymous. You seem to have at least a bit of a sense of the history behind the present crisis in shared governance at the university, while the majority of students, faculty, staff and alumni do not. If you had arrived here twenty years ago as a tenure-track A&S faculty hire, you would have arrived at the time President Horton was also hired. He was the first of the recent UT presidents hired by the BOT to attempt to impose the business model, and thereby attempt to empower the administration through the systematic weakening of the tenured and tenure-track faculty. Horton gushed with charisma, but still screwed up trying to impress the BOT with an unnecessarily heavy-handed approach that earned the suspicions and then alienated career A&S faculty, as well as faculty across the campus. AAUP was formed at that time in response to the Horton administrations unprecedented and alarming hostile administrative encroachments on traditional tenured faculty rights and responsibilities as career educators in public higher education. Horton eventually left UT, ever bitter over his failure to accomplish what the BOT instructed him to do, which was to undermine career faculty centrality to the UT educational mission. At that time there were relatively few part-time teachers and non-tenure track visiting professors and lecturers. The tenure-track and tenured professors in A&S College, and across campus, had high morale and a strong sense of shared identity and purpose. Students who completed their earned degrees were well-educated and highly satisfied. Anyway, the formation of AAUP on campus strengthened faculty solidarity. Horton did make one punitive decision that in the long run led to the isolation of career faculty from one another and facilitated the divide and conquer tactics successfully employed by subsequent UT presidents, all hostile to the career professoriate on campus. He shut down the always convivial Faculty Club in Libby Hall and began to convert it to the administrative bunker it is today (except for a two-hour period on alternative Fridays when the administration invites faculty back into Libby Hall to rub their noses in the fine environment they forfeited by unionizing -- the landmark site that once marked the centrality of their culture on this campus.) The next President to attempt to engineer the end of faculty centrality to the mission of UT at the behest of the BOT was Vik Kapoor. He was routed in short order, in a protest campaign mainly orchestrated by liberal arts professors in the A&S College. At this juncture an ideologically-entrenched neocon BOT went back to the planning table with a war plan that worked. They got serious, hired the amiable President Johnson, and he helped finesse the hospital merger and the devious transition to President Jacobs. The merger by any measure has been a train wreck in slow motion for UT over the past three years. The success of the hospital depends on squeezing the cash cows of the A&S College and the JHCE College. The milk is not coming fast enough so BOT member Brady himself is poised to mount the three-legged stool and tug away till the cow runs dry. Then he and Jacobs and half the administration can retire with big bonuses for finally accomplishing what could not be accomplished twenty years ago. All this has been possible by deliberately demoralizing and retiring the tenure-track and tenured faculty in the A&S College, the historic hotbed of liberal ideas and font of disobedience and dissent against authoritarianism and corruption at UT. Most UT faculty today on the main campus is comprised of poorly paid overworked lecturers and visitors, and their interests are not the same at the tenured professoriate. The contingent teaching (“learning”) workforce in the A&S College is easily manipulated by a business model that exploits their desperation and constant fear of termination. When you, Anonymous, chastise Bloggie with “what the hell are you people doing? You have tenure and a union!” you don’t appreciate that our actions in protest of the Jacobs administration, and apart from the hamstrung yet ultimately effective actions of our AAUP, are at present mainly those of a guerilla movement, and not those of an organized faculty army. Bloggie is an effective component of our communications network. Also, don’t overlook the fact that our tenure-track and tenured faculty have solid support of many concerned students, staff and alumni just like you. We will prevail, one way or another, to save the A&S College and its undergraduate and graduate liberal arts. The main distressing element in our protest effort is the collaboration of some of our most prominent A&S College tenured and tenure-track faculty in the planned creative destruction of the A&S College. As long as they persist to support the insidious activities of the Learning Collaborative and the Learning Alliance, our A&S College is in perpetual jeopardy.
Thank you, Lloyd Jacobs, for your warm and caring open letter. I have received not so much as a 'sorry, pal,' as you line itemed my family's rent and food money with your delicate pen. How many jobs could be saved if you simply returned your $750,000 bonus check?
I'm sure you're feeling mildly wounded by my words, and wish I weren't posting anonymously. Perhaps you consider this anonymous posting a moral failure. Perhaps even though you're hellbent on crushing the humanities, you've heard of that scoundrel Milton?
"They who have put out the people's eyes reproach them for their blindness." -- John Milton, 1642
So you guys' blind, factless claims you throw around are cause Jacobs has put out your eyes? You'd think smart Ph.D. folks like you would find some way around that.
How come you didn't post my PSA comment?
Send PSA comment again, please.
If the business model is so good, why are so many businesses going under?
I agree with Anonymous upthread -- the faculty are the only unionized, tenured body on campus. There may well be legions of postdocs, grad students, and undergraduates on campus willing to participate in direct action, but only with the unambiguous endorsement of their faculty mentors and teachers. When are we going to see a real plan? For step one, I'd suggest holding a Save UT teach-in. Instead of your usual curriculum, tell your students what's going on at this university and have them write Dr. Jacobs with their thoughts. When you're not teaching, grab a bullhorn and hit Centennial Mall. The religious nuts do it; why can't the voices of reason?
Bullhorns are bulls**t. They don't even manufacturer them any more. But you already know that. Your post here is transparently fake; a typically flaky micro-media production designed by comical Mr. Bow Tie and his Stalinesque UT administration's counterintelligence and psychological defense units. Wasted money. We will patiently and actively prevail to Save A&S College using unconventional tactics that will work. See you clowns at the Town Hall meeting.
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