University Deregulation

State universities have an enormous amount of bureaucracy: reports, evaluations, security checks, monitoring arrangements, computer surveillance disguised as support, mid-level committees reviewing the decisions of lower level committees. The layers have been there for so long many people forget what it was like to operate without all the endless checks and imbalances. As budget cuts force state universities to reduce their staffs, as units are consolidated so that fewer secretaries are performing more work, it would be worth considering a reduction in the amount of bureaucracy.

Yes, in my middle age I have come to sound Republican, but really this is a plea for more autonomy for the individual university units to carry out their mission without all the restrictions that bureaucracies impose. Professors, lecturers, department heads, librarians and administrative assistants are constantly double and triple checking before acting, because of the obligation to enter any decision into the university administrative apparatus.

But now we are operating with greatly reduced resources, fewer administrators fulfilling the same high level of regulations.

So as a cost cutting measure, and in the spirit of neo-liberal university administration--Why not reduce the restrictions on computers, simplify transactions between departments, eliminate some of the redundant administrative reviews?

If we are going to act like businesses here at the university, then let us stream line the bureaucracy while we are cutting everything else.

History without Strings

Been reading Lord Acton over winter break, something I have wanted to do since grad school. He is one of those ancient nineteenth-century British historians who always seem to have a clever quote. You still find him cited in mid-twentieth-century histories of Europe and his principles clearly continue to influence senior historians today, the ones who eschew all reference to theory.

Acton explains why historians so wish to avoid methods that require some sort of moral judgment. He explains the need for autonomy in scholarship with a clarity and vigor I had no seen before. In reviewing German schools of history, he credits Leopold von Ranke with writing as a dispassionate, detached, apolitical story teller.

Now Ranke, and his brand of historicism, is often denounced in a few swift, familiar moves. A quote from Benjamin here and a few "don't you know" statements about Prussian nationalism, then he is finished.

On the question of autonomy, however, Acton explains what an innovation it was for an historian to write with automatically being in the service of the state, politics, or church theology. Ranke was different from his predecessors for they wrote history as "applied politics, fluid law, religion exemplified, or [in] the school of patriotism." Today we would add the free market to the list of institutions which demand obedience in writing history. Write history so that it will sell well, reads the injunction.

Now impartiality is often an excuse for allowing prejudices to remain unchallenged, and surprisingly Lord Acton acknowledges just that--Ranke refrained from judging history so as to not disturb German patriotic allegiances to historical figures, such as Martin Luther or Frederick the Great, who clearly could be subject to moral criticism.

Autonomy in historical scholarship is sometimes open to political critique, but really these days it is much more challenged by market forces. How many times have we sat on committees where we discussed whether a potential dissertation topic was saleable? The job market and the reading market and the dean's market shape our conversations much more than any supposed drive to know.

Surely this was true for Ranke, as well. He sold gobs of books to the general audience. Acton does not mention the importance of this market, it is still invisible to his academic eyes, yet his argument for autonomy, for writing without serving an immediate end, applies brilliantly to our own neo-liberal institution.

History departments jettison fields because they don't want to hire faculty to teach in them. European history no longer matters in a global, post-colonial world, it is sometimes said, so some departments stop teaching in it. Surely there is no scholarly justification for tossing out entire fields of history, but in a budget driven, enrollment-oriented university, it takes just a few meetings to put an end to an entire field of knowledge.

This is the new threat to autonomy, far more serious a concern than the intrusion of theory into history. It is an entirely different pressure on scholarship than the ones Acton and Ranke recognized.

source: Acton, Lord, "German Schools of History," English Historical Review, 1 (1886): 7-42.

Innovation does not equal high enrollment

There are just so many examples of how institutions undermine themselves, despite their best intentions. In the era of budget cuts, administrators have become more concerned than ever with maintaining high enrollments. So now some universities have begun a review of courses in order to eliminate the “under-enrolled.” Missing in much of the discussion about course enrollment is a consideration of course content.

A common distinction, in graduate courses, is made between courses that are listed, and often required, by the department bulletin and “special topic” courses which are taught by faculty interested in developing a new research topic. These “special topic” courses have been targeted increasingly because they are under-enrolled. However, the low enrollment in such courses does not indicate that these courses are unimportant or uninteresting. In fact this year’s special topics course may become a requirement in five years, it’s just that no one can predict that today.

Special topic seminars are, in my experience, where the new research happens. Every literature department can fill a course on Romanticism, but not everyone is willing to take a course on race theory in German Idealism. Just wait though a few more years, and those handful of students who took the race theory course will be publishing up a storm. The Romanticism students will probably be following in their tracks. Yes, its more pleasant to discuss Wordsworth crossing the Alps than the Haitian Revolution. But if we pause a little, we will find that of course Wordsworth has a few things to say about slavery in the Caribbean and before you know it we have dissertations on race theory in Romanticism—here’s the point though. The race theory class was first presented as a “special topics” course, something outside the mainstream curriculum, an innovation, an experiment, a professor’s first attempt at laying out a long and complex argument. Someday we may all think Wordsworth’s most daring poem was dedicated to Toussaint L’Ouverture. But you heard it first in a “special topics” seminar.

So if you want a university that innovates, that does not fall back on the familiar, a university that grows and develops new research, please, dear high-level administrators, do not cut the special topics seminars, just because they are under enrolled.

Marketing your Class

This week I went to several lectures and dinners in which all sorts of professors were expostulating the need to insert a greater sense of marketing in to how they teach the humanities. This sounds great, if by marketing we mean something like persuasion. Professors should certainly strive to convince students that a subject matters, they should show its importance in the world, and not just pedantically assume that just because the topic has been considered important in the past that it will continue to be so. We should be light on our feet, witty, approachable, smiling.

The problem with marketing as a university principle arises when the very disciplines are structured according to a rewards system that is meant to mimic a market. Universities are not actually organized like an economy. They bend over backwards to reorganize themselves as if they were but the inherent hierarchy means that they do not operate through their own mechanisms. There is always the hand of an administrator acting as if he or she were the invisible one allocating resources. The free market model is more often a jargon to justify policies that administrators perceive as marketable, but not because the market has chosen them through its own operations.

Universities use business economics as a model, but they are not actually operating as an open system of competition. The very structures that are meant to measure the economic value of a discipline end up restricting their competitiveness. For example, any university that rewards departments for having high enrollment needs to enact rules on how to count students. Even in fields where interdisciplinarity is considered important, the mechanisms that measure the market flow of enrollments end up restricting it.

Students, for example, are routinely told they must take courses within their department because of enrollment counts. This of course undermines the free flow of the market. The reason students are treated like precious commodities within a mercantilist economy is that all department advisors know they are being measured by an administration that wants to see high numbers. Thus they prevent students from taking courses outside their department. The administrative mechanism that is intend to measure market place movements ends up hampering that very ebb and flow. Only by not counting enrollments and by lifting restrictions on where students take courses will a college simulate a market.

The real trouble is that universities are not interested in just selling classes. They also want to produce smart graduates, innovative research, famous professors. Marketing does not produce the most intelligent argument. The tendency is to develop a product so that it appeals broadly by deploying the most common denominator within the target audience. Very complex thought may go into designing the product, there is indeed often great art in simplicity, but most things up for sale are not so well thought through. They fit a familiar pattern; they confirm existing tastes and prejudices. History departments, if they were driven by market forces, would teach nothing but the American Civil War, World War Two, maybe some Roman history if it did not involve too much Latin.

Marketed products are not supposed to disturb the expectations of the audience. Television appeals to the assumptions that the audience already possesses; rarely does it seek to alter them, more often than not it confirms them by giving them a product that is consciously crafted to excite the feelings that have already been shown to exist. Innovation is important to marketing design only in order to distinguish a product from its competitors, but only to the extent that the new image promises a variation on an already familiar pattern.

If university courses were structured like sit-coms or reality shows then they would quickly stop developing new ideas. They would sell lots of seats perhaps, but they would not actually generate creative innovation. Instead they would reiterate the status quo, as opposed to changing it.