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There’s a lot of people saying other people need to STFU going around in higher education recently.
Arguing at a U.S. appeals court in defense of the “Stop Woke” act, an attorney representing the State of Florida told the justices that the state could “insist that professors not offer—or espouse, I should say, and endorse—viewpoints that are contrary to the state’s.”
This means that, for example, criticism of Florida governor Ron DeSantis could be prohibited in the classroom. As public employees and therefore agents of the government, Florida instructional faculty would be bound to respond to the desires of the state.
Writing at The Harvard Crimson, Lawrence D. Bobo, dean of social sciences, declared that “A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors—be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government—to intervene in Harvard’s affairs.”
In other words, Bobo believes that those who work for Harvard have an obligation to keep any complaints in-house. He says, “The expression of diverse, conflicting positions, especially those advanced with passion and conviction, is the stuff of a healthy intellectual community. Academic departments, faculty meetings, town halls, and campus publications should be regular forums for participation in University governance.”
Once you take things public, well, that’s bad because it invites “external intervention,” which is so bad as to be potentially sanctionable, according to Bobo.
Bobo goes on to suggest that student protests directed at their university administration is also a problem, even though one would think that this is a good example of institutional stakeholders keeping things in-house. The problem, according to Bobo, is that protests “draw media attention,” which I guess is a conduit to potential external intervention.
Bobo thinks protesters are doing it wrong on two fronts: “Targeting protest at those charged with a pastoral duty of care for their students and an indirect-at-best relation to the protesters’ core grievance considerably removes these efforts from the inarguably heroic actions of college students who burned draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War, registered black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, sat in at segregated lunch counters, or joined marches for women’s liberation and gay rights.”
To paraphrase: You shouldn’t be yelling at university administrators because we care about you, and besides, there’s nothing we can do anyway.
Bobo’s chief complaint appears to be that student protests have left the Harvard campus “unsettled.” Harvard’s motto is Veritas, meaning “truth.” Based on Bobo’s views, maybe instead it should be Tranquillitas—“calm.”
In another incident that may not seem to have national implications but still fits the pattern, a nontenured history instructor at Tarleton State University with 12 years on the job teaching a special military history course was nonrenewed, apparently because he confronted a high-level administrator at a public meeting over a significant increase in parking fees.
Ted Roberts, the instructor, cannot know for sure the reasons for his nonrenewal because, well, because the administration doesn’t have to give him one. It is simply their prerogative to dismiss a nontenured instructor despite years of positive student reviews and multiple pleas from faculty bodies to keep Roberts on.
As I’ve been drafting this blog post, yet another example cropped up, a missive from Emerson College president Jay M. Bernhardt saying that student protests had resulted in lower enrollment, which will require budgetary cutbacks. This was after Bernhardt’s actions regarding the protestors resulted in a no-confidence vote from students and a vote of censure from the faculty.
I am actually not a big believer in looking at individual events and drawing sweeping conclusions from them, declaring something a trend based on this kind of evidence. I think in a lot of cases involving campus unrest, while there are likely commonalities, there are also local circumstances that make drawing those sweeping conclusions questionable. For example, as reported in The Chronicle, Emerson College was preparing for a reduced budget long before any protests started.
But.
It is interesting to observe what is shared among these examples and what that says about how higher education institutions are organized and run in this day and age.
Let’s call this possible emerging trend higher ed “managerialism.” As a broad term, managerialism is the notion that organizations are best run by professional managers primarily oriented around the value of efficiency and favoring a structural hierarchy, with the managers in control, even when other groups with a stake in the organization have a right or claim to at least some measure of control.
In each case, the locus of the manager may be a bit different, but the ideology is the same. The state government of Florida has declared its public institutions as direct arms of the government and has sought to manage them accordingly. The previous upending of New College is also an example of this principle. The state of Florida didn’t want a public liberal arts institution that was perceived as politically liberal and so they changed its very essence. Students, faculty, the broader public are not allowed any power or even autonomy within the institution. All permissions flow from management down.
Dean Bobo at Harvard recognizes he does not have the same degree or levers of power as a sitting governor, so he is attempting a plea from principle, a plea so laughably and transparently self-serving that he has been roundly “roasted,” as reported by IHE’s Ryan Quinn.
Bobo’s mistake was in aiming his rule by managers at the actions of faculty, a group that is not inclined to voluntarily accede to the rationale of managerialism.
But I note that Bobo also aimed his argument to keep the volume of criticism down at students, and if his argument had been confined to that group, I doubt that he would have been roasted, even though the rationale of managerialism would have been just as present. Rather than being “customers” of a university—itself a troubling framework—Bobo sees students (and faculty) as the institution’s workers, whose job it is to further the aims of the institution, as defined by the management.
Bobo is no innovator. The managerialist mindset applied to student speech was in evidence back in 2016 when a “welcome letter” to students from the administration at the University of Chicago declared certain topics of discussion (“safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”) as off-limits and illegitimate. The letter was widely praised at the time, but with hindsight I think it is a clear example of a managerialist mindset.
Not to pat myself on the back, but hindsight wasn’t necessary. I detected something rotten from the get-go and said as much in a post written contemporaneously, in which I said that Chicago’s letter was not a robust defense of academic principles but a frightened response to dealing with student voices and the possibility of challenge. The Chicago administration was asking for a “safe space for administrators” in a manner very similar to Dean Bobo, and very few people roasted them for it.
A couple of years later we had Haidt and Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind, which created a previously unknown psychological pathology, “safetyism,” out of thin air to protect the institutional managers from having to deal directly with student speech and dissent. The book was an attempt to delegitimize student speech under the guise of protecting academic values, a sort of high-minded attempt at telling students to STFU. But in my view, it was a weak rationale for not having to deal with speech or dissent that the academic managers found unpleasant or counterproductive or not to the academic mission—because what’s more important than discussion and debate to the academic mission?—but to the institutional operations.
How’d that telling students to STFU work? What are the consequences of telling stakeholders who believe they have something to contribute to STFU? Considering the recent protests, I think you can view the most counterproductive and stakeholder-alienating actions of university administrations at places like Columbia, the University of Indiana and the University of Texas, which flowed from an essentially managerial mindset.
Those actions were couched as being made in the interests of the community, but seeing the results, and gaining insight into what triggered those responses, it is tough to credit those actions to principles beyond the desire to maintain managerial control.
In my view, the earlier examples of the Chicago letter and the arguments in Coddling gave permission to managers to ignore the voices of students in those cases. Rather than facing the challenges head-on as a community, many were eager to dismiss voices with inconvenient messages by using their power to declare that speech they didn’t want to deal with was illegitimate.
It was only a matter of time until the managers also came for faculty, and in fact, they were coming for faculty all along, as shared governance has become more myth from a previous era than anything substantive.
The problems are deep, structural. Administrators are incentivized to act as managers rather than leaders by those who oversee and appoint them, and the realities of higher education as a marketplace, rather than a space dedicated to purpose and mission, make undoing this dynamic very difficult. The faculty and students of West Virginia University made many principled, practical and moral objections to E. Gordon Gee’s remaking of the institution into a wholly corporatized entity, and it just didn’t matter because he was authorized by the people with the power to do so.
Which is why my advice to everyone below the level of manager is to band together and find as much strength in numbers as possible.
The fates of faculty and students are inextricably intertwined, and given that students possess a power that faculty do not—coming coupled with sources of revenue institutions require—it’s even more important for their mutual interests in freedom from managerial overreach be pursued.
This will require faculty inclined toward paternalized notions of faculty authority over students or an inclination to pathologize differences in values rooted in different experiences to actually listen to what students are trying to tell them, but a little listening never hurt anybody.
