Are You Ready for the New Administratively-Centered University?
Of course, by the trick of having administrators teach an occasional class, bloated administrative salaries can be made to appear as faculty salaries, so it appears that administrative costs are far less than they really are. Is this sort of deceptive book-keeping what is meant by synergy or the idea of the university as an economic engine for job creation? It sure creates a great many jobs for insiders, such as administrators and ex-BOT members.
44 comments:
Looks like UT is back in Deadspin, with spinmeister extraordinaire Larry Burns stepping up to the plate this time.
http://deadspin.com/5986210/sext+happy-former-toledo-running-coach-denies-sex-harassment-other-claims-former-runners-say-hes-lying
It would be sad to see UT in a bad light in the media (most of us are honest with true respect for this institution), but we need to see a similar expose on current UT administrators and cronies, and many witnesses (whistle-blowers) coming forward. There should be a reward for informants. Time is not on their side!
It's important to separate the institution from the administrators and the trustees who are running the institution...into the ground! Any bad publicity reflects on incompetent administrators and trustees.
Read the deadspin article cited in the first comment. Burns is quoted as saying that the Hadsell debacle was a "H.R issue" and would not have been handled in a "public fashion," in other words in a way that would have brought negative publicity to UT and negative focus on UT's leadership. UT is a public institution and ultimately responsible to the taxpayers, who many of the bills. H.R. issues are by definition public issues.
Burns is UT's corporate entertainer. Such nuances are beyond his authority (or competency). He's only there to pick up his paycheck...and I almost forgot, bonus check and free bow tie.
"Of course, by the trick of having administrators teach an occasional class"
Now you know why they have to lower the entry requirements for the Honors College and dumb down the course materials. This way, these administrators may even look somewhat smart to groups of mediocre students who may otherwise have had a hard time succeeding in an equivalent but respectable community college course.
With the new Honors Dean, it may just mean better and better student discounts at the nation's leading junk electronics store: Best Buy! Go through the Honors College, and find a career in the Geek Squad!
Off topic but related to administrator related weirdness at UT
Here's BGSU's academic calendar - very clear, concise and user friendly:
http://choose.bgsu.edu/academics/calendar/?year=2012
Here's UT's academic calendar:
http://www.utoledo.edu/catalog/pdf/2012-2013-Calendar.pdf.pdf
Huh???!!!
Do they offer a PhD in UT academic calendar studies??
Re: Anon March 3, 2013 at 10:44 AM. Exactly. The calender is just one example of the deterioration of UT. Everything about UT is designed to obscure and confuse. The myriad schools and administrative titles. The weird vocabulary, the slogans, the way over the top signs (has anyone seen the one hanging from the football stadium?). They are all the product of admin busy work. Layer and layer of unnecessary language and graphs and power points and charts and signs. UT is now the realm of the mad hatter.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's suspicious about the changes to the Honors program.
As with so many of the Jacobs-era changes, no attempt has been made to articulate what the problem was with the Honors program. It certainly worked for me.
The Honors Program had national recognition. Just another example of Jacobs attempting to reinvent the wheel and in the process breaking the wheel.
Do some research before jumping to critical conclusion and shooting yourself in the foot. With everything this administration is doing wrong you mention the bloody calnedar? FYI, that calendar format has been in use for the last 20 years if not longer.
If this is an exmaple of the best a tenured and unionized faculty can do to resist the administration then we are all doomed.
" Just another example of Jacobs attempting to reinvent the wheel and in the process breaking the wheel"
Reinvent? Jacobs cannot reinvent! He probably failed as surgeon, but now he wants to perform surgical reconstruction on higher education (by lowering it), academia, and yes: the Honors College... Surely, he is failing again. True, no dead people, just dead souls and dead intellects!
I am neither "unionized" nor "tenured." And the present calender is not the same as it was 20 years ago, or even 5 years ago.
Blog losing steam?
The Blog runs on Jake's solar energy bonanza, that big talking project that produced what, about 1/10th of a kilowatt for how many millions of dollars?
Steam would have been more effective.
"The Blog runs on Jake's solar energy bonanza, that big talking project that produced what, about 1/10th of a kilowatt for how many millions of dollars?"
Bloggie points to the essence of the Relevant University's business model: spend millions on a wind mill and the result is minimal. Spend six figures on inefficient administrators, and get minimal results. Lay off hardworking staff then distribute the wealth among these greedy thugs...just to see less work done, and call it "Relevant University" -- relevant to administrators' bank account.
You can tell that the business models of companies employing BOT members are not any better...have you started your boycotts. They sent Koester to justify the idiocies of Jacobs. Koester -- next in-bred president of UT!
Jacobs' schemes have produced plenty of hot air and the faculty are steaming about it. Can a vote of no confidence be far off?
Why there won’t be a no-confidence vote anytime soon: The administration has effectively divided and conquered the faculty with little or no resistance. In no particular order and percentage are very only rough estimates.
10% of the faculty is too new to feel they have all the facts, lack tenure, and have their nose to the grindstone trying to establish their careers.
10% of the faculty is so out of touch with reality they have no idea what is going on
10% of the faculty feels “campus politics” is beneath them.
10% of the faculty is personally profiting from the administration and are supportive of it
20% of the faculty feel they are close enough to retirement to leave “running the university” to the next generation.
30% of the faculty feels helpless and too isolated to do anything on their own.
10% of the faculty is too busy drawing idiotic cartoons and channeling revolutionary energies in to harmless pastimes.
I’ve asked this before. At what point do you go from victim to collaborator through your own inactions?
As a frequent critic of the faculty-slowness to respond, let me say that I did not author the previous commentator's analysis, but I agree with it completely. wake up folks! Try a strike; show some backbone. Trust your tenure. The administration has figured out your weaknesses, but you can figure out your strengths. Note, your strength to wait out the bastard is mirrored by all of civilized america during the Jewish destruction of WWII, it will not work without significant loss of life and conscience.
Okay, I'll weigh in. "Victim"? "Collaborator"? Are you kidding me? This rhetoric is inappropriate. UT is a 'sideshow of a sideshow' and no one is being put up against the wall and no one is taking notes for review by the KGB. What's happening at provincial UT has been happening around the country for years now and is happening even a few miles down the road at BG. What we are in the middle of is an attempt to redefine the "university" and "academic" and "intellectual property." I certainly believe that this is an important debate and will have a effect on future generations, but I also happen to believe that language and words are important, and invoking the rhetoric of collaboration and victim diminishes the value of those words when they are applied around the world to struggles in which people do risk their lives.
1. I have heard from some higher-ups that Jacobs will retire in 2 or 3 years.
2. His chosen successor is Scarborough.
3. The Scott Park campus may be for sale. Nothing happening with the energy portion, and upgrades to athletics facilities there put on hold.
4. Akron's capital campaign calls for the hiring of 100 new tenure track faculty.
Anon 4:47 PM
Just two examples:
What do you call the hundreds of people who have lost their jobs in the past five years or so during our annual budget cuts? I believe the word victim is totally appropriate. I think they would agree with me.
What do you call faculty who in their hearts know that this administration is doing harm to the insititution, yet actively support the administrations' follies and get promoted to Chairs, Deans, Assistant Provosts, etc. I call them collaborators.
You are absolutely right in pointing out that there are far worse victims, and far worse collaborators in the world than here at UT. Compared to the struggles of World War Two this is petty. Nevertheless this is our battle, here and now. And yes we have victims and there are collaborators.
I do not believe it is fair to label chairs "who in their hearts know that this administration is doing harm to the institution, yet actively support the administrations' follies" as collaborators. Would you rather that departments did not have chairs that fight to protect their departments and faculty? We all (faculty) know what the administration is doing in many cases is wrong, but what choices do we have? Chairs and faculty fighting back at the administration, screaming and yelling, declining to cooperate only hurts departments. Someone has to serve as department chair so it does no help to label those as collaborators when their aim is to protect and fight for faculty and their departments. Keep in mind the whomever serves as chair does so only at the pleasure of the dean, provost and president - any of whom can remove chairs. If you feel your chair is in fact not supporting the faculty and department and only looking out for their own interests then yes I would understand your concerns, then get your faculty to remove them. But we have to work here and enhance and promote our departments even if that means working with the evil empire time to time as needed.
To Anon @ 9:04
I stand corrected. I'll grant you that some chairs, deans, assistant provosts, etc. are doing it to protect the faculty, the students, and the institution. I suppose we could call them infiltrators. Thinking about it, I have to admit I know a couple. Still, I fear they are in the minority.
If chairs around campus got together, or even from one college, and resigned in protest - that would be a gesture that would shake up the admin. And the press and public would take notice. People willingly giving up power and prestige always gets noticed - it's politically a very strong statement. Individual faculty are bound by contract and cannot join together and simply strike or come down with 'blue fever'- the most they can do is look for jobs elsewhere. If the faculty do anything that damages their public credibility as educators (and abandoning their classes would do that) then the PR war will be lost and Jacobs will be empowered even more. Chairs, on the other hand, can make a dramatic statement with their resignations. They can return to teaching and leave the admin with a huge problem, particularly if it is hard to find faculty to replace them (this is where individual faculty can take action - by refusing to replace chairs who have resigned in protest). Why won't chairs get together? Most of them are admin wannabes and resigning would be admin career suicide. So stop lambasting "faculty." The issue here is what chairs should do as they watch the morale of their faculty destroyed, class effectiveness reduced, and professional standards demolished. Sheesh! has their even been one chair who told the Provst "NO! I won't increase workloads."
Well said. There is a certain level of administrative activity necessary to run the university - and it starts and ends with chairs,
Admins have successfully over the years conned taxpayers into believing they should be paid according to a corporate model and not a civil service model. This is the function of the rhetoric they are constantly inventing in the shell game they play with taxpayers. And so Jacobs, whose job title is "President" rhetorically becomes the president of a corporation, despite the fact that he is paid with taxpayer money. Here's the difference: Jacobs, who oversees a small fiefdom called UT, makes $392,700 in base salary, and the President of the US makes $400,000. Congress makes $174,000. Members of the Ohio General Assembly $60,584. The average pay for state governors is $128,735. Jacobs's salary is in fact in the bottom range for CEO's in the US. Once taxpayers bought into the rhetoric these con artists sold them, the game was lost.
MaticlaBecause of the background of the man at the top at UT for the past seven years, our university is much the social structure of the military in the 1960s. An officer/NCO/enlisted rigid social stratification has been implemented that also resembles (not surprisingly) the rigid social stratification in a typical southern textile mill; for example, as described by Erskine Caldwell circa 1933.
If the main campus at UT is perceived by the BOT and Jacobs Inc. as a teaching factory churning out degrees (which seems very much the case), then:
Officer/NCO/enlisted = Boss/foreman/teacher.
Where do the Department Chairs fit into this factory social hierarchy now entrenched and enforced at UT by Generalissimo/Bossman Jacobs? They are the NCO/Forman culture. Those that have chosen for increased pay to forget they were ever teachers and to make sure the work of the factory floor gets done. This means riding herd on the teachers, and roughshod if ordered to do so.
Note that when teachers become chairs at UT, they are no longer members of the AAUP. Snip-snip; they volunteer to undergo institutional circumcision as aware adults. They are changed forever.
“Promotion to Chair” at this university at this time is a deliberate and highly significant separation by choice from membership in a venerable teacher corps to membership in a notorious managerial corps.
New Departmental Chairs are sell-outs. They report for duty, commit to the Devil and begin retraining for a new life. Even if they return to the teaching ranks they can no longer be trusted by other dedicated teachers. They took taxpayer money to do bad things to good people: student, staff and teachers. Chairs have lost their moral compass and not interested in finding it.
UT teachers have experienced unprecedented, undeserved indignities under this disrespectful, greedy administration. The single institution protecting UT teachers from wholesale systematic abuse of the sort suffered by military grunts in The Absurd War and Depression-era Mill Town workers is the AAUP.
UT teachers! Fight long and fight hard for securing the highest quality educational rights of UT students!
Don’t trust your chairs. Trust and support your union.
Take a look at today's blade. More $1,200/day consultants. How many part-time instructors could we hire with the salaries of these consultants? Consultants don't generate revenue, but instructors do!
http://www.toledoblade.com/Education/2013/03/10/UT-paying-2nd-adviser-1-200-a-day.html
“'In this case, we actually contracted with Cam’s company, Enrollment Builders, for interim management services,' Mr. Scarborough said. Part of his duty is to 'reverse the enrollment decline,' he said."
Oh, really? For 3 years Jacobs Inc. has claimed that our enrollment decline was part of our Strategic Plan! What liars! Every story coming out of UTNews Center is spun like a top. How long will students, alumni and the BOT put up with such brainless excuses and shenanigans?
"If chairs around campus got together, or even from one college, and resigned in protest - that would be a gesture that would shake up the admin. And the press and public would take notice. People willingly giving up power and prestige always gets noticed - it's politically a very strong statement."
I wonder if the Collegian or UTNews end up fighting each other to see who gets to publish on this because the Blade won't -- they love Jacobs, despite its latest posturing like it is paying attention. The news media is so ideologically and intellectually bankrupt -- it will not notice what should be right or suspicious; it will only go for
-- shocking stories (like another gun violence)
-- celebrities
-- raising tax on the nation's wealthiest
-- or other gossip blown out of proportion
What happens when chairs step down? A newly hired UT administrator takes over...The Faculty loses that position, and nobody will give a fuck! Faculty should instead identify those chairs/deans that are selling their departments out, and pass a vote of no-confidence at the department level before they can form a united front with capable chairs and deans.
"Take a look at today's blade. More $1,200/day consultants. How many part-time instructors could we hire with the salaries of these consultants?"
You must be kidding! Adjuncts work just as hard as tenured and tenure-track faculty. You cannot expect UT administrators to make students smarter (to the point that they may make teaching administrators look ignorant). That would be against the far right-wing dream of having few smart (wealthy) ones, and dumb poor masses. UT must stay "Relevant" to this dream. That's why they need these $1,200-per-day mop-up contractors, who know how to clean up after UT administrators. Maybe government auditors are on their tails...finally!
On the workload issue: a bulletin by the AAUP (not UTAAUP) called attention to a bill currently up for consideration in Ohio which, amongst other things, will REQUIRE workload to be increased by one course at Ohio colleges and universities.
"Don’t trust your chairs. Trust and support your union. "
A union (and Faculty Senate) that beyond newsletters and public forms have done nothing to fight back in a serious way against this administration, especially in regards to the lack of any votes of non-confidence or labor actions. If you would like to blame someone besides the administration, look at the majority faculty and those in positions of leadership with the AAUP and Senate.
Yet every day the majority of department chairs work to try and protect and maintain departments and faculty positions. If you really believe that chairs are the problem and that they hold some mystery major power over the administration you truly have no idea how this university is being run. Look at the recent issue of teaching loads, chairs raised many concerns and questions and advocated hard to protect and justify teaching loads even those that ended up being increased slightly (really did any TT/T even get close to 4/4?). But at the end of the day the administration, starting with the Board, President and Provost insisted that the deans and chairs work on revised loads, no change in chairs would have stopped that.
If they step down, individually or collectively, they will simply be replaced - perhaps by non-faculty administrators as we have already seen with deans and the provost and maybe even with merged departments or elimination of the model of academic departments (all of which have been considered by this administration).
Again if as faculty you feel your chair is not serving your department, then the faculty need consider removal, but keep in mind why you are unsatisfied with the current chair and what the alternative may be.
well said, but why divide the world into two groups - the truth is that neither the union/senate leadership/rank & file nor Chairs have stood up for anything and confronted the administration. There are no sheeps and goats here - just all goats.
"On the workload issue: a bulletin by the AAUP (not UTAAUP) called attention to a bill currently up for consideration in Ohio which, amongst other things, will REQUIRE workload to be increased by one course at Ohio colleges and universities."
To be fair and correct the bill gives each BOT the choice to override faculty contracts and assign one extra course, it does not REQUIRE it.
"Note that when teachers become chairs at UT, they are no longer members of the AAUP. Snip-snip; they volunteer to undergo institutional circumcision as aware adults. They are changed forever.
“Promotion to Chair” at this university at this time is a deliberate and highly significant separation by choice from membership in a venerable teacher corps to membership in a notorious managerial corps.
New Departmental Chairs are sell-outs. They report for duty, commit to the Devil and begin retraining for a new life. Even if they return to the teaching ranks they can no longer be trusted by other dedicated teachers."
Not a very fair statement as I am personally aware of many former chairs who have returned to the faculty as excellent teachers and members of the faculty in their departments and colleges right here at UT. In fact most former chairs I know did not move up the administrative chain of command here at UT or other places, but in fact returned successfully to the UT faculty. I know that some have moved up as administrations, many of whom are the targets of scorn from their former colleagues, but not all have done so. Again lets be fair here.
To Anonymous 11:49
You are defending the Proud Chairs of Yore (pre 2006) and not the hand-picked cockroaches that these days help this greedy administration feast without shame on an overturned applecart of a degree mill that once was a productive metropolitan university.
The chairs I was referring to are post 2006 chairs elected by their department faculty (of which I know of many at UT in various colleges), but perhaps you are concerned about other chairs appointed differently - directly by deans and provost without department faculty votes?
To Anonymous 9:48
Yes. I delivered my broadside mainly against the brown-nosing appointed and anointed chairs.
However, a chair-elect ought to do some serious soul-searching before reporting for duty: “Why have I, a capable teacher and researcher, chosen to join mismanagement and take a significant pay hike at the risk of being ordered to do bad things to good people -- for example, to my contingent faculty and departmental staff -- for vague and perhaps unethical reasons?
I assume you are one of these chairs elected by your peers to serve under this corrupt and corrupting administration and for that reason want to be held harmless. If so, you are delusional.
The way I see it is that the elected chairs are all adults and fully aware they serve as wrecking balls employed by Jacobs Demolition Inc. to knock down perceived “silos” and such: the “ivory tower” (Boom!); the Arts and Sciences College (ka-Boom!); and so on (Boom! ka-Boom! Blooey!).
When the dust settles it is clear that Lloyd is a BOT-empowered engine of destruction that wants to jerk chairs around by their chains knowing that, however much conflicted, they will still do their jobs as expected.
With chairs, the paycheck will always come before the reality check.
A chairs revolt? That’s a laugh. Chairs strive to have their cake and eat it too. Convince me otherwise.
Again I ask you if faculty elected to serve as chairs turn down the opportunity what would be the result or alternative and would it be better for that Department?
The current elected Chairs are well aware of the administration situation they find themselves in and have no control over (nor do the Deans have any authority or control over many of the operations of their Colleges), but at least those chairs are trying to best serve and protect their faculty and departments. If those faculty do not serve as chair someone else has to or would you prefer non-faculty administrators overseeing faculty and departments?
These current faculty chairs that you would attack have done a great service in many cases and situations to protect faculty and their departments from even more administrative actions then you are even aware of.
Again if you are speaking solely from the perspective of your department and chair and feel your chair is not serving in the best interest of your faculty and department, then take action, but do not assume that all other chairs are not doing the best they can to protect faculty and departments as in my experience many are doing just that.
Anonymous 7:18
Ok. You convinced me otherwise. My own chair is a saint, but prone to defend the dean, which leads me to believe that my chair aspires to be a dean some day. Anybody with this sort of aspiration needs to be medicalized or criminalized, don't you think?
medicated not medicalized. There is no need to avoid use of the English Language when dealing with your survival.
read about the new contract for the AAUP at BGSU and again ask yourself why is the budget a problem every year at UT? WOW
“When medicalization—the characterization of human traits in terms of disease and ailment—first appeared as a concept in the 1970s, …”
http://books.google.com/books/about/Medicalized_Masculinities.html?id=cOJhS6Tr9goC
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