The Threats to Wisconsin's University System

Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin

At the end of March I blogged briefly about acclaimed linguist and sociopolitical critic Noam Chomsky's Jacobin essay, "The Death of American Universities" (whose link somehow became mangled and led to a junk site--my apologies). As part of my preface, I noted that much of what Chomsky argues in this short transcribed talk, delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, would be familiar to anyone working--and paying even passing attention to the changes--in academe today, though the effects are perhaps more evident in public institutions, which are more economically vulnerable because of their reliance on shrinking state and federal support, and smaller institutions lacking the massive endowments of the elite research universities and liberal arts colleges.

Even at the wealthiest institutions, however, a neoliberal ethos has increasingly become preponderant. Nearly all US universities today are increasingly viewed and run as quasi-businesses, with all that that conceptual shift entails. Tuition costs and fees grow ever more exorbitant; students are labeled and treated like consumers; the administrative bureaucracy waxes, paying itself at near corporate levels; fiscal austerity and competition for funding have become the baseline for most aspects of the university except the sports programs and high-end infrastructure renovation; the ranks of contingent faculty swell and tenured positions dwindle; donors are given outsized say (cf. the University of Illinois and the Stephen Salaita case); market-based policies become standard; and a fixation on promoting what elites in society believe will translate into direct benefit for corporations, or what is popular--and preferably what falls at the nexus of the two (computer science? biomedical engineering? financial engineering and sciences?)--gains emphasis at the expense of all else, with concomitant corporate-style jargon, acronyms and programs proliferating like kudzu.

I could give numerous examples of how this has played out at institutions across the country, including my current one, where, as I noted three years ago when I arrived here, the three-university system, and particularly the universities in Newark and Camden, found themselves in a fight for their lives. The story of that particular battle is a complex one, but let me just note that it was student, staff, faculty, administrative, union, and alumni pushback that not only saved the university, but perhaps made those who were seeking yet again to transform it for the worse to step back, at least temporarily, and rethink their actions. We have subsequently been engaged, at our university, on the conceptualization and development of a strategic plan that has been a model of shared consultation and conversation. When I was in Montana this past spring, several professors at that state's university whom I met there, and who were not directly linked to the conference I attended, bemoaned the constantly shrinking budgets and the onslaught of attrition. They spoke with admiration of what had occurred in New Jersey.

Just last week, the  University of North Carolina's Board of Governors' educational planning committee announced the elimination, discontinuation, consolidation, and demotion of whole departments across the entire university system, including one at flagship campus University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a policy the full board later voted up. Over fifty percent of the cuts were slated for four campuses: East Carolina University, UNC-Greensboro, North Carolina State University, and UNC-Charlotte. Among the eliminated programs were African Studies, women's and gender studies, various K-12 educational programs, and so on.  The Board of Governors based their decision, as one put it quite bluntly, on neoliberal principles: "We’re capitalists, and we have to look at what the demand is, and we have to respond to the demand."  This followed the recent move by Tom Fennebresque, NC Board of Governors president, who, along with the rest of his colleagues, had previously ousted UNC's highly regarded president, Tom Ross.

Yet as far as I know, the most extreme assault thus far on public universities and the American university system, which is also an attack on academic freedom, appears to be taking place in Wisconsin, where that state's Republican-dominated legislature's Joint Committee on finance voted this week not only for over $250 million in budget cuts but also to remove guarantees of shared-governance involving faculty and students, and to strike faculty tenure, from state law. The legislation clearly states this:

Tenure: Approve the Governor's recommendation to delete the definition of a "tenure appointment" and language establishing the conditions under which the Board of Regents may grant a tenure appointment to a faculty member. Delete current law specifying that a person who has been granted tenure may be dismissed only for just cause and only after due notice and hearing. In addition, delete the definition of "probationary appointment" and provisions limiting the length of such an appointment to seven years.

That is the chilling language taken directly from "University of Wisconsin: Omnibus Motion," linked above, which Wisconsin State Senator and Majority Caucus Chair Sheila Harsdorf and Representative Michael Schraa introduced for a vote. Both are Republicans.

According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the proposed legislation passed the committee on a party-line vote, despite warnings from Democratic legislators that it would harm the university system, widely acknowledged and ranked as one of the nation's best, and it will likely pass both GOP-majority houses of Wisconsin's legislature. After that Republican governor Scott Walker, who had previously gutted public and private sector unions, and survived a recall election, intends to sign the bill into law, whereupon he plans to launch his run for the presidency on the Republican ticket. The tenure-stripping measure was but one of several on which the legislature and Walker, who had initiated a push to restructure the system into a more top-down format, agreed, though there was disagreement on others involving the independence of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, tuition increases, and the depth of the cuts.

In response, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the University of Wisconsin's Board of Regents voted unanimously today to temporarily add tenure protections to their board policy should this almost broadly accepted standard will be struck from state law. This appears to be a reaction to the regent's acknowledged inability to convince the legislature to change its mind, though several members of the board have urged the legislature to remove the "non-fiscal," or non-budgetary changes from the law, thus far to no avail. Not only does the stripping of shared governance and tenure endanger academic freedom, but it transforms the future Wisconsin professoriate into an contingent precariate, subject to much easier dismissal, based on political views, statements and actions, under the rubric of elimination and discontinuation of programs, as is occurring in the North Carolina system. Should a new professor like the distinguished historian William Cronon espouse views critical of or contrary to the wishes and beliefs of Wisconsin's leaders (broadly understood), she very well could now be fired. As might any or large numbers of his colleagues.

To put it another way, the professoriate will be subject to the same precarious status as employees at most US businesses, with no guarantee of tenure to ensure stability while pursuing research of any kind, let alone controversial research, whether in the natural sciences (think of the geologists at the University of Oklahoma who have shown a causal link between fracking and earthquakes) or the social sciences (economists studying inequality, say) or the humanities (teaching socially critical works of literature), or engineering (biomedical engineers working with human embryos). But then this destabilization and quasi-privatization is the neoliberal goal, and this silencing of anything that might be viewed as socially or politically controversial is the conservative goal, isn't it?

Though the US Constitution seems to protect prior tenure contracts, the realities of the new law will eventually devastate Wisconsin's faculty, its system, and its educational profile. But then that is the same goal Republicans (and many "school reform" Democrats) have effectively pursued against public elementary and secondary education all over the US, and the effects could be just as far-reaching, since the destruction of the public sphere and commons, with all that they entails, have serious consequences. The people behind such policies act as if because they can neither accept nor transform faculties' independence and liberal tendencies, whether in knowledge, politics or any other sphere, by persuasion, then coercion might work, with dismissal a final step. We have been here before, at various points in history, and the outcome rarely is positive or pleasant. What I hope most people understand is that this is only the beginning, and if voters don't challenge such policies at the polls by publicly denouncing what is happening and voting out legislators advancing agenda like these all over the country, we will rue the day we watched this destruction unfold and sat by, doing nothing, thinking, well, that's just Wisconsin, but in my state....

However, lest we assume there was ever an idyllic or platonic idea of American university life, Chomsky, in the talk to which I linked above, brings us back to earth. As he suggests, great democratization of our universities, with students, staff, faculty, and administration all having a voice in how things are run, is the direction things shifted in the 1960s, to create the examples of shared governance we now think of, at least at many institutions, as the baseline. But let me offer Chomsky's words directly, remind us, as he does, that these ideas come out of Millian classical liberalism, which shows how far contemporary conservatism has moved from its economic and social roots:

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory.

Exactly. 

Chomsky on the Death of American Universities

(Copyright © Flickr / WorCehT)

In a recent issue of Jacobin magazine, scholar, theorist, critic and activist Noam Chomsky, whose work needs no introduction, offers one of the most succinct and powerful critiques of the direction of contemporary universities and colleges that I have read in quite some time: "The Death of American Universities." Much of what Chomsky says here, which is an edited transcript (prepared by Robin J. Sowards) of remarks Chomsky delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, will be familiar to anyone in higher education, as well as any who have experienced--or closely followed--the travails of students and parents, contingent and permanent faculty, and institutions struggling to deal with budgetary cuts and economically unsustainable cost inflation, narrowing educational goals, the imposition of market-based ideologies, the effects of technological shifts, and various forms of anti-intellectualism, some of very long standing as the late Richard Hofstadter, Susan Jacoby, and others have argued persuasively, that have taken root in our contemporary society.

Perhaps the only area he does not touch upon is athletics, a subject he has commented on in the past. But in every other area what he says applies to every institution in the US, including the richest and most elite--think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, etc.--though in some areas, such as renewing a focus on the arts and humanities, feeling the pinch of federal and state cuts, and trustees who are more concerned with how the football team does rather than whether students are receiving the highest quality education for the complex world in which we live, a world which they will help to shape and transform, these institutions are still somewhat insulated. 

But even Chomsky's former home base, MIT, is not immune to the critiques he lodges or challenges he describes (the MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the major incubators of high-level business thinking in the US), and as he always does, he makes sure to broaden his discussion to larger issues in the society, noting how the "precariat" is not just an issue for higher education, but central to contemporary asset-based globalized capitalism. You might quibble with some of his assertions, but in general, I think he gets things very right, and I wish more than anything that upper-level university administrators and leaders, legislators and other public officials, college and university trustees, and members of the media would read this piece without blinders or prejudice, whether they ultimately disagree or not. I see up close what he'd talking about; getting those in positions of power to acknowledge and address what's going on is another matter. 

Here are a few quotes, but do read the entire article.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. 

At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more.

and

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “the time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. 

At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy” — namely, that there’s too much democracy.

and

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. 

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them — that’s freedom and democracy. We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”

Excerpt: Noam Chomsky

An excerpt from: Noam Chomsky's "'Losing' the World": American Decline in Perspective, Part 1, znet.com, February 14, 2012

"There are important lessons in all this for today, even apart from another reminder that only the weak and defeated are called to account for their crimes. One lesson is that to understand what is happening we should attend not only to critical events of the real world, often dismissed from history, but also to what leaders and elite opinion believe, however tinged with fantasy. Another lesson is that alongside the flights of fancy concocted to terrify and mobilize the public (and perhaps believed by some who are trapped in their own rhetoric), there is also geostrategic planning based on principles that are rational and stable over long periods because they are rooted in stable institutions and their concerns. That is true in the case of Vietnam as well. I will return to that, only stressing here that the persistent factors in state action are generally well concealed.

"The Iraq war is an instructive case. It was marketed to a terrified public on the usual grounds of self-defense against an awesome threat to survival: the “single question,” George W. Bush and Tony Blair declared, was whether Saddam Hussein would end his programs of developing weapons of mass destruction. When the single question received the wrong answer, government rhetoric shifted effortlessly to our “yearning for democracy,” and educated opinion duly followed course; all routine.

"Later, as the scale of the U.S. defeat in Iraq was becoming difficult to suppress, the government quietly conceded what had been clear all along. In 2007-2008, the administration officially announced that a final settlement must grant the U.S. military bases and the right of combat operations, and must privilege U.S. investors in the rich energy system -- demands later reluctantly abandoned in the face of Iraqi resistance. And all well kept from the general population."

Is Obama Really Colin Powell? + Teddy Pendergrass RIP + Noam Chomsky on Haiti

Some weeks back, perhaps at the start of the new academic quarter when I had a smidgeon of time and was feeling thoughtful, I tweeted about a hypothetical situation which had struck me that day: what if instead of electing Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 we had elected Republican Colin Powell to the presidency, and how, in practical terms, would a Powell presidency be different?

What prompted me to ask this was a year's worth of reflection on Obamatude, and how, in so many ways, instead of a true, clean break with the last administration, what we've gotten, and what's become a source of distress for many progressives and independents not bound by hero-worship of the President, is a continuation of the Bush's and the GOP's policies, just in slightly attenuated form. This thinned yet still toxic broth we're being served daily has led me to wonder where Obama, who ran as an agent of "change"--even if his own record hovered between post-partisan beliefs and neoliberal policies relabled as "pragmatism," and sometimes impressively progressive symbolism and rhetoric--has differed from what a counterfactual Powell administration might have looked like. Comparing the record of the real administration with the fictive one, I cannot see where there is much difference, except perhaps in the nomination of someone like Supreme Court Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, though even in this instance, I would not have put it past Powell, with a nominally Democratic Congress, to make such a symbolic, if politically risky, move.

Let me begin by saying that I was happy that Barack Obama and Joe Biden defeated John McCain and Sarah Palin in November 2008. Like many Americans, and almost every black person, American or otherwise that I know, I continue to be both amazed and proud that we now have an African-American president in the White House. I am also proud of my fellow Americans for making this choice. In terms of Obama's first year of governance, I do not agree that he hasn't accomplished some substantive things, but I continue to be disappointed that he has repeatedly backed away from pushing the status quo, that he will not make a more sustained public case for his policies or politics, that he will not push the Congress more to do the proper thing, and that he appears to be more effective as a symbol than as a leader. This, in a sense, is his great triumph so far: symbolic leadership. It led to the premature Nobel Prize; it continues to garner him adulation in this country among elements of his base, as well as across the globe (and I saw this this year in Cuba and Italy); and it endows what leadership he does demonstrate with something extra, a value-added spark and cachet. I try never to forget the importance of this symbolic element of Obama's tenure, and am always urging that he use it more. (Drew Westen's excellent piece on Obama explores this and related issues.)

SCTV Bergman Parody + Filmmakers of Today + Chomsky on Non-War on Terror

Now for a little humor: SCTV's parody of Ingmar Bergman, Cries of the Wolf. I'd forgotten how silly and hilarious Catherine O'Hara, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, John Candy, and company were. Enjoy!


On IMDb.com, on the Ingmar Bergman page threads, someone suggested that international cinema was "weaker" because of the deaths of these two extraordinary figures, and others like Ousmane Sembène. I agree that their deaths are a tremendous loss, but there are quite a few very talented, in some cases major, relatively prolific international film artists out there. Some of them, like Manoel Oliveira, are older than either Antonioni or Bergman, and still making films, while others are close in age or only a generation younger. And then there quite a few important makers of art films (broadly construed) in the 40-60 age range. The list I came up with includes:

Woody Allen, Theodoros Angelopoulos, Olivier Assayas, Lucas Belvaux, Bernardo Bertolucci, Catherine Breillat, Jane Campion, Laurent Cantet, Souleymane Cissé, Costa-Gavras, David Cronenberg, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Claire Denis, Carlos Diegues, Atom Egoyan, Jean-Luc Godard, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Michael Haneke, Werner Herzog, Shohei Imamura, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Abbas Kiarostami, Kim Ki-Duk, Takeshi Kitano, Emir Kusturica, Spike Lee, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Terrence Malick, Takeshi Miike, Nanni Moretti, Mike Nichols, Gaspar Noé, Manoel Oliveira, Nagisa Oshima, Idrissa Ouedragou, François Ozon, Ferzan Ozpetek, Jafar Panahi, Park Chan-Wook, Alexander Payne, Roman Polanski, Alain Resnais, Eric Rohmer, Raoul Ruiz, Walter Salles, Volker Schlöndorff, Martin Scorsese, Cheikh Omar Sissoko, Aleksandr Sokurov, Todd Solondz, Tsai Ming-Liang, Agnès Varda, Ventura Pons, Andrzej Wajda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Peter Weir, Wim Wenders, Lina Wertmüller, and Wong Kar-Wai.

(Admittedly I've listed far too few women.) Whom would you add?

Audiologo mentions: Kasi Lemmons, Lisa Cholodenko, Nancy Savoca, Lucrecia Martel, Ana Kokkinos, Alison Maclean, and Delphine Gleize.

Other directors?

***

On a completely different note, here's a link to Geov Parrish's recent AlterNet interview with Noam Chomsky on the "war on terror," or the nonexistence thereof.

Says Chomsky:

The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It's a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world's energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror. And the same with other things. Take, say, nuclear terror. The American intelligence systems estimate that the likelihood of a "dirty bomb," a dirty nuclear bomb attack in the United States in the next ten years, is about 50 percent. Well, that's pretty high. Are they doing anything about it? Yeah. They're increasing the threat, by increasing nuclear proliferation, by compelling potential adversaries to take very dangerous measures to try to counter rising American threats.

This is even sometimes discussed. You can find it in the strategic analysis literature. Take, say, the invasion of Iraq again. We're told that they didn't find weapons of mass destruction. Well, that's not exactly correct. They did find weapons of mass destruction, namely, the ones that had been sent to Saddam by the United States, Britain, and others through the 1980s. A lot of them were still there. They were under control of U.N. inspectors and were being dismantled. But many were still there. When the U.S. invaded, the inspectors were kicked out, and Rumsfeld and Cheney didn't tell their troops to guard the sites. So the sites were left unguarded, and they were systematically looted. The U.N. inspectors did continue their work by satellite and they identified over 100 sites that were systematically looted, like, not somebody going in and stealing something, but carefully, systematically looted.