Why bother with a 43 year-old book by an American historian in a blog on the ethnography of academia? For one thing, the level of ethnographic and behavioral detail Furner is a nuanced tour de force. Despite its compelling qualities, the book completely fails to capture the issues uniquely affecting American anthropology and therefore sets us a task that has yet to be addressed. The book remains, however, the most detailed and sustained treatment of the passage from political economy as a combined analytical/social reform effort to a set of academic disciplines called the social sciences that have mostly abandoned social reform and even abandoned the discussion of social reform issues in anything but veiled terms. The cases of the rebels she so vividly documents, and the controversies they created and how they were settled, rewards a close reading for the clues they provide to the present passive, defensive, and inert postures of most of the non-STEM fields.

The book covers mostly the same period as Dorothy Ross’ comprehensive The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) but Furner focuses largely on economics and political science while Ross’ treatment is more encyclopedic but less substantive about the ideas and interactions of the key actors.

Furner states the aim of the book as follows: “This book queried what was gained and what was lost through academic professionalization of the social sciences and through the ascendance of the specifically academic mode of knowing capitalism, society, and state that followed” (loc. 201). The answer is ultimately quite depressing.

She opens by detailing the founding of the American Social Science Association just after the Civil War, an organization of gentleman scholars who aimed to offer policy guidance and who saw studying social issues and being engaged with reform efforts as compatible. As Furner says, “ASSA members recognized no opposition between knowledge and reform. Such a concern was unthinkable: the two were inseparable. In this view, the problem-oriented, empirical, fact-gathering, atheoretical ASSA approach set its inquirers up as reporters to a wide audience concerned with policy questions” (loc. 215). This easy coexistence of knowledge and reform would not survive the creation of American research universities.

By the 1880s, economics and history began to move away from the ASSA umbrella, and the fraught process by which this happened in economics is the main subject of the book. As they moved away, they had to work out a balance between their status as academic professionals and social reformers. This turned out to be quite complex and resulted in purges, blackballing, and nasty public controversies. This is where the epistemology of objectivity makes its appearance, and from these humble beginnings, we have ended up with the objectivism and positivism that assails the social sciences and determines their funding.

Furner points out that objectivity was and remains a disingenuous ideological concept:

“As an attitude on the part of academics most affected by these new epistemologies, objectivity more commonly named ways of behaving that achieved important institutional goals rather than a commitment to the norm of absolutely value-free science proclaimed by positivists” (loc. 259).

Being objective, dispassionate, and not upsetting the oligarchs was necessary but it did not exclude these social scientists from a role in the public arena. The solution the economists adopted was what Furner calls “commissioned” or “authorized” expertise (loc. 273). This meant writing reports for government agencies and otherwise deploying their expertise both for profit and to use it in some way to affect social policy. Of course, the agencies that would contract such expertise were hardly those interested in promoting major social change.

But even these general trends were not linear. The role of economists as expert advisers was questioned and curtailed at various times, although post-World War II, the role of conservative economic advisers to government and other public authorities had become relatively stable, something that never happened in the other disciplines. Furner concludes depressingly that “Academic social scientists, and economists particularly, were indispensable shapers of this shift to the right.” (loc. 387).

To survive professionally, economists had to find ways of repressing partisanship and presenting an appearance of unity and objectivity to the public. Gradually moderates forged a kind of working alliance that sacrificed extremists in both schools to scholarly values that highly self-conscious professionals considered more important: professional security and the orderly development of knowledge in their disciplines (loc. 725). This is a story repeated in the other social sciences in much the same way. As Furner puts it:

“As professionalization proceeded, most academic social scientists stopped asking ethical questions. Instead they turned their attention to carefully controlled, empirical investigations of problems that were normally defined by the state of knowledge in their fields rather than by the state of society. Professional social scientists generally accepted the basic structure of corporate capitalism” (loc. 740).

“Though they dropped their claim to moral authority… when the same economists gave expert testimony at legislative hearings, served on government commissions, or commented on tariff, trade, and money questions in the popular press, they frequently represented special economic interests themselves.” (loc. 1276)

Furner takes up in passing the creation of the American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, and the American Sociological Association. Implicitly, she argues that the processes in those fields are similar, though less successful in the arena of providing respected expert advice to governments. We are left on our own to decide why, but her argument implies that they could not bring off the “objectivity” argument as successfully as the economists had.

Furner concludes:

“With professionalization, objectivity grew more important as a scientific ideal and also as a practical necessity. The value of objectivity was emphasized constantly in both training and professional practice, until it occupied a very special place in the professional ethos… Ideological considerations were inevitably present, but they were ordinarily unacknowledged.” (loc. 6118)

“The tension between advocacy and objectivity which characterized the professionalization process altered the mission of social science… The academic professionals, having retreated to the security of technical expertise, left to journalists and politicians the original mission—the comprehensive assessment of industrial society—that had fostered the professionalization of social science.” (loc. 6118)

Finally, one of her strongest critiques is hidden in the middle of the book and comes from the 1970s and not the present, as it might appear.

“If and when our much abused, sadly degraded polity recovers its traditions of more independent, less tendentious, more empirically-derived and philosophically-justified advocacy, its practice of politics can be nourished by a more balanced and responsible mix of “Advocacy and Objectivity.” (loc. 634)

Critique:

This is a brilliant book, and rewards a careful reading with a much deeper understanding of the dilemmas faced by contemporary universities in the present extremely hostile environment. But the depth in economics, unsurprisingly, is not matched by deep treatments of history, political science, sociology, and anthropology. (Psychology is not even mentioned.)

In the case of anthropology, Furner misunderstands the complex history of anthropology in US, with its engagement with issues of genocide, immigration, antisemitism, colonialism, and cultural supremacist ideologies, and its lack of organizational fit with the Tayloristic disciplinary model. Her main statement on anthropology is this:

“The case with anthropologists was also different. In their emergent period, which really fell largely in the twentieth century, anthropologists were primarily concerned with establishing a field distinct from physical science by ridding themselves of concepts and generalizations derived from biological models. They attempted to organize inquiries around the idea of culture, to create a unique terminology, and to develop field techniques of research.”

Despite the similarities in issues of censorship and purges, the trajectory of American anthropology is different and the internal problems anthropologists faced in creating the “four field” pseudo-synthesis are quite unlike those faced by the social sciences Furner analyzes. I have written an essay about this, and rather than repeat those arguments here, let me link to to the book chapter available on my ResearchGate site.

Franz Boas’ difficult relationship with the fledgling American Anthropological Association, as well as work like David Price’s Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, Duke University Press, 2004) show that anthropology came to be singled out for purging and suppression because the very basis of anthropological thinking is critical of jingoist, racist/eugenicist, and cultural supremacist ideologies that were popular in at the outset of the 20th century, in the 50s, and, of course, now once again in an extremely virulent form. The subsequent general silence of academic anthropologists on most social issues and the moving of applied expertise into the Society for Applied Anthropology and the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology is clear. It is only matched by the silence of the rest of the social sciences that are currently busy fighting a losing battle to protect their professional, disciplinary bunkers as funding and tenure evaporate, federal funding dries up, and rightwing politicians do all they can to destroy the lessons of cultural understanding and anti-racism around which anthropology originally coalesced.

The organizational analysis Furner conducts within economics is very subtle and interesting but there are other even broader organizational issues that she does not address. Since I have written so much about universities as organizations, I miss proper attention to the organizational model that led to the current disciplines. This is a serious weakness in the analysis and leaves even the story of economics rather incomplete.

Though the creation of the social sciences out of political economy is documented and placed temporally, it is not linked analytically to the emergence of the PhD programs at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere that created the disciplines and disciplinary departments in a festival of Taylorism units within an intensely hierarchical university structure overseen by external and highly conservative elites from business and politics. The world of taken-for-granted disciplines, professional associations, and professional practices is the product of a process that domesticated the controversial social and social welfare questions that political economy originally raised.

Despite this, most academic social scientists live in these disciplinary worlds as if they were the products of natural law rather than the results of a set of social and political choices the results of which have been anything but successful for the use of the social sciences not just to understand but to improve society. What Furner does show effectively is that we academics ourselves and our ambitions for security and territories to control deserve as much of the blame for this situation as do university administrators and the pressures from business and politicians on university professors.

Read the book. It is a needed stimulus to the kind of work remaining to be done in the rest of the social sciences and humanities, including anthropology.

Aside from the politics of research which are fraught, the study is interesting both in content and also for the contrast and comments made by Elizabeth Armstrong, whose work I greatly admire.  After reading this and thinking for a moment, I am amazed that anyone is surprised at what is happening. We herd together 18-21 year olds without parental supervision and with some spending money in intimate environment in which liquor and drugs are easily available and then say we are surprised when, in addition to liquor and drugs, they do “that”.  Are we as foolish as we seem to be?  Are we willing to change campuses to the point necessary to change this social environment? I doubt it.

I particularly like the call for those who made it to tenure to reflect on this.  My own career, despite all the hard work, was significantly built on chronological luck of entering the professoriate when it was a possible vocation and not a fee-for-service job overseen by armies of non-academics.  What obligations do the tenured now have to the “wreckage”? If there is an obligation, how is it to be met?

Davydd

This Chronicle of Higher Education story is both welcome and disturbing. It is welcome because it credits students being intelligent enough to evaluate constructively what and how they are learning in classes.  So far so good.  But the rather breathless tone of this essay ignores the fact that the Tayloristic premises of higher education institutions as organizations has primarily created students as passive consumers of “education” rather than active partners in a process.  This reveals the native Fordist model that dominates and its associated “banking model”.

It is positive to have some student voices as being credited as worth hearing.  It is not very sensible to see this as a solution to much.  So long as the organizational structure make it appear innovative to include students and other stakeholders in the teaching/learning process, we are not getting anywhere.

And this piece takes no account of other key issues.  First, most teaching faculty are either on term contracts, part-time and cobbling together jobs, etc. The article evokes places where this is not the case.  Second, creating a collaborative teaching/learning environment is a fundamental pedagogical reorientation.  When it occurs by itself, as it did in my classes, the students report “whiplash” in moving between a class where they were valued partners and classes where they are filling seats in an auditorium or being lectured at in a so-called seminar.  Third, most higher ranked universities clearly take no account of the quality of or support for teaching quality.  Administrators want evaluations to control faculty and to polish their institutions’ public image.

At various times in my career, we had some coalitions of the willing who created a small space for this kind of teaching/learning and the results were breathtaking.  But they ran against the grain of the institution and could not survive.  My learning is that higher education cannot be half-reformed.  Incremental change is not going to work against such a consolidated structure. The value of the article is simply to show that you can learn from students and they can learn from the process of being valued as evaluators.  It is important but more is needed.

We are grateful for a review that invites a dialogue and we hope these topics will be discussed more broadly and from additional perspectives. Eli has been an important partner in this work ever since his undergraduate years and will continue to be long after we are gone.

Eli is right that the link between organizational analysis and education is the most innovative part of our argument and he asks why we don’t separate organizational from philosophical analysis.

If, as we propose, the mission of higher education is a form of Neue-Bildung, our argument is that it is utterly impossible to educate this way in institutions organized as NeoTaylorist vocational training schools. Trying to do that would be like asking why you don’t bend your elbow to a 240-degree angle simply because you want to. It is organizationally impossible to deliver an integrated, mentored, open, and active pedagogical experience and to pursue research driven by curiosity and wonder in institutions designed to create customers, products, and who measure success in rankings and money.

Eli remarks that this implies radical changes in the working and life conditions of existing faculty. We agree and he asks why they would collaborate? A. This is a good question. More than a few faculty, especially the “academic rock stars” that John Smyth refers to in his book, The Toxic University would oppose it. However, that is not an argument against the reform. It is a reality of the problem of reform.

Current faculty should wake up. The percentage of tenureable and tenured faculty is declining rapidly and occasionalized, contract employment on a fee-for-service basis is quickly becoming the future of academic work. A few academic rock stars at a few elite wealthy institutions may survive but the vast majority of the faculty either will oppose NeoTaylorism or will find themselves reduced to a throwaway working class existence sooner rather than later.

We think Eli is mistaken in linking our arguments to social democratic ideology. We are neo-pragmatists with an analytical view of the structure and dynamics that make for good organizations. At issue here is not some massive social program to give everyone an education. The issue is to create universities in which pragmatist modes of inquiry, participatory pedagogy, participatory research agendas, and participatory management work together to educate students in both skills and civic practices, liberate the greatest possible knowledge and energy in the faculty and staff, and reduce the coercive and exploitative power of senior academic administrators.

We don’t believe in social democracy but in the ability of participatory practices of knowledge development, application, and action to produce the best possible outcomes. The neoliberals and NeoTaylorists have had their turn and even the International Monetary Fund says neoliberalism is a failure. The trouble is that participatory practices will unseat the current powerholders and they will selfishly fight us in a struggle for their lives. Look at how the casino capitalists successfully fought off regulation after they wrecked the global economy in 2008.

Families, communities, businesses, schools, and political systems are the key contexts of civil life and all benefit from being organized in solitary, participatory, and fair ways. This is not social democracy. This is DEMOCRACY in action.

Eli rightly asks if team-based organizations are a sure recipe for human thriving? As he suggests, the answer is that they are not. Any form of organization can be debased and ruined. A team-based organization can be a free-for-all and a dystopia unless it is properly structured, properly supported, and vigilantly protected structurally and normatively by the stakeholders. Team-based organization are not a bunch of hippies holding hands in a circle with beatific smiles on their faces.

In our experience, well-designed and successful team-based organizations have clear rules and behavioral norms and missions that are agreed to by the participants. They base their decision making and actions on using and debating the best information available from those in the best position in the value production process to know what will and will not work. They are labor-intensive in the sense of being time-consuming dialogue arenas that seek to approximate “ideal speech situations” and that build discipline for organizational decisions on dialogue and debate. The compensation and power structure of such organizations need not be fully egalitarian but must be built on quite limited inequalities in compensation. Mondragón operates with a 1:6 differential between the general manager and the lowest paid member. Imagine if a university president were paid only 6 times the salary of a janitor. How would things be different? Such organizations exist and we have seen them in operation in Mondragón and elsewhere

From our perspective, participatory leadership is not an option to be entertained; it is a sine qua non for the operation of productive, solidary, and collaborative organization. The aim of participatory leadership is to liberate potential, support openness, create safety for innovation, and run interference for the organization in the larger environment. It is a requirement of effective participatory organizations. Ordering people to participate from an office remote from the sites of value production has been tried and it has given us the pathetic universities we now experience.

Eli cogently asks how to get people to participate in a future that is not pre-defined. We understand that most people are both insecure and not very daring under current conditions. We also acknowledge that the future is uncertain because it is up to the participants to design the future they are going to live and work in. However, the strength of such systems is precisely because the participants get to build it and have an equal say in how it is built and run that makes it a future they can imagine themselves living in. It is not up to us to tell them what that is like. They have the knowledge and experience to design it and awareness of the failures of the current system they want to overcome. This is also why such organizations are likely to differ from case to case because they will result from different situations, stakeholder experiences, and environmental conditions/challenges. Finally, we think we are very near the end stages of the collapse of public higher education. Before it collapses around them, will the stakeholders have the courage and good sense to risk a better alternative? Or will they stand on the deck as the Titanic sinks and not risk getting on a lifeboat?

Thanks to Eli for promoting this dialogue and we look forward to hearing more voices and views on these issues. This is precisely why we wrote the book in the first place.

Daniel has an ambitious and diverse research agenda that you can review at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Daniel_Kontowski.

Daniel and his colleagues have just produced a book of essays by liberal arts students in Europe and it blew me away. These are wonderful statement, diverse, tough minded in some cases, and creative in many. I know no example like this of student voices and it is exciting to see for what it tells us about educational trends in Europe, contrasts with the US, and the general possible futures and foibles of the liberal arts in the twenty-first century. I am adding the url to the book on ResearchGate because the file is too large for this blog system.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320427721_What_is_Liberal_Education_and_what_could_it_be_European_students_on_their_liberal_arts_education

I do urge you to look at Daniel’s ResearchGate site as there are many more interesting projects and publications to be found there.

Davydd

These issues brought to mind the work of my late, lamented friend and colleague, the Israeli sociologist and therapist Dan Bar-On.  The author of many interesting books, Dan was a refugee who family fled Germany to Israel.  In his therapeutic practice, he found many children of Holocaust survivors who were deeply troubled by the silence of their parents or families about what had happened. He concluded that the silence itself prevented them from working through these issues and traumatized many.  After a time, he became curious about the children of the Nazi perpetrators and eventually went to Germany to meet some of them. He found they were suffering similar traumas brought on both by silence and shame.  His book about this is called The Legacy of Silence: Encounters with Children of the Third Reich.  Eventually he brought a group of the survivor’s children and the perpetrator’s children together to share their experiences on the basis that “working through” these issues was their only way forward. Later Dan found that the legacy of silence affected even the grandchildren’s generation.

This raises both an ethnographic and pedagogical issue for me. Are we “working through” these issues  or are we reproducing the trauma of slavery and genocide by silencing them.  What has anthropology to say about silence, taboo, and social healing?  When is silence and taboo socially valuable and when is it destructive? How can we be relevant to the current scene based on lessons we have learned from our fieldwork and ethnographic analyses?

“The New Political Economy of Higher Education”, Special Issue of the journal Higher Education, Editors: Johannes Angermuller, Jens Maesse, Tilman Reitz, Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Higher Education, Volume 73, Issue 6, June 2017. https://link.springer.com/journal/10734/73/6/page/1

Eli Thorkelson put me on to this special issue of the journal Higher Education. I confess I had not seen it and that I was pleasantly surprised to see the robust theoretical and empirical work coming from a group of scholars who I was unaware of. Since I read as much as I can on US and European higher education (in English and Spanish), the fact that I was unaware of this network of researchers suggests that others might gain as much as I have from learning about their work.

This special issue contains the following articles:

1. The new political economy of higher education: between distributional conflicts and discursive stratification, Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Tilman Reitz, Jens Maesse, Johannes Angermuller
2. Worlds of higher education transformed: toward varieties of academic capitalism
3. Tobias Schulze-Cleven, Jennifer R. Olson
4. Autonomy or oligarchy? The changing effects of university endowments in winner-take-all markets, Heinz-Dieter Meyer, Kai Zhou
5. Varieties of academic capitalism and entrepreneurial universities, Bob Jessop
6. Academic hierarchies in neo-feudal capitalism: how status competition processes trust and facilitates the appropriation of knowledge, Tilman Reitz
7. Fief and benefice feudalism. Two types of academic autonomy in US chemistry, Oliver Wieczorek, Stephanie Beyer, Richard Münch
8. The elitism dispositif: hierarchization, discourses of excellence and organizational change in European economics, Jens Maesse
9. On stratification in changing higher education: the “analysis of status” revisited, Roland Bloch, Alexander Mitterle
10. Academic media ranking and the configurations of values in higher education: a sociotechnical history of a co-production in France between the media, state and higher education (1976–1989), Julie Bouchard
11. Academic careers and the valuation of academics. A discursive perspective on status categories and academic salaries in France as compared to the U.S., Germany and Great Britain, Johannes Angermuller
12. Academic mobility, transnational identity capital, and stratification under conditions of academic capitalism, Terri Kim

This is a rich collection of work ranging across a wide spectrum of political economy issues from a variety of perspectives. It is a dense set of works and so an attempt at a summary would be futile but I guarantee that reading it through will provide lots of new ideas and data on the processes of higher education. So I will only comment on things that struck me personally.

Throughout, the authors maintain a focus on comparison and their comparisons are often quite nuanced. General processes of hierarchization and neoliberal ideology are evident but a number of the articles leaven this generalized perspective by showing that national paths through these processes are anything but homogeneous. This is a helpful corrective to overly abstract generalizations about neoliberalism in higher education and also provide an anchor for local reform activities.

Many of the authors are quite sophisticated in economic analysis and thus do not fall for the simplistic argument that what is happening in mere “corporatization” of higher education. Their analyses are a good deal more nuanced and useful.

In a number of locations, they refer to the development of neo-feudal relations. In taking this up, the authors provide an interestingly new way of framing issues that have been talked about in other terms (new public management, neo-Taylorism, etc) and get additional analytical purchase on these authority systems.

A persistent theme is how ranking and stratification in academia itself can support the rising inequality in capitalism in general. This is a version of the famous cartoon strip “Pogo” where the cartoon characters say “We have met the enemy and they is us.”

There is a wonderful analysis of the way university endowments are being used to consolidate and protect the money of the rich under the guise of public-spirited charitable philanthropy. There is also an insightful argument about the need to distinguish between academic capitalism and emphasizing market mechanisms.

Regarding national differences, I greatly enjoyed the arguments that are made for the general trends in higher education being played out through highly path dependent scenarios in individual countries. So national differences persist and still matter, even though all countries are affected by neoliberal forces.

And there is a great deal more of interesting and nuanced analysis offered here.

I urge readers to delve into this collection. It provides fresh perspectives on many of the issues that traverse the whole field of higher education research and reform.

The blog entry page is http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/.  Here is the most recent example:

What the UCOP Audit Means

Posted: 01 May 2017 02:14 PM PDT

The new UCOP scandal is the worst in a long-running series.  This one was prompted by a state audit of the Office of the President’s budget, which found issues the auditor claimed cast doubt on UCOP’s honesty and competence. State officials reacted angrily to the four biggest of a number of charges from State Auditor Elaine M. Howie (pictured): that UCOP spends a good chunk of money from an “undisclosed budget” that is separate from its public budget; that it affords this undisclosed spending with a tax on the campuses that yields more revenue than it needs; that it spends this excess money on systemwide programs that could go instead to students on campuses; and that it appears to have changed the results of the auditor’s campus surveys to make itself look better.  The auditor also rekindled longstanding claims that UCOP hires too many administrators and then overpays them.  It even dragged pension underfunding into the mix.

The interaction between the State Auditor and UCOP has turned a boring problem of inadequate budgetary records into another political firefight. Together the parties have produced a new round of heightened denunciations from state officials that include calls to rescind the 2.5% tuition increase and to increase direct legislative oversight of UC.  The report itself runs 169 pages and includes a 34 page, single-spaced UCOP response that rejects 72 separate passages in the audit.  This is in turn followed by the auditor’s blanket rejection of UCOP’s rejections.  The report also includes a 6 page letter from UC president Janet Napolitano that, in spite of the confrontation elsewhere, accepts nearly all of the auditor’s technical recommendations for accounting improvements.

The angry stand-off in the full document massively overshoots the stated policy differences, and the mutual hostility becomes a problem in itself.  Politicians and the press reacted as much to tone as content. Legislative hearings have been called for Tuesday. Long-time LA Times columnist George Skelton signaled renewed doubts about UC’s ability to serve the state with a piece entitled, “Big Changes Needed at UC–Starting with the Kool-Aid-Drinking Board of Regents.”  

This fight is actually unnecessary, and marks another setback for public understanding of the deeper issues raised by the report: research costs, research benefits to undergraduates, and public-good management standards.

Raptor Budgeting?

First, on the budgetary issue, a bit of background. UCOP does two big things: performs central administrative services and manages systemwide programs. The budget statement that goes to the regents each year is split more or less 50:50 between these two categories.  UCOP used to publish budgets with more big categories (it had 4 in 2014-15, for example [page 144]).  Multiple administrative activities appear in these baskets, divided up by function (governance, budgeting and finance, etc.) along with systemwide initiatives that can be listed with expenditures for each.

The problem seems to start with incomplete lists of programs, and continues with their being funded from two budgets, one of which the auditor calls “undisclosed.” The auditor charges (summary here) that UCOP accumulated $175 million in surpluses that it did not disclose, and then spent them through a process that lacks adequate controls.  The issue is summarized in the report’s Figure 6.

Although UCOP spent some of these reserves, it spent less than it accrued in each year, so the reserve grew–and grew even in years when UCOP increased its tax to the campuses.  The auditor agrees that reserves are legitimate, but doesn’t understand why UC has no written policy governing their size.  It repeatedly insists that UCOP could produce a simple unified budget of revenues and expenditures in which all outlays are visible and clearly tied to specific programs. It offers a one-page sample:

I’d add a couple of lines to this myself, but this is better than what the auditor seems to have gotten from UCOP, and UCOP agrees that it will consider adopting this kind of presentation.

At the same time, UCOP resents the auditor using the term “undisclosed,” argues that these are little more than unspent funds carried forward from one year to the next, that its “reserves” are $38 million not $175 million, that all the money was spent on programs that benefit the campuses, its students, and the state, and that administrative growth merely reflects UCOP’s enormously complicated set of jobs that are not duplicated in other university systems.

You’d think that this would be the end of it.  UCOP could say yes, we’re moving budget presentations from Figure 6 to Figure 11, thank you for your help, and by the way we regret any confusion, which was entirely innocent, plus you don’t understand our inner workings, which is fine because that’s our job as a constitutionally independent entity.

That isn’t what happened.  The best of UCOP’s response is Janet Napolitano’s letter to Elaine Howie. The letter accepts most of the auditor’s recommendations, deals with the charges of incompetence by saying UCOP constantly strives for improvement, lists some systemwide programs with budgetary amounts that it says are of value, and rejects the recommendation of tighter legislative control of UCOP.  The letter doesn’t explain why these expenditures weren’t present in the visible budget in the first place or why the initial list of programs wasn’t complete.

I completely understand the auditor’s core beef.  Why can’t UCOP automatically produce listings and expenditures for the systemwide programs? Why couldn’t they have listed all those that are part of their response to the audit, organize them properly (for example, into the categories, “outside sponsors,” “presidential initiatives,” and “systemwide faculty research”)?

I’m doubly mystified because, over ten years ago, I was personally involved in a two-year Senate inquiry into UCOP’s systemwide research programs, where our planning and budget committee (UCPB) made iterative requests for full expenditure data for all programs. It was pulling teeth with pliers, but we made progress over time. Phase 1, a full list of all programs with UCOP outlays, should have been in place a decade ago with regular updates as programs and funding changed, which they certainly did.  Phase 2, which apparently never happened, was to be tracking expenditures from UCOP to the campuses.  Is the geospatial systems funding–to make up an example– going directly to fund direct and indirect research costs on several campuses, or have two of the four campuses moved the funding into administrative discretionary funds or, as in one actual case, has a campus converted research money into a pseudo-permanent set of FTE lines in a local department?  UCOP should have a handle both on how much is going out and how it is being spent.  Apparently they don’t.

In addition, why didn’t UCOP have a unified budget both for the regents and the state?  I’m also bewildered by the dual budgets, which is to say that I agree with the auditor that in its multiple lengthy retorts UCOP never really explains the “undisclosed” budget.  Why do the books look like that? 169 pages later, I couldn’t tell you.

In any case, the numbers fly. UCOP generates the gratuitous mud wrestling of Attachment 2,  which apparently seeks victory through body count.  That attachment is a masterwork of bureaucratic defensiveness. Naturally, it doesn’t work.

The auditor’s short final response begins,
The Office of the President’s 34-page Attachment 2 is demonstrative of the barriers we faced throughout the course of this audit.  Ultimately, Attachment 2 contained no additional information that would cause us to change the conclusions reached in our report. Rather, the Office of the President goes to great lengths to describe its dissatisfaction with the context we included surrounding the conclusions and the underlying philosophy related to transparency and accountability upon which we based those conclusions. As a result, we are choosing not to comment on each of the 72 points
that the Office of the President included in Attachment 2 because doing so would not ultimately change the overarching conclusion that we convey in this report: that the Office of the President needs to better serve its stakeholders by making decisions in a transparent and accountable manner. (165)In the summary, the auditor writes,

the Office of the President missed an opportunity to receive feedback from its key stakeholders, and it demonstrated an unwillingness to receive constructive feedback. Thus an official state review finds UCOP’s accounting substandard and also unlikely to improve.

Not Biting the Bullet on Research

The report concludes that 1 (an undisclosed budgetary surplus) + 2 (unjustified staff growth) = 3 (“significant change is necessary to ensure that the Office of the President’s actions along with the mission of the University of California”).   This is a brutal conclusion: the State Auditor is saying that UCOP isn’t running UC for the public benefit.

The immediate rationale for this claim is continuous administrative growth coupled with “poor tracking and monitoring of its systemwide initiatives” that leads to misused funds.  The deeper rationale is what the funds are allegedly misused on–systemwide research.  The audit’s own list of UCOP initiatives (Table 11, pp 71-72) shows spending in a number of categories, but research seems to be the big problem.   It concludes,

Although most of these initiatives provide academic or public benefits, we question the Office of the President’s decision to prioritize them over other activities such as campus spending on students especially given it has not sufficiently evaluated these initiatives’ purpose and intent. (69)On its face, the statement is ridiculous: the auditor lacks the credentials to question UCOP’s judgment about academic priorities, and research, the main component of most of the programs, is part of undergraduate education at a research university, not a subtraction from it.

The underlying problem is that UCOP has failed over many decades to explain the centrality of research expenditures to all levels of students.  Longtime VP for the budget Larry Hershman believed the legislature refused to grasp the research mission and always would, so the University had to act as though the state’s whole allocation was going into student instruction and related services.  I don’t doubt he had empirical reasons to think this, but most legislators also thought the internal combustion engine had made train travel obsolete. At some point you have to roll up your sleeves and do the tireless teaching that reframes the debate.

The tragedy of this particular audit is that UCOP is so busy saying it did nothing wrong that it can’t tell the more important story, which is that research is a vital public function that costs enormous amounts of money.  UCOP has to subsidize a lot of it or it won’t actually happen.  It has to use state money to do this, as it always has. We could argue about how much should be funded by UCOP vs the campuses, which is what we were getting set to do in 2006.  We could also argue about whether faculty have been pushed aside in too many of them, and whether the Senate has enough control.  But the real issue here is that the state has to pay for research as well as instruction through enrollment-based general funds.  UCOP’s dual budgets may have been trying to downplay this, I don’t know.  The strategy stopped working years ago, and now the battle for the state’s role in research has to be fought, and not like this.

Public-Good Management

Then there’s the other huge issue, which is the auditor’s claim that UCOP doctored the auditor’s survey results.  The auditor had sent two surveys directly to UC campus officials to find out whether there were redundant administrative services and how the campuses felt about what they were getting for their UCOP tax.  Here’s the auditor’s statement on the subject:
Contrary to the Office of the President’s assertion that we failed to send our survey to those knowledgeable about specific subject areas, we determined that the campus audit coordinator was best positioned to facilitate the response to one survey and the campus chief financial officer, or an equivalent position, was best suited to respond to the other survey. After we sent the survey, the Office of the President’s systemwide deputy audit officer contacted us and followed-up on some technical questions posed by multiple campuses. This level of coordination was appropriate and we took no issue with it. However, four days before the survey was due, the deputy chief of staff to the president organized a conference call with all of the campuses to discuss the survey. Subsequently, the emails he provided to us show campuses sent him completed surveys which he reviewed to determine, in part, whether the campus responses were within the scope of our audit. However, as we discuss on page 86, the surveys that campuses sent to the deputy chief of staff were much different than the final surveys submitted to us. As is clearly shown in Table 15 on page 87, significant changes and deletions were made to the original surveys sent to the deputy chief of staff for the Office of the President. (166)As we know, universities, in exchange for academic freedom, agree to conduct impartial and independent research whose findings can’t be skewed by politics or money.  And yet the audit claims that senior officials of a leading research university coached the subjects of a survey until they got the answers they wanted.   UCOP thus blunders right into a culture war stereotype: academics cheat, just like everybody else.  You can’t trust them not to waste your tax money.   Fake news, fake science, fake climate change, #fakeuniversity.

A depressing part of the coverage of this alleged survey tampering was the deference of the campus’s top officials to Bernie Jones, Janet Napolitano’s Deputy Chief of Staff, who was running the survey massage operation. For example:

Several changes were made to UC Santa Cruz’s initial survey. Jones told UC Santa Cruz to consider “reframing” or deleting a suggestion for greater systemwide coordination to recruit low-income students, asking administrators there to take into account the central office’s efforts in coordinating disbursement of state funds for underserved schools. “As you will see, I addressed 98% of your concerns and I made a number of additional changes as well (all in a direction you would not find problematic),” UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal wrote to Jones in a Nov. 23 email. Jones provided the email to The Times. UC Santa Cruz’s initial survey raised issues about the UCPath system, which is aimed at centralizing personnel, payroll and academic processes. “Some Office of the President initiatives, such as UCPath were at first very poorly and inefficiently run, but they seem to have figured it out and are on the way to bringing a huge and — often — failure prone project to a successful conclusion,” the initial response said. “The key issue is that the Office of the President provides the leadership, vision, and public relations acumen to keep the University on the best course.” That paragraph was removed and the final survey response instead read: “The services and leadership provided by the Office of the President are crucial for the success of the system. Especially for a smaller campus like ours, it would be both expensive and inefficient to provide those services ourselves. In addition, there is a true public policy benefit to the role that the Office of the President plays in providing uniform standards….”

UCSC’s original statement was already more positive about UCPath than anything that I have heard–it was a very nice comment in fact.  UCOP apparently didn’t stop with deleting the hint of UCSC criticism, but went on to exact veneration for its public service. Of course in a proper academic survey, if your subject doesn’t spontaneously mention your centralized outreach program, that is the datum: it probably means they don’t think this program makes much difference to them.  In the academic world, this alteration would be research fraud.  The auditor was right to toss out the results–except she also published many of them.

This part of the disaster seems to me to flow from UCOP’s attempt to defend its executive sovereignty over the overall system.  UCSC’s revised comment– a smaller campus needs central services– tries to nail shut the whole can of worms about campuses’ frequent duplication of of UCOP expertise.  One example was the decentralizing of technology transfer, as over about 15 years one campus after another got their own office of technology licensing and industry alliances, even as UCOP’s Office of Technology Transfer continued to preside. (Some of this decentralization is now being reversed.)   My simplified history is that UCOP used to curate, develop, and strategically guide campuses.  But in the twenty years, and especially in the last ten, perhaps from around the time that regent Richard Blum wrote a memo calling on UCOP to be “strategically dynamic,” UCOP has become better known on the campuses for enforcing standardization and compliance.  Disconnected from everyday academic life, it offers the public a series of middlebrow tactics.  And as these tactics have failed to produce lasting solutions, it has also devoted itself to spin.

The budgeting and the survey meddling seem to me to have a common source, which is a closed managerial culture dedicated both to its image and its decision rights.   Much if not most of UC has become a culture of silence, of conformity, of handpicked task forces replacing senate committees, of a small list of insiders deciding everything, of non-consultation, of divisional senates that provide no information much less active discussion with their supposed constituents, of shunning or quiet retaliation in response to dissent.  Senior managers are not meaningfully accountable to their subordinates, including to the tenure-track faculty.  Some performance reviews are on a cycle and some are discretionary, but in either case comments are generally by invitation only, and results are never publicized.   If actions are ever taken, they are taken from above, and truthful explanations are not given.  UC’s response to in this case is a good example of this closed culture at work: the chair of the Board of Regents posted a video pep talk that closes ranks with UCOP.   She didn’t even mention the audit’s criticisms, much less promise to deal with them.  It’s hard to imagine any regent confronting the cognitive and ethical failures that closed cultures create.

Like the proverbial frog that doesn’t notice the water is getting hotter, we UC faculty don’t seem to have noticed our gradually increasing cynicism about our university and state. Increasing cynicism has led to lower expectations.  In my email over the past few days, a number of faculty have said “well what do you expect,” or “that’s politics,” or “that’s UCOP,” or “UCOP’s bad, but not as bad as the legislature.” Obviously I oppose legislative control, but we can’t afford to wallow year after year in this choice between the legislature’s intrusive austerity and UCOP’s executive autocracy.   UC will go nowhere if it can’t make a plausible case for its public good stature.  The prerequisite to both these things is an open culture.   Open administrative cultures depend on active governing involvement of students, faculty, and staff.