About a month ago, I posted this on Bluesky:
As of today, despite a faculty vote of no confidence, [gift link] the President of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, is still in office, showing that it’s a much safer bet to call the cops on students protesting than it is to stand up to Elise Stefanik in a congressional hearing.
The title of this post is from a fight between Jeff and Beau Bridges’ characters in the Fabulous Baker Boys, and man it took me a long time to remember it. (I thought it was from a fight between Peter Krause and Michael C. Hall’s characters in Six Feet Under, which would make sense because the dynamic was similar.) In the Fabulous Baker Boys, Jeff’s character is the talented one in a family piano duo, while Beau is the family man who keeps the wheels on the act but, in his brother’s telling, he’d need sheet music for chopsticks. Anyway, the Baker Boys are a long way from the President of Columbia, but the dynamic remains: the people who become presidents of any university, not to mention an Ivy, are going to be people who have been kissing ass so long that they’ve started to like it. And, the asses that they kiss are donors and trustees, not students and faculty.
People were pissed, and rightly so, when Pudding Boots Heel Lifts put Ben Sasse in charge of the University of Florida so he could ruin the joint, but in my view the average college president is someone who has just learned to give enough lip service to placate the faculty as they gut the liberal arts and do the bidding of big donors. In other words, they’re like Ben Sasse in that they are gross opportunists and mainly politicians, but their mask fits better.
It’s a bit ironic that a lot of the asses presidents have to kiss might have been students in the 60’s and engaged in protests. But there’s almost no patience with college protests today. I’m amazed at how little it takes to call in the cops to bang heads. I’m sure there were idiotic things said and stupid things done during the Columbia protests, and I’m sure I wouldn’t agree with a lot of the rhetoric. But it sure seems that a lot of campuses were able to get through the protests without having cops haul off the protesters and then tell stupid cop lies painting a bog-standard Kryptonite bicycle lock as a tool of professional agitators.
Like Linda Katehi, the UC Davis Chancellor who had students pepper sprayed, Columbia President Shafik realized that her best move to preserve the endowment was to do what the right wingers wanted, and so she did it. (Note that Katehi wasn’t brought down because of the pepper spray incident — she apparently liked to tell fibs and also tried to hide that she paid UC money to have contractors remove negative comments about her on websites.)
One more Fabulous Baker Boys parallel: not only do most faculty view the president in the same way that Jeff Bridges’ character viewed Beau’s (as a hack), it’s also true that the perspective of Beau’s character applies to faculty. From the point of view of administrators, faculty, for the most part, are completely ignorant of how the university should run, and most of them have none of the practical skills required by good administrators.
Susan Einbinder
I hope that you meant that university presidents and administrators THINK this, your last sentence: “Faculty, for the most part, are completely ignorant of how the university should run, and most of them have none of the practical skills required by good administrators.” I’ve been a faculty member for quite some time, and know plenty of faculty fully capable and able of running a university …. (ok, a few maybe not so much)…
Baud
Was there patience back then? I seem to remember some folks getting shot.
Betty Cracker
I think you nailed the Sasse role at UF. Outrageous but in the common way. I’ve followed how the admin has harassed protesters there, mostly with dumb rules about signage and prohibitions about sitting and leaning on things..
Students set up a shanty town and busted IBM Selectrics on the steps of Tigert Hall to protest investment in apartheid South Africa when I was a stoned Gator stumbling around that campus in the late 80s. I guess the admin was more woke back then. Nobody gave a shit, IIRC.
stinger
One of my favorite movies!
$8 blue check mistermix
@Susan Einbinder: I clarified it.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Baud: It’s not that there was a lot of patience back then, but you’d think that people who had engaged in some protests back then would be a little more lenient now. But they’re not — it’s such a common phenomenon that someone wrote a song about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeWZhuzFMM8
trollhattan
To think compared to neighbor UC Berkeley, Davis is a chill backwater, home of the Aggies for Christ’s sake. Nevertheless, the beatdowns will continue until morale improves.
Kay
The disparity in treatment is pretty blatant. Hopefully some of the students will sue and we can get an explanation from college management why one group of students were treated so differently from another. It sure seems like it’s because they want to suppress this particular political speech. They succeeded too. They really shut down any opposition to US Gaza policy on those campuses – although obviously protests have continued where they can’t (yet) shut them down, but those have come with police beatings of protestors.
Harrison Wesley
I saw a photo yesterday of a protest site on Drexel campus in Philly; apparently it’s tied in with protests at Penn, which is right next door. I didn’t recognize the place, and I worked across the street from it for 25 years.
Dangerman
The 800 pound Gorilla in my neigghborhood runs the place; but for them, the Central Coast is a large backwater with a few cool beaches (and there is Pirates Cove; not that cool and definitely remember the major sunscreen for the sensitive areas).
Shit, there was a young woman killed on the campus, in the Dorms, and the Administration was pretty much down with having her buried in a local backyard for a couple decades. Just no bad news about the Campus, OK? They did everything (by which I mean they did dick) but buy the shovel. Total disgrace but keep those Advancement checks coming.
Math Guy
@Susan Einbinder: A colleague of mine once described our administrators as “failed faculty.” A bit of an over generalization, but spot on in several cases.
lowtechcyclist
And so what? I was once a faculty member for several years, and the skill set for my job was very different than the skill set I’d hope an administrator would have. What one would hope and expect faculty members to bring to the table is a clearer sense of what the point of a college or university is, which is something I’d expect would be easy for administrators to lose sight of.
gvg
@$8 blue check mistermix: I don’t think the specific people who are administrators protested back then. In fact most of the 60-70’s protestors have passed retirement.
The 80’s protests didn’t make as big a splash, possibly because the prior protestors were still around, including in government.
Ksmiami
@Betty Cracker: Honestly I don’t have time for this bs anymore, not when we are up against a true fascist menace. Sorry
JML
@Susan Einbinder: Part of the problem is that the noisiest faculty are frequently the ones who have the least capability to actually run the university.
My university is going through this right now, because we have a substantial budget deficit and there’s almost nothing left to cut anywhere but the teaching faculty at this point. There are still some redundant administrators (though they’re getting another whack as well), but the problem is as a public institution that’s part of a system, there are reporting requirements (even if they’re idiotic and not used for things) that still have to get done every year or the university will lose funding as a consequence. that’s probably the most substantial cause of admin bloat at my school?
I don’t have much good to say about senior administrators: too many of them have “management-itis” where they think they’re the only ones who can possibly do their jobs, ignore ideas unless they come from people they like (and can take credit for), and carry around egos so large that rather than admit they don’t know or have n answer to a specific question will make one up or outright lie instead.
That said…a substantial part of our faculty are sadly at the root cause of many of our troubles and have no interest in fixing anything, especially if it might mean they have to change anything about their life and work. We have programs that are being axed and the departments with them, and these faculty are outraged…when they have more faculty in the department than they have students enrolled in the major. They refuse to be-stir themselves to help recruit students and often treat the students that pass through their department via general ed so poorly that no one wants to come near their classes. Some of them have moved to other parts and haven’t set foot on campus in years. One program had dwindling majors and one of their own faculty worked up a proposal for how they could reinvigorate the program and make themselves a strong, viable, and growing program…and they were told to shut up and not speak at department meetings. they took their proposed changes to another university in the system as part of a program review, and now that department is thriving. but this department chair (after silencing one of their own) stood up in an all-campus meeting and complained that no one had ever asked them for their ideas. (they’ve been asked for ideas on recruitment, enrollment, etc for years, while being warned that we were running out of runway) Another faculty member wanted to cut the entire university marketing budget, because “we don’t need to waste money on that”.
Right now our faculty are being given the opportunity to provide alternatives to cuts that have been proposed. They’ve known that cuts were coming for months and frankly most of them knew where most of the cuts were going to be targeted to. So far the only faculty response I’ve heard is “you can’t cut us, we’re too important!”
I think the butt-kissing aspect for university presidents is much more common at the larger and exclusive universities. Whether any of them are actually competent administrators is another question.
Math Guy
@lowtechcyclist: “What one would hope and expect faculty members to bring to the table is a clearer sense of what the point of a college or university is, which is something I’d expect would be easy for administrators to lose sight of.”
Agreed! Several times, though, I saw faculty who aspired to be administrators promoted because of their willingness to buy into the administration’s policies. They would prefer to tell their colleagues how to teach and conduct research rather than work on their own teaching and scholarship. Hence the term “failed faculty.”
geg6
@Susan Einbinder:
As a staff member with 34 years in, I would respectfully disagree. I have yet to meet a faculty member who could run a bake sale.
ETA: Same goes for the top administrators.
Baud
Coming from a place of ignorance, it does intuitive to me that faculty and administration require different skill sets. Of couse, some people are skilled enough to have both sets of skills, but probably a minority.
Certainly, fewer people would suggest that anyone in administration has the skill set to be faculty.
JaySinWA
@geg6: I think you have helped to confirm the staff vs faculty viewpoints.
Jeffro
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Sorry, but I’m bored with this. And the students are all heading home for the summer now anyway. Maybe they can locate the nearest office of their Rep or Senator – you know, someone who might actually be able to do something about Israel and Gaza – and voice their concerns as constituents?
Baud
Via reddit
JaySinWA
@Baud: I could have sworn he said something similar previously, maybe about abortion. Promising a policy announcement later that never materialized. Sort of like infrastructure week.
Baud
@JaySinWA:
He did abortion. He said he would leave it up to the states. A lie, obviously. But he said something.
Citizen Alan
@Math Guy: During my brief span as a high school teacher, I came to the very definite conclusion that one of the biggest problems with education was that administration was dominated by people who got into teaching but realized they didn’t like it only after it was too late to start over again in a different field. So they went back and got an admin degree so they could keep their retirement years but move up into an admin slot where they never had to deal with kids.
Tony Jay
@Betty Cracker:
Some of the bile being spewed against the pro-Palestine protests in general and the protesting students in particular is, quite frankly (but unsurprisingly), utterly disgraceful in tone and content. Completely unhinged and often twirling off into the chthonic abyss where war-crimes get justified and every dead kid is uniformly stamped ‘no Angel’ in advance. How dare these protestors judge a far-Right Government by its actions. How dare they say that their own Governments shouldn’t be funding the slaughter of civilians. How dare they!
Well. They dare. And though the usual pukefunnels are doing their very best to drown out reality with their gaslighting nonsense, it looks very much like international law and global opinion are on their side.
Ethnic cleansing and terror-bombing civilians aren’t popular, and you can’t shame-bully people into pretending otherwise. Imagine that!
O. Felix Culpa
@Kay:
I was part of that protest. Possibly one difference was that we (the protestors) were trained by the organizers on how to conduct ourselves: on what to do and what NOT to do (i.e., no violence, no property damage). In other words, the student leaders and participants understood and adhered to the principles of nonviolent civil disobedience. Unfortunately some of the current crop of student protestors have not informed or conducted themselves within those parameters. (And that is established fact, so please don’t pretend they are all innocent naifs. They actually have more information easily accessible to them than we did, pre-internet era.)
I cannot say whether the difference in the administration’s reaction to our occupation of Nassau Hall versus the Gaza protests was due to the particular cause being espoused or the protest tactics used, or something else altogether. It was a different political era and maybe the administration was less under the gun by fascist Congresspeople, and/or more benevolently inclined. Don’t know.
I do, however, find it interesting that many (most?) of the instances of overreaction are by female presidents. Perhaps they are over-compensating with shows of putative strength, after their female counterparts at Harvard and Penn got canned due to poor showings in Congressional hearings. I wonder if this is a case of the female bind: not having been taught how to deal effectively with conflict in the public sphere, and damned whatever path you choose.
ETA: Nonviolent civil disobedience does not necessarily mean that the officials will respond in kind. We knew that and had been advised on what to do if the authorities were violent. It’s a risk one takes in any protest, as history shows us. And our over-militarized police seem to be increasingly a law unto themselves. Another issue that needs to be addressed, perhaps more pressing than the failings of some university presidents.
Dorothy A. Winsor
In my experience, one of the problems with university presidents is that they move from school to school, climbing the prestige ladder, so they often don’t have a good understanding of the institution they’re at.
JML
@Dorothy A. Winsor: the short stays is increasingly a problem with other senior administrators too. we’ve been churning over our CFO’s about every 2 years. But you definitely see it where someone comes in and then floats out after 2-3 years before they get called out for being full of it and none of their “genius” plans actually work.
Baud
Amazing video
Geminid
@O. Felix Culpa: Yes, a lot of these university presidents are women. My cynical side tells me that when various boards of visitors were selecting the latest cohort of college presidents, they foresaw troublesome years ahead. “Time to put up a woman to catch the flak! We’ll be replacing them in a couple years, and then we can hire the male candidate.”
Ed. “This is the surest course to furthering the University’s core misson: growing the endowment.”
bg
@Kay: Honestly I think some of the disparity is tied to the difference in cost of tuition between then and now.
For instance, my son and his friends (all college students in the Philly area, but not at $$$$$$$ Drexel and Penn) initially were ambivalent about the protests – not something they were going to blow the semester’s tuition joining (most of them work 20+ hours in addition to classes to defray cost), but generally supportive.
However, as things stretched on and got louder and more obstructive to getting around campus, I heard the attitude start to shift to eye rolls about privileged kids staging performative BS for online cred and followers. And when all of this ran into finals week where it was loud and distracting and made getting to the library or study sessions or to the 2nd of back-to-back finals, THEN opinion turned kind of sharply against the protestors. Like sure they had 1st amendment rights, but surely the other students working their butts off to get a degree and not drown too much in debt had *some* right to?
Anyway, just one observation from the distance of parent over hearing kids talking. But I think there’s a tendency to see college students as some monolithic group here, and I don’t think they are quite as united wrt opinions on this back when my cohort protested apartheid.
Geminid
@Baud: That’s a really good video.
Baud
@Geminid:
A me too reaction?
Martin
Your post is incorrect. Katehi did not order the pepper spray of the protestors. She gave instructions to UC police to not use force and not arrest students. The chief of police at UC Davis interpreted ‘no force’ as ‘pepper spray to the face’.
I’ve tried to explain this before, but UC police are a systemwide police force with leadership out of UC office of the president and then individual units on each campus under the chancellors administrative structure – usually under a vice chancellor under the Provost. Each campus police is integrated with the local city policy to various degrees depending on how independent the campus police can operate – more at rural campuses and less at urban ones.
There is minimal directed oversight of the campus police as a result – not unlike in cities. When a cop does something shitty, it’s not because the mayor told them to. The mayor is still accountable, though for the overall performance of the police. One way we kept the peace at our campus was by having administrators (like me) regularly present when there were situations where police would be present, because we could tell the police to back off and they’d listen (at least they did with us) because we were taking responsibility for the outcomes, but we never trusted the police because cops are cops and will always act like cops. I told the story of one demonstration when we told police to lock down the administration building when things were getting a bit energetic, and as one officer was walking to lock a side door an alumnus of ours was walking in that door to pick up her diploma – in business attire. The cop yelled at her that she couldn’t enter, she didn’t understand why since the building didn’t close for another 2 hours and was unaware of the demonstration on the other side of the building, and the cop body slammed and arrested her. When we found out we went over to bail out the alum, took her to her Dean’s house for dinner to make clear we were working on a plan, but we had to beg the DA to not press charges. We had zero authority once the arrest was made. It was all of 30 seconds tops from the administrator telling police to lock the building to a rogue officer assaulting a student, which took hundreds of staff hours to unwind. Plus a settlement to the alum.
There is WAY too much expression of control over police directed at campus administration. Even with campus police, the university is not sovereign – all local laws still apply which the police can administer independently of the administration. They are sworn law enforcement, after all. Property crimes can be intervened since it’s campus property, but it’s not private property at a UC but public (Columbia is private – somewhat different relationship), and personal crimes cannot. If student A assaults student B and a cop is present, there will be an arrest and the chancellor has no say in that outcome. That’s just a sworn officer upholding the law.
A lot more of the responsibility for police action at Columbia really should fall on Adams, not Shafik, though Shafik fucked up plenty on her own. Adams is the one who leaned in hard, leaned on the University, and instructed NYPD. He was VERY hands-on here – way more than he should be as mayor. Cops be cops.
O. Felix Culpa
@Martin:
QFT.
Geminid
@Baud: The BLM movement could have given university boards an inkling that the next few years would be challenging for administrators. But mainly I’m just being cynical here, about institutions and their treatment of woman leaders.
Belafon
@O. Felix Culpa:
1. We know that having more information via the internet doesn’t make it more accessible. It’s like handing you the New York phone book and saying one of these people will help solve your problems.
2. I remember college, and students are still kids.
From what I’ve observed in the reaction to these recent protests is that it’s been far more often that the schools have overreacted to otherwise noneventful protests than the protesters causing problems.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
In this analogy, who’s Michelle Pfeiffer dancing on a piano in a red cocktail dress??
Chief Oshkosh
Hey now, Brown’s President and their Chancellor have done pretty well in all of this.
Tony Jay
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
I’m trying to think of an analogy but I can’t get past the image, and I’m fine with that.
trollhattan
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch:
IDK but I’m playing the damn piano.
Michael Bersin
Me, seven years ago:
A conversation at the flag pole
As the second police officer approached, he started to put his gloves on. My first thought on observing this was that my spouse was gonna be really ticked off.
Kay
@Martin:
How do you explain why some colleges did well, though? Columbia ranked at the bottom but there were examples of good management too – Brown, Rutgers, Northwestern, University of Minnesota, MSU.
We know they could have done better because many managers and colleges did, in fact, do a much better job.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
@Baud: here’s a video of a guy catching a bomb and preventing it from exploding (clip)
Dorothy A. Winsor
OT, but my nephew’s daughter has been elected as a Vermont delegate to the convention. She graduated from college last year and has been working in the state house
O. Felix Culpa
@Belafon:
And your point is? We were the same age then, as these students are now. And yet we found ways to inform ourselves. I just googled “principles of nonviolent civil disobedience” and came up with the links below. I’m just citing the first five links to demonstrate it took about 2 seconds to get useful, actionable info from that terribly hard to navigate internet, which these students definitely didn’t grow up with and probably don’t know how to use. //
Nonviolence
Civil Disobedience
Three Principles of Civil Disobedience
MLK’s Six Principles of Nonviolence (pdf)
Civil Disobedience Toolkit (pdf)
Baud
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
👍
We are proud of her.
JaySinWA
@Baud: The abortion up to the states was a backtracking of previous statements. It wasn’t something he put forth as a policy per se, but a reaction to questioning about a national abortion ban. It’s part of the attempt to nail jello to the wall dance he does. Hard to call it a policy statement when it is so malleable over time. I seem to recall him mumbling when asked about consequences of that “policy”. Maybe states’ rights will stick this time, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
I was thinking more of the expression “we are looking at that and will have a very surprising policy statement real soon now” that I believe he has used before when questioned about something he has no clue about how to respond to. He never volunteers a policy statement as a follow up IIRC. It might be pried out of him later, and then contradicted soon after he said it. He’s already denying the implications of what he said about birth control.
Dan B
@Chief Oshkosh: University of Washington president Ana Marie Cauce did okay. The encampment came down yesterday. She gave into University specific demands and ignored the divestment demands. It may be a simmering sore spot. We’ll see.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Martin:
When you comment I definitely pay attention and think you’re generally right, but I still remember writing about this tawdry incident. Even if she had the best intentions and innocently called out the police and they went rogue, her actions after the incident show that she’s a liar and a gross incompetent. IOW, whether or not she actually said “no force,” she definitely tried to bend the record to benefit her. For some reason, Google is terrible at indexing this site, but I was able to look through the posts via our editing interface and found posts by me and John detailing just how terrible she was during the whole incident:
John: https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/20/cant-anyone-here-play-this-game/
John: https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/21/todays-fallout-firebreak/
John: https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/23/wait-what-who-said-anything-about-force/
Me: https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/20/walk-of-shame/
Me: https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/21/so-sorry/
Me: https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/23/interdisciplinary-collaboration-in-action
These posts document what happened and what she was trying to hide with her “blue ribbon panels.”
JMG
At my alma mater, Wesleyan, the school left the protest encampment alone, except once to send a warning about graffiti. Instead, the administration held meetings with the protestors about their demands. Well, any college administrator loves meetings as the staff of life itself, and they ran rings around the protest negotiators. In the end, just about as school ended, the encampment broke up in response to an “agreement” with the school about its investment policies vis a vis Israel. The agreement calls for, you guessed it, more meetings come fall.
I see that Wesleyan hasn’t changed much since my day. In 1969, when I was a callow freshman, a group of protestors occupied the then-only administration building over I forget what, might have been Dow Chemical recruiting. “Tense round-the-clock” negotiations followed, only to be halted when a TV was brought into the meeting room so that protestors and administrators could focus on what was obviously more important to them — Game Seven of the NBA Finals (to be fair, it turned out to be Bill Russell’s last game).
Callow I was doubtless was, but I had enough on the ball to realize “this is some bullshit here” and abandon political action for the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll side of the Revolution. One of the best decisions I ever made.
Kay
@bg:
Oh, I know they are nowhere near a majority. I don’t think they are a threat to Biden’s politically, even. He definitely has some problems with various groups of voters, hence his low polling, but I think the pro Palestinian protestors are only one issue and won’t matter – with the exception of Michigan. Michigan is like the perfect storm- Arab Americans plus a huge student vote- and he won last time by such a small margin I think the issue is a real threat there.
I actually think we’ll now go to the 2nd phase of opposition to Gaza – experts and (more) Democrats in Congress will turn against the policy. The Biden Administration never had an unlimited window to get a deal in the context of the ongoing slaughter, which quite literally gets worse every day. They’re going to have to change course at some point – this approach has failed. Tim Kaine said a month ago it was failed policy and that will only get louder.
JaySinWA
More to the point of this post, a pedantic question. Do ass kissers actually come to like ass kissing or is it merely getting used to it, so it doesn’t bother you anymore?
Is it an acquired taste, like scotch or a buildup of tolerance, like an odor in your home that you don’t notice anymore?
O. Felix Culpa
@Geminid: I don’t know if the plan was as prescient or cynical as that, but I do wonder if Claudine Gay would have been canned if she had been a white male. Of course, a white male might felt privileged to deal with Elise Stefanik quite differently. I haven’t delved deeply into the hearings with the university presidents, but I get the impression that their testimony was too guarded. Which is understandable, when you’re a First.
Martin
I disagree with this statement. At least in my experience working across the entire CA university systems (including community colleges).
Faculty are extremely well equipped to oversee the academic mission of the institution, at least in aggregate. At research institutions they are also very well equipped to oversee the research mission – though they tend to be overly territorial mostly due to incentives around tenure and retention. At teaching institutions they tend to be reasonably good at overseeing student matters.
But universities are increasingly businesses, and not institutions of learning (this is not a good thing). UCLA operates 4 hotels. Their football team throws off $80M a year in broadcast rights now – so much so that they need to pay UC Berkeley $20M a year to make up for what they cost their peer campus for undermining the Pac12. Housing, parking, operating power plants, running a hospital, mental health services, restaurants – it’s a lot and it’s a whole set of skills that most faculty want nothing to do with because it’s all a distraction. Faculty constantly decry the business as this terrible thing, but when I was doing faculty retention, every goddamn one of them expected that business to throw money at them to stay. They loved that business because increasing their compensation was every bit as important as academic freedom, but would never admit to that.
The ‘administrators are failed faculty’ trope is a common one, and I’d agree warranted in a few cases, but this is effectively arguing that Steven Chu was a failed academic. There are plenty of faculty administrators that happen to be good at both academics and administration. But the more institutions turn into businesses, the less academics are valued.
Kay
A month ago.
Tim Kaine is a Biden ally and considered pro Israel. It’ll be people like him who start…protesting. This really can’t go on like this. Humanitarian aid is still being blocked, as are medical supplies.
$8 blue check mistermix
@Martin: Yeah, the term “administrator” is probably too general. Here’s what I wrote during the Katehi incident about higher-level admins:
https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/20/walk-of-shame/
TF79
@Martin: It’s probably also helpful to distinguish between the academic side of the university that oversees academic departments and the “other” side (all the other stuff – e.g the business stuff). At least at my university, the academic side administrators are all competent academics (at least at some point in their career) and some are quite well-renowned in their fields – many return to their home departments after admin service, with some “career” admin eying a move up the hierarchy. My understanding is that the “other” side administration looks very different, and at the very tippy top (president-level and such) it’s a weird mix of legit academics and non-academics who are both much more “career” admin/politicians.
O. Felix Culpa
@Martin:
I don’t know about plenty, but I agree there are definitely some who are competent at both. And honestly, I don’t think that people who succeed at the top levels of academics are any more subservient than those who succeed in business. You’re always accountable to someone else, no matter how high you climb, unless you’re a billionaire maybe.
Michael Bersin
@Martin:
Most university faculty do not teach At Research I institutions, nor do they get paid at that level, nor do they have sufficient support. We do, however, have the same issues with the businessification of higher education – just with fewer resources and more administrative incompetence.
There are approximately 1.5 million higher education faculty in the United States. Most don’t teach at Harvard.
A few years ago my sister asked me what my annual salary was (tenured, professor, regional comprehensive). I told her. She replied, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
No matter how many times I explained it, my mother could never wrap her mind around the idea that I didn’t come close to the salary for faculty at “elite” institutions described as “the norm” by lazy media.
“Mom, I don’t teach at Harvard.”
zhena gogolia
@bg: That is a well informed comment.
Martin
@$8 blue check mistermix: I won’t dispute any of how she behaved after. I’m not trying to defend her scrambling to salvage her reputation.
I’m just noting that she did tell campus police no use of force, no arrests. We know this. That’s not disputed. So many of these situations, like the one I described, are situations that the cops create and administrators have to bail the institution out of because everyone assumes the administration is in control. They are only barely. The pepper spray incident was entirely the discretion of the police.
My point here is that in these individual cases leadership is petty much caught up in a circumstance not directly of their making. I’m not overly sympathetic to them taking a fall – that’s what they’re compensated for – but the fundamental problems here are larger than them as individuals. These are institutional and societal problems. Even when we worked to reduced tension between students and police on our campus, as we learned from our mistakes, the police simply got more aggressive because they were following the trajectory of national police. We were powerless to move our local police off of that trajectory – and we tried pretty hard. Our only really effective measure was to be physically present. But that was expensive and could only go so far. I guarantee UCLA administration didn’t instruct UCLA PD to let JDL and white nationalists beat up the demonstrators for 3 hours – that was a call made entirely by UCLA PD. But so long as we are going to allow the right to set the narrative of how to treat students, and the nature of their demonstrations (notably, when the students themselves don’t get to explain them) and let them set the narrative of the nature of policing and enforcement and discipline, then the issue of campus policing is effectively an unsolved problem. If the public sentiment is to smash heads, the cops are going to smash heads regardless of what the administration says. It’s what cops do. That was clear enough during BLM. If we want this to stop, the answer isn’t to yell at administrators more loudly, it’s to change the cultural narrative around policing and enforcement and discipline – all the things we were working on during BLM but then stopped.
Now, administrators shouldn’t be incompetent at that effort to bail out the institution. They certainly shouldn’t be focused on only reforming their personal reputation. But I think when we go after someone like Shafik after the House GOP, and her own Mayor, and campus billionaires and donors, and basically the entire right wing noise machine acted nonstop in bad faith, with lies, and misrepresentations and their own completely unreasonable demands, I think expecting her to succeed in this environment is unfair, and serves to do the job of all of those bad actors for them. The situation at Columbia was fine until all of these agents made it impossible, and then she failed, because it was impossible to not fail. How do you evaluate the performance of Caitlin Clark playing solo against the entire Golden State Warriors team? Of course she’s going to lose. Is it because she sucked, or because it was unwinnable? If it’s unwinnable, you can only reserve judgement. Maybe she sucks, maybe she’s great. This test doesn’t inform us one way or another here. But the bad actors want us to say she sucks so they can point to us saying she sucks.
I think Shafik was okay in her testimony, I think she should have spoken more forcefully on a number of matters, I think her response the next day was deplorable, and then I think everything after that she or anyone else at Columbia couldn’t possibly have succeeded at. I think there’s an important narrative difference between ‘the UC Davis chancellor wanted the students to be pepper sprayed’ and ‘the UC Davis chancellor did a terrible job cleaning up after shitty cops pepper sprayed some student against orders’. They can both lead to her being fired, but one says something VERY different about the institution than the other – and the students especially need to hear that difference.
Susan Einbinder
@$8 blue check mistermix: Thank you. This is my favorite website and I always enjoy your postings and reading your very complex policy materials, too.
Susan Einbinder
@Math Guy: What really bothers me is WHY the faculty who were there just gave up and watched as administrators were hired at 3 times the rate (and at least twice the salary), and tenure has been slowly destroyed. And there’s a faculty union, whose representatives assure me that it’s ‘great’ that part-time and full-time lecturers are hired (instead of tenure-track faculty), whose lawyers have no concept of what it means to be a faculty member … sigh. I have 10 years to go before I can retire. Still I love my work, at least, if not the institution(s).
Susan Einbinder
@JML: Yes, I agree: Three years ago, the tenured faculty member who was President of our Academic Senate encouraged and allowed the the -new President to pass a policy that essentially said that the President has final say on everything. This year, the administration has decided that post-tenure review is the most important thing to address — even though, according to our union contract, we can only be evaluated by the standards in place when we were hired and there were no standards for post-tenure review ever, AND the proposal they presented does not establish what consequences there will be for good, bad, or neutral evaluations. I was the only faculty member who raised this — all of the others were either quiet or actually enthusiastic (while meanwhile, the 50+ part-time instructors who teach in my department (graduate school) have not been evaluated since 2017, despite the requirement that they have to be).
It is positively stunning to me how so very, very many well-educated and supposedly smart people are collectively stupid … and makes me very, very nervous about the future in general. I think higher education is nearly transformed into a widget factory….
tam1MI
The last two colleges on your list are public universities*, and get a decent amount of their funding from the state rather than private donors. That might have taken some of the “DO SOMETHING!!!” pressure off their administrators and allowed to take a more mellow approach.
* – And are in blue states, so administrators might not have to worry as much that their funding might be cut if they don’t crack down hard on protestors.
Susan Einbinder
@geg6:
@Baud: If administrators had been faculty once, or knew anything about what it entails (juggling multiple, often conflicting responsibilities, teaching, research, service, oh my), maybe they would have a shred of respect for faculty. Instead, they see faculty as the ‘problem’.
There’s a funny short article about how to ‘solve’ the problem in higher education I just read — on McSweeneys? – which argues that first, they have to get rid of the faculty, and then get rid of the students, and then the administrators can have just what they want. Satire but it sure seems true….
TF79
@Susan Einbinder: was it this?https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/23/save-colleges-chatbots-administrators-satire/
Martin
@Michael Bersin: So, for some years I headed up a statewide intersegmental working group – UC, CSU, and CCC. It was 95% faculty with me non-faculty leading it up. They elected me. And proportionately it was over 50% CCC faculty. I got to know them very well – I really put a lot of effort into it, visited most of the state public campuses at one time or another (there’s 160 of them) plus some private
At the R1s, like mine, we have relatively speaking a lot of money, we’re big, and we can afford and have space to hire a lot of domain experts around the institution. I was exclusively on the academic side, but was a domain expert. At the CSUs – the 4 year teaching university with MS programs, but not PhD, there’s a lot less of this unencumbered money, and a lot less overall funds for domain experts. Regular faculty wear more administrative hats. The stakes tend to be lower, but aligning knowledge and interest to those administrative tasks is tricky so your ceiling of expectations is lower than the UCs with domain experts like me who can work full time to operate at a very high level. At the community colleges, there’s almost no staff. It’s faculty all the way down. They wear the most hats – because there’s nobody else to do the work. So while their ceiling of expectations are the lowest because everyone pretty much does everything, in my experience their commitment to the thing the public expects educators to be doing is the highest. And our data showed that generally speaking they did better jobs educating undergraduate students than the CSU faculty who were better than the UC faculty – which was a VERY difficult message for them to hear. (MA/MS and PhD students are a different story).
But nobody – and I mean NOBODY – at the institutional level gives a shit about the quality of instruction or what students learn. It’s not part of rankings, it doesn’t generate money, accreditation is something to be endured not to excel at, it is effectively a cost center that is only done well because individual faculty care about it. And of course the ones who do it well get paid the least because it’s not valued at the institutional level – all of this other stuff is. The state cares more about teaching more than teaching better. And the more the institution carries a side business, the more that will get valued even by the state because they want the benefits of that business as well. UC creates a fuckton of companies and jobs off of that stuff. Students and parents want the reputation and cache of attending a more prestigious institution. There are more people right now wearing Harvard hoodies than there are people who ever attended Harvard. It’s part of the business. And *everyone* is invested in it – faculty, students, the public, lawmakers – EVERYONE. Nobody has clean hands on this one – I sure as shit don’t. And it’s getting pretty terrible. The adjunct situation at top institutions is fucking criminal – you make what the grounds staff do. Probably less than someone in purchasing. Postdocs aren’t much different. I could go on.
It’s a goddamn mess, and one of the things that contributed to my retirement as someone who had moved up to be involved in all of the moving parts was my conclusion that this is completely unsustainable. The system has to fail. I don’t know when or how, but it’s inevitable. And I couldn’t do anything about it (even though everyone would think I was in a position to do something about it), and I didn’t want to contribute to its failure any longer. That’s why handling our Covid response was my last act. I knew how everything worked, and could work that problem really fucking fast, and had enough respect that it would be heard. And it was needed, and then once everyone was sure they wouldn’t get blamed for a student or faculty member dying, it went right back to business as usual, and I was out.
tam1MI
This won’t happen until after the election. No Democrat (aside from maybe Bernie Sanders, and he has been remarkably silent on this issue) is going to break ranks before then and risk being seen (or being) the reason the election tilted to Trump. Of course, if Trump and the Republicans win in November, it all becomes a moot point.
Omnes Omnibus
A couple of observations:
First, IMO the schools that have had problems with the protests have administrations that have chosen to have problems. They chose to be confrontational. They chose to call the police. The schools that have had protests without problems made choices as well. They just made better ones. Martin is probably right that the university administrations have little power over the police once they are called in. So Don’t Call Them In. Talk to them.
Second, it seems to me that most of the protests are at Ivies/Ivy equivalents, state flagship universities, and boutique LACs. This is the environment in which most elite MSM people were hatched. It is not typical of the standard college student. I was at my nephew’s graduation from a mid-sized state school on the 11th. Not a whisper of a protest to be seen. Quite a few first generation college students. My niece, who is at another similar school, told me that there wasn’t anything going on her campus either. OTOH, it would not surprise me at all if my undergrad LAC had some kind of demonstration at its commencement in June.
brantl
@Ksmiami: Piss off.
Martin
@Michael Bersin: I should add – at my R1 all faculty taught with a few exceptions. It was only a few years ago that we even allowed faculty to buy out a course – and only one. They might not teach if they had a full administrative load, or some combination of things – we had one faculty who was doing both the tenure committee (which bought out a course) and was heading up a national lab which came with course relief – stuff like that. Senior administrators usually didn’t have a teaching load, but would usually volunteer to teach an undergraduate seminar or something like that – they’re pretty fun. All of our courses were taught by someone with a PhD with the exception of writing which was more relaxed, some skills courses in arts and engineering (drafting, etc.). Exceptions would be made for PhD students who had advanced to candidacy to teach lower-division courses – usually because they were on a career path for academia and having the teaching experience was overall beneficial. They were always fantastic instructors, too.
This does vary, but generally at UC you gotta teach and your instructors are really well qualified (not the same as being good at teaching, though). You get to places like Berkeley where you have some bigger names I’m sure there are more exceptions to that. Places like Stanford and USC have their own set of rules and I suspect there you see a lot of research faculty
Martin
@Chief Oshkosh: A LOT of universities have – but they don’t make the news.
tam1MI
I listened to NPR while driving in to the office this morning, and happened to catch an interview with Ron Dermer, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, reacting to the issuance of warrants for both Hamas and Israeli leaders for war crimes in Gaza. You can listen to it here – and really, you have to listen to it to get the full scope of just how unpersuasive this dude’s arguments are. He’s just yelling and Gish Galloping and making wild assertions with no evidence whatsoever to back them up. (Here’s the wildest one: “We have had 20,000 trucks move into Gaza. We have paved roads and open passages to get more trucks into Gaza. You know who has not done that? Hamas has actually attacked the border crossings. They did it a couple of weeks ago, right after the American Secretary of State was here. They’re stealing the aid. Israel is pushing the aid in. They’re stealing the aid, and we’re the ones that are being hit by these war crimes charges. ”
At any rate, at least according to NPR’s reporting, the warrants have had the counterproductive short term effect of unifying Israel behind Netanyahu.
Martin
@Kay: Oh, lots of different reasons. Just not being in the spotlight sure helps a lot.
How isolated the campus is from the community helps a lot.
Whether the institution has a culture of communicating with students. Go back to my front page post and I outline some of the things we did to keep these things at a simmer.
USC was a complete self-own. UCLA was handling it pretty well until the right wing agitators moved in, which the cops ignored, and in response the students dug in really hard. Hard enough that I’m not they could have deescalated no matter how hard they tried – the students were pissed, were right to be pissed, felt like they were abandoned and under siege, and acted accordingly.
Every campus has a different story here, different dynamics, different other grievances (USC was almost entirely driven around the administration discriminating against a student and then constantly doubling down on that), Cal Poly Humbolt is their really bad student homelessness problem and their decision weeks before to kick the homeless students off of campus property. I mean, they’re fucking lucky the students didn’t take over buildings back then.
There’s no magic formula here. Some were just better than others, some had better conditions, some did the steady, unglamorous work of constantly maintaining that relationship with students. I think that last category really went to shit with Covid as everyone got accustomed to being remote and hands off, and a lot of campuses never returned to their previous hands-on interaction with students. That’s what happened at my campus, and part of that was I wasn’t there to fight to restore that because I retired – and I worked to build a lot of that culture. But I learned that from early failures in my career, and maybe this will inform those that follow me.
Martin
@Susan Einbinder: I can’t speak for other institutions, but we never saw the faculty as the problem. We sometimes saw them as disingenuous and self-serving. I got a lot of earfuls about why these other endeavors were bad for the institutions but boy howdy did they expect a retention offer paid for by those other endeavors. They’d rant and rave about how we didn’t appreciate their contribution and pay them adequately, but any time they didn’t want to teach a class they were super suggestive we hire an adjunct for $8,000 a course – surely we have that in the budget. Faculty would sell out other faculty routinely. So yeah, these expressions of class solidarity fell on some pretty fucking deaf ears, especially when I was there mediating these things.
But again, I was on the academic side. Faculty constantly accused me of trying to get rid of them, even when I’m there advocating why faculty should have a greater academic role in the accreditation process, promoting efforts to improve the flow of the curriculum (important in STEM, among other places) by having faculty take more responsibility across the curriculum, etc. We were huge advocates of faculty overall, expanding their role, etc. I’d berate them constantly for not exercising their joint governance responsibilities when they would complain to me about x or y. I was in those committees – and they’d be silent even on matters they were just complaining to me about that the administration was pushing them around.
It was hardly uniform – faculty are as diverse as any other community – but there were a ton of faculty that when we gave them agency just couldn’t be bothered. They’d complain constantly about tenure which was a 100% faculty driven system. All of the polices were written by faculty, they were evaluated by faculty, recommendations by faculty – the administration could submit a single recommendation in all of that, but there were no administrators making the decisions. And they constantly complained that this was the fault of the administration. Like, what do you want me to do? I’m not even allowed to be in the room when cases are being discussed – how the fuck is it the administrations fault here?
I know that not every institution works this way, but it’s how ours did. I’m not trying to shit on faculty, but they weren’t some angelic class. They were just people like everyone else that ranged from wonderful to shitty to lazy to workhorse to everything in between. Most were doing their best to navigate the system in their best interest without doing undue harm to others. That wasn’t necessarily the best path for the integrity of the institution. And administrators were exactly the same.
Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: So, one of my criticism of UCLA PD, especially on that Tuesday night is that once 911 calls started coming in the police should have responded ignoring all administrative instructions. It’s a 911 call – you respond. Period. Full stop. They didn’t. Additionally, once that explosive went off inside the camp, it should have looked more like an active shooter response than a standard 911 response. The police did the opposite here of what they should have done here.
As for some of the other issues, my campus rolled cops in when students started taking over academic buildings and blocking classes from happening. Golden rules for student demonstrations are pretty clear – no harming others, no creating dangerous situations, no interfering with academics.
Now, looking at the encampment, it was pretty small. It should have been easy for the administration to keep it from getting to that point and talking to my friends there that are involved in these things, the folks in charge of this did drop the ball. Okay. Even so, when they brought police in, they did so in a wildly excessive fashion. Now, I’ve been told the administration is upset with the response because while they did give permission to take the encampment down once academics were impacted, they asked that it be done carefully and without excessive numbers (this from a friend of mine who participated in the discussion and there was agreement on how to proceed). Of course, within an hour the cops put on a show because it’s politicized not just with the usual suspects but with the governor due to what happened at UCLA. What could have been done with 4 cops and a handful of administrators instead was done with 100 cops from 4 agencies and the county rolling in full sirens after a multiagency call went out about a ‘violent protest’. I opened up the livestream as soon as the sirens started going and the camp was quiet with students sitting nearby studying waiting for their next class.
You need police – or at least some form of enforcement to keep bad actors from joining students or attacking students. That’s established. But as soon as you give the cops agency, they take every inch of it. I don’t think there’s a way to do this and not lose, unless you are taking our old approach of literally babysitting them at all times. I don’t think they can be reformed.
Not surprised there was no protest. Students generally don’t want to screw up other students celebrations. This is why fears of a politicized student speech are pretty unfounded – it’s a pretty easy conversation to avoid that.
O. Felix Culpa
@Omnes Omnibus: Good points. There are demonstrations at our flagship university, but not at the community college where I used to teach.
O. Felix Culpa
@Martin: That’s an interesting observation, about the effect of COVID on communication channels, relationships, and trust between students and administration.
Kay
@tam1MI:
Bernie Sanders has not been quiet, at all, on this issue. I would say he has vigorously and publicly opposed this on a weekly basis since January.
Democratic Senators are serious people. It’s not a cult and they’re not going to go along to get along on such a serious issue. They have their own reputations and legacies to think about. 7 D Senators and 88 members of the House have already broken with Biden on this and if the humanitarian crisis continues unabated there will be more. The status quo is not acceptable. Blinken and Co cannot just keep asking for 6 more weeks – as they have been doing for going on 8 months. Placating Netanyahu in a desperate, sunk cost motivated play for a deal isn’t working.
JMG
If the people of Israel rally around Netanyahu because of the ICC (I’m doubtful about that), then they have made their choice. They cannot be judged, whatever they do is right. OK, fine. Then whatever your enemies do to you is right as well. That’s clearly not true, but the US is under no obligation to support an ally playing at outlaw. In fact, we’re under an obligation not to.
Kay
@tam1MI:
And I get it. We’re now going to get the administration saying the ICC charges are counterproductive to their (supposed, eventual) deal but not everyone in the world is going to go along with the Biden Administration objectives. The ICC have their own objectives, and apparently “placating Netanyahu in the hopes he can be reasoned with, eventually, maybe” is not one of them.
I saw they’re now saying they’ll be joining with Republicans for some stupid fake law or proclamation or something chastising the ICC for doing their jobs. They’re getting pulled further and further into this.
Darkrose
Funny you mention that. I was talking to a student recently–a sophomore–and they’d never heard of the pepper spray incident. I was shocked until I remembered that yeah, it’s been 13 years since that happened, and this student was probably around 7 at the time.
That said, many people on campus and in the local media have noted that the current administration has been very careful in how they’ve dealt with the encampment. There has been no police presence nearby so far, and I definitely think May is very aware of his predecessor’s mistakes and isn’t inclined to repeat them.
Darkrose
@Martin:I think Shafik was okay in her testimony, I think she should have spoken more forcefully on a number of matters
I honestly don’t know how she could have been prepared for a sitting congressman to ask her if she wanted Columbia to be cursed by God. That said, I would have thought she’d be aware that commenting on pending personnel matters was not on, like when she said that a certain professor would never work at Columbia again. That was an own goal.
YY_Sima Qian
@Martin: Shafik is a British Baroness w/ an accomplished career working in finance & Multilateral Financial Institutions. More than the vast majority of people, she has the cushion to take a principled stance, even at the cost of her job. However, she valued her membership in & access to the elite much more.
PatrickG
@Martin: picking a comment at random here to respond to, but just wanted to say thanks for all your deeply thoughtful and considered comments over many posts on this topic.
I’ve been taking notes and using your points to talk to people IRL on the subject of college protests. Administrators and faculty should both find that pleasing!
However, as a former student, I must cast a pox on both your houses. Demanding ingrates! ;)
Pittsburgh Mike
@Kay: The administrators who did well knew that they could just stall for time. Agree to form a committee to investigate divesting from Israel. Agree to have the students participate in the show committee, even though the investment committee will actually make all the decisions. Or sell some shares in some Israeli companies. To “divest” in a specific country is pretty meaningless anyway — some of the biggest companies are probably multinationals with an office in Israel.
BTW, I think one difference between these protests and the 1960s was that there were too many instances of these protesters just preventing visibly Jewish students from accessing campus spaces. I saw a number of videos of protesters linking arms to prevent “Zionists” from crossing the encampments.
These things probably only happened at a handful of campuses, but it was an own goal that made it look like the protesters were using the threat of violence against a specific ethnic group. At that point, some administrators felt they had no way to defend leaving the protesters alone.
Geminid
@tam1MI: I’m not sure the requested ICC warrants have unified Israelis behind Netanyahu. Most of the opposition advocates I see are saying that Netanyahu brought this on himself, and the ICC charges are more evidence of his government’s incompetence and Netanyahu’s personal incapacity.
As for Ron Dermer, he can call himself “Minister of Strategic Affairs” all he wants, but Dermer is just the Likud hack Netanyahu put in the War Cabinet as “Observer” in order to balance out Gantz’s selection of Gadi Eisenkott.
There is some truth to what Dermer is saying about Hamas impeding and diverting humanitarian aid, but that does not lessen Israel’s culpability for this humanitarian crisis. If anything, it makes that culpability greater because the Israel government has had the initiative in this war since October 8, and and its supporters have only themselves to blame for how badly they’ve screwed it up.
Geminid
@Geminid: Last sentence should read , “…and the government and its supporters…”