Unfortunately I’ve had to suspend this project. Now that I’m not working in (or on) the academy any more, I don’t have the resources to keep up with new research on higher education. For those of you still working in this area, I wish you all the best and wish I could have stayed involved longer.

The website will remain up for a while longer, until the domain name expires.

— Eli T.

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

I recently participated in a roundtable debate on higher education at the AAA meeting in Washington (DC) on the subject of ‘The Academy and the Future of Freedom to Dissent’, which raised some interesting thoughts for me on what constitutes the greatest threat to academic freedom in universities.

The premise for the roundtable, taking its cue from the growing tide of populism and nationalism in Europe, the US and elsewhere, was that these ‘Twenty-first century populisms’ are pushing academic freedom to the brink. As the provocation for the debate noted, a combination of ‘resurgent nationalism’, the neoliberalisation of higher education, the normalisation of austerity narratives, growing university dependence on student fees, and targeted cuts to those disciplines that promote ‘liberal’ thinking (i.e. humanities and social sciences) — is fundamentally undermining academic freedom. To echo Mary Evans (2004), it is ‘killing thinking’.

The panel began with two main questions:

1. Who and what is being marginalised in higher education and how has anthropology as a discipline been affected?
2. What are the structural conditions necessary for academic institutions to create a buffer to protect the future of freedom of dissent, and why does the academy matter?

The responses were fascinating and highlighted some key differences between national higher education systems. As US ethnographers such as Don Brenneis noted, the heterogeneous US system grants universities more room for manoeuvre, leaving the national government less power to impose its will on the whole sector. Nevertheless, powerful financial and political interests can exercise an unhealthy degree of power and censorship. For example, the pro-Israel lobby seeks to govern what academics can and cannot say with regards to Israel, treatment of the Palestinians, and US funding of new settlements on stolen Palestinian lands. Others emphasised academic precarity and the silencing effects of anxieties about failure or censorship. As Tracey Heatherington put it, the question ‘how do I write about this without getting fired’ is now one that many critical and reflexive scholars have to ask.

Meanwhile, for European ethnographers such as Jon Mitchell and Dorle Drackle, populism combined with neoliberalism now constitutes a clear and present danger to academic freedom, as evidenced particularly in Hungary and Poland, in the 2017 German elections, and in Britain following the Brexit referendum. In each of these contexts, ‘cruel patriotism’, xenophobia and homophobia have been given free reign. , What is new, however, is the extent to which these anti-system movement have welded the ideology of integralism to a neoliberal discourse of austerity in order to legitimise their policies for violently downsizing the public sphere. Janine Wedel also noted that universities are increasingly ‘laundering reputations’ of corrupt elites, enabling former generals, politicians and financiers to mask their political interests by affiliating themselves – and their ideas – with academic institutions where they have been given honorary status.

My own view, having observed university reforms being carried out over several decades first under the Thatcher and Blair governments in Britain and more recently in New Zealand, is that the greatest threat to academic freedom is not nationalism or populism, although these are worrying in themselves. Rather, it is the increasing influence of audit culture and marketisation in universities. These have brought a whole nexus of new values and instrumentalities to the way universities are conceptualized and managed that runs contrary to the principles of disinterested knowledge production and higher learning that once defined the C20th public university.

The new narrative of the university in the global knowledge economy is all about the virtues of competition, commercialization, innovation, entrepreneurship, investment, generating revenue from patents, licenses and ‘translational research’ that turns ideas into invoices. These have become the new keywords of the university in the age of academic capitalism. What we are seeing is perhaps less a tragedy of the ‘knowledge commons’ than its increasing penetration and capture by predatory financial interests, aided by a compliant neoliberal-inspired political elite. This process is often justified in terms of the need to ‘unbundle’ universities (Barber et al 2013) in order to open them up to competition from more external private providers. In the UK, this policy has now passed into law with the 2017 Higher Education and Research Act, which makes it a statutory duty for the newly-created ‘Office for Students’ to ‘encourage competition’ (read ‘asset stripping’) and ‘promote value for money’ (read ‘management by accountants’).

Neoliberalisation was always a deeply flawed and destructive assemblage of coercive managerial practices harnessed to economic dogma. Yet rather than being rejected as a dangerous idea that has gone past its sell-by date, it has become further entrenched and normalized. To survive in this brave new world, universities must increasingly hawk themselves through competitive branding, fundraising from alumni and commercializating their research. University funding has been redefined as ‘strategic investment’ and only the STEM subjects warrant public subsidy. Academics are being incentivized (and cajoled) to become entrepreneurial subjects who market themselves and their ideas. Decisions over academic recruitment are now routinely being made not by faculties of departments but by senior administrators in the university’s Research Office, commercialization units or leadership teams.

Reorganising universities into schools (‘schooling’) is another corrosive disciplinary technology that undermines academic freedom. The main purpose of schooling is to increase centralized control by breaking up departments might question decisions from above. Torin (2005) calls this process ‘fragmented centralization’ as it concentrates decision-making at the top of the organisation while making accountability for centrally made decisions more ‘distributed’ (Amsler and Shore 2017). It is also about replacing disciplinary knowledge with more ‘flexible’ forms of integrated teaching and learning so that managers can more easily re-deploy academic labour where they decide ‘student demand’ or ‘strategic opportunities’ may lie – all typically justified by the neoliberal mantra that the ‘student consumer is king’ (except that the student consumer rarely gets to speak for herself). The strategy is to promote the flexibilisation and casualization of the workforce.

So to answer the questions raised earlier, anthropology is deeply affected by these changing budgets, bureaucracies and political shifts. Academic precarity and constant managerial demands for increased productivity and accountability are extremely effective instruments for keeping academics isolated and in their place. Research assessment exercises, teaching evaluations and annual performance reviews – all of them individualizing and totalizing ‘technologies of the self’ — also play an increasingly dominant role in shaping academic behavior and subjectivity. Most anthropologists and academics, even those who feel deeply committed to the ideals of academic freedom and collective struggle, simply don’t have time to perform their social role as critic and conscience of society. We have all become far too busy and distracted answering emails and filling out the latest online form demanded of us by our university administocracies to be able to be actively engaged in the decision-making processes that shape our own institutions.

All this has worrying implications for democracy. Public universities matter because they (like other public institutions) are essential to democratic society, as Levin and Greenwood (2016) cogently illustrate. Along with a free press, academia is a key site for critical thinking and reflection and the humanities and social sciences are practically the only spaces in society where received wisdom and policy can be meaningfully challenged. As Helga Via, President of the European Research Council states:

The social sciences and humanities produce knowledge and insights about our societies and our past, our complex relations to each other and to our environment. They are crucial to building, understanding and improving those institutions that are the backbone of democracy.

Looking across the globe today I would say that democracy is looking increasingly weak and fragile in many parts of the world. Much needs to be done and could be done to protect both our universities and the future of freedom of dissent. One starting point is to turn our disciplinary skills as anthropologists and ethnographers towards our own institutions. That could provide a knowledge base for reclaiming some of the space that we have ceded to managerialism. We could also adopt some of the principles of the ‘slow academia’ movement (Berg and Seeber 2016) and put a halt to the fetishized obsession with speed that now dominates academia.

But a fuller account of ‘what is to be done’ deserves its own blog post. Let me end, therefore, with a call to others to propose ideas for how me might address the twin blight of neoliberal dogma and managerial corporatism that threatens to drown both our public universities and our political systems.

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.

Thank you for the review of our book. This is what we need for our own professional development. Our challenge is to be open and responsive for comments or judgement of the book but still stick to our major arguments/ideas underpinning the book’s major point. I am glad that you seem to appreciate the “simple “language we are using. Simple language is not the same as simple ideas. We have learned a lot from this German, Australian and Norwegian based researcher Philip Herbst.

It is unclear for me what you mean by using the concept “manifesto.” Too political and too little substance is what I fear. What we argue for in the book is a professional and substantive position which of course is a political-economic perspective.

Sound like a workshop mechanic. We have the ambition too, but only in combination with theoretical reflection. It is an integration of theory and practice what we are aiming at. The essential Action Research (A) argument — “learn from practice and feedback reflection to participants” — is the major message. This is the “long” argument in the book.

You expand on critical distance as an important issue. In AR it is important to identify own biases related to the field of research where one are working in. I like to identify this issue as controlling for biases. Keeping a critical distance has its counter-position in involvement in concrete research.

Neo Taylorism is basically a way to identify the now-dominant organizational models. Social democracy is first of all a joint labor: managers and public/political representatives join in the same activity. There are lots of books/reports in Norwegian on this issue. The perspectives differ quite a lot from your modeling of social democracy. Maybe your interest and experience from industry result in substituting social democracy with a capitalist model of organization.

The same argument can be used when it relates to social democratic vs capitalist ideology driven leaders. The literature in the field is a crazy mixture of research based text and, stories of leadership heroes. It is complex and laborious job to make sense of leadership. Participative leadership is our model.

The overreaching model for social organization is a model where participative democracy would be the engine that transform society through education for a democratic praxis. The long time perspective is that democracy in higher education would expand to all strata in society.

Maybe our ambition is unrealistic and far too big and complex. It might be too big and complex for engagement in one institution. Creating a democratic higher education would have to be a collective responsibility.

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?

Anyway, I realized today that there are actually three book series in CUS, which seems like a clear barometer of institutionalization. It may be useful for new people to the field to see them all assembled in one place:

• Berghahn Books (New York, USA/Oxford, UK) publishes Higher Education in Critical Perspective: Practices and Policies, edited by Susan Wright and Penny Welch. It started in 2015 and has thus far published a monograph and a pair of edited volumes. It’s also closely associated with the journal LATISS: The International Journal of Higher Education in the Social Sciences, by the same editors.
• Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, USA) publishes a Critical University Studies series, edited by Jeffrey Williams and Christopher Newfield. (Series announcement.) It’s published two monographs so far, both in 2016.
• Palgrave (London, UK) also publishes a Palgrave Critical University Studies Series, which is edited by John Smyth (from University of Huddersfield, UK). It began publishing in 2016 and has already produced eleven volumes.

Let’s briefly compare the mission statements of these three series to see how they position themselves.

Berghahn

Around the globe, universities are being reformed to supply two crucial ingredients of a purported ‘global knowledge economy’: research and graduates. Higher education’s aims, concepts, structures and practices are all in process of change. Together with its sister journal, LATISS, this series provides in-depth analyses of these changes and how those involved – managers, academics and students – are experimenting with critical pedagogies, reflecting upon the best organization of their own institutions, and engaging with public policy debates about higher education in the 21st Century.

Palgrave

Aims of the Palgrave Critical University Studies Series Universities everywhere are experiencing unprecedented changes and most of the changes being inflicted upon universities are being imposed by political and policy elites without any debate or discussion, and little understanding of what is being lost, jettisoned, damaged or destroyed.  The over-arching intent of this series is to foster, encourage, and publish scholarship relating to academia that is troubled by the direction of these reforms occurring around the world. The series provides a much-needed forum for the intensive and extensive discussion of the consequences of ill-conceived and inappropriate university reforms and will do this with particular emphasis on those perspectives and groups whose views have hitherto been ignored, disparaged or silenced. The series explores these changes across a number of domains including: the deleterious effects on academic work, the impact on student learning, the distortion of academic leadership and institutional politics, and the perversion of institutional politics. Above all, the series encourages critically informed debate, where this is being expunged or closed down in universities.

Johns Hopkins UP

Over the past decade a new wave of criticism of higher education has begun to emerge. This series will lead this new field by publishing some of the best, often provocative, and most original works of Critical University Studies.

Critical University Studies focuses on contemporary changes in higher education, in the US and around the globe. The series will explore the shift toward privatization and corporatization, zeroing in on various causes and effects, such as high tuitions, high student debt, the stress on profit-accruing research, the replacement of full-time professors with what is now a majority of adjuncts or part-timers, the remaking of administration as corporate management, and the marginalizing of the liberal arts. As universities become more like corporations, banks, and entertainment companies, how does this affect educational quality, independent research, and the public good? Higher education has entered a new era, and Critical University Studies will explore how it got where it is and suggest better directions for the future.

In general, Critical University Studies books will be short monographs analyzing key changes and targeting key problems in contemporary higher education. The series will represent a variety of perspectives, such as exposés of current practices, short accounts of recent history, and theoretical engagements with what is occurring. While scholarly and analytical, the series will feature books that make sustained, focused arguments about specific critical issues and also propose solutions to the problems they describe in both the United States and internationally.

I haven’t been able to review all these books very systematically, but at a glance, the European-based series seem more international and comparative (and more inclined to publish edited volumes as opposed to monographs), while the US-based series seems more oriented towards the US situation. No doubt this has some relationship to book marketing considerations that are important to the respective publishers!

It seems to me that keeping an eye on how we produce and publish critical research on higher education is a major goal of the Academography project. What does our writing do? Who is it reaching? These have been existential questions for me since I first started doing my own ethnographic work on academic culture… I’ll see if we can get in touch with the series editors (some of whom are friends of mine — this is after all a small world), and see what they can tell us about their projects.

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.