I think there's a specific version of the quadrant of fury that's very relevant today. That's when information is restricted because the administration thinks that everyone else would be mad, but also thinks that everyone else would be wrong to be mad. For example, because they want to appease conservative politicians to avoid worse outcomes or close programs that they think are unsustainable. Sometimes this is driven by different assessments of the world, sometimes by different values, sometimes by different orientations towards resisting bad trends. But in all situations this is extremely toxic to the relationship between the administration and everyone else.
Oh yes. This is fury X 2: it's not just "we know people will be mad" but the patronizing, condescending sense that "everybody is stupid to be mad" which then serves as the justification for keeping the information under wraps. ("We're not withholding information that people ought to hear, we're just saving everybody a bunch of needless hysteria".
Exactly. Although we should be mindful that it's hard to manage these conflicts of values in any productive way. It's just that the values being instantiated are so terrible.
One result of all this is that, when information does leak out, the implications are often catastrophic. Think of the leaked DNC emails in 2015- the content wasn't new (the party backs candidates it perceives as winners) but hte fact of leakage was
Completely. Information in the fury quadrant especially has a way of eventually leaking out and as you say it is an absolute catastrophe when it does precisely BECAUSE it was suppressed in the first place.
I think you give all this much more serious thought than do the higher-ups at most universities. I also think your colleagues who implicitly shame you for who you are target entirely the wrong person, creating divisions where alliances are desperately needed -- assuming these individual faculty share your concerns. The total sacrifice of shared goodwill for education to individual greed among administrators and those who desire to join them, by making high administrative jobs so lucrative, and by making the prospect of losing those golden eggs so terrifying to their holders, has corrupted the entire system. Those of us in the lower echelons of academia saw it first, long ago.
Oh, nobody's shaming me, and I don't object at all to those observations--they're usually a very friendly way of pointing out that I'm particularly mournful about this shift because I took an interest in so much of the information flowing around. I think it's just that everybody is seeing the routinization of opacity regardless of how much information they used to have access to--so much is being kept for no reason at all from so many.
But there is a reason, surely! Control. Power. I can't imagine why that wouldn't be everyone's concern, either (and also exasperated by performative identity stuff in elite academic circles, as if that weren't obvious. 😀)
No good reason, as I see it. But yes. Except as John Quiggan pointed out in another comment, it's not even a great way to optimize power and control--when you start the routinization that leads to everything being #3 and #4, you end up with it almost inevitably blowing up in your face, because academic institutions are inevitably porous and because you're trying to bottle up a hive of people with Ph.Ds who know how to work information.
I'm way behind on my reading, so this comment isn't timely, but I think this is overcomplicating things a little, at least when it comes to the change over time. To put it in terms of your quadrants, I think what's happened is that in real terms basically everything has slid to the left-- becoming less able to be shared-- but many faculty continue to think of the distribution remaining centered where it used to be. That is, there's been both a broadening of the range of causes over which a school might be sued and a lowering of the threshold for triggering a lawsuit (as society in general has become more litigious). At the same time, budgets have tightened for a variety of reasons, so institutions that are wealthy in absolute terms are relatively less able to laugh off the cost of litigation than they were in the past. Consequently a lot of schools have tightened up dramatically on what they're willing to share. Stuff that used to be in the "I shouldn't tell you this, but nobody will care, so..." category has moved firmly into "I am not allowed to tell you this, full stop" category for reasons that are unfortunate but legitimate.
People who remember the prior environment (and younger people who have bought into talk of the Good Old Days) frequently fail to notice the overall leftward shift in the issue environment, though, which leads to problems. As a result a fair bit of stuff that, in your nomenclature, properly ought to fall in "tragedy" is perceived as "incompetence," and a fair bit of "paranoia" is perceived as "fury." I catch myself doing a bit of this-- "Why are those idiots not sharing such-and-so?"-- but when I make myself slow down and think it through, there's almost always a solid (if regrettable) reason for the line to be where it is.
I think you are right about the *claims* made about shifting everything to the left, but I think just substantively those claims are either knowingly false (which is why Quadrant 3 produces such fury when it's exposed) or are generic, e.g., made as a reflex and not thoughtfully or on a case-by-case basis. Which kicks a lot of stuff into Quadrants 2, 3 and 4, with the attendant consequences.
I think the other change is that at a fair number of institutions, academic management at all levels no longer cares whether faculty think that they are doing the right thing behind the veil of confidence. E.g., thirty years ago administrators earnestly wanted to reassure everybody that a given decision was a "tragic" case where everybody would agree if they could only see it; now, I see a fair number of administrators being assertively indifferent about whether that's the case or not.
One example that I can see other people dealing with as well at other institutions is that the IRS has been steadily clarifying guidance to all workplaces about business-related travel expenses and there's been a kind of collective judgment that funds that support faculty travel to conferences and research-related travel expenses need to be reconciled with this guidance. I don't think that's in reaction to any major enforcement or review initiatives--it's about managing possible or perceived risks proactively. That is itself a discussion worth having--e.g., whether prophylactic compliance sometimes wastes money and resources and cripples mission-critical functions that were operating well. (And equally, whether 'compliance' is sometimes just a Trojan horse for 'cost-cutting' to make it seem as if there is no choice in the matter.)
But you could say that an institution making those changes *ought* to just say so, clearly. And yet from what I can see both locally and comparatively, many of them are not--they're just saying "you can't do that and you can't do that and you can't do that". When people reply "but I did that for years, what's changed?" more than a few institutions are saying "No, you never did that, it's never been allowed". Why do that, given that it infuriates people to flatly contradict what people know to be true?
I think the answer is that the people making the policy changes have decided that there are two legal risks in saying "we're trying to do better at complying with IRS guidance than we have in the past". The first is that the IRS gets wind of it and says "oh wait, are you saying you were not in compliance?" But this is roughly like threatening a high schooler that a D- will go on their permanent record and haunt them until they are in a nursing home in their 80s--most high schoolers know that is bullshit. The IRS retreated from enforcement to a major extent starting in the 1980s, and what they still do in those terms is strongly rationed to cases of major, flaming noncompliance, where they tend to be joined by accrediting agencies in the case of higher education. I mean, look at it this way: nobody was looking closely at the financial rectitude or compliance of the University of the Arts for the last ten years of its existence, plainly, despite what now seem to be massive irregularities and/or criminal misconduct.
The second and more disturbing reason, I suspect, is that the people changing policies think that if they say "yeah, we did fund that thing you're asking for in the past but we can't any more", they're potentially inviting a faculty employee to sue for breach of contract or at least to bring a grievance internally. But it is precisely *because* you're trying to gaslight people about what you used to do that you get people mad enough to consider reacting that way.
So this is a decision that I'd probably place in Quadrant 3 but pretty close to 0,0. There are elements of things that do need to be kept confidential, where everyone would agree that you have to be in compliance; there are elements of things where legal commitments require some confidentiality but where there's some potentially dubious stuff happening (like cost-cutting disguised as compliance) and there's infuriating gaslighting going on because the basic reasons aren't being shared at all.
And what this also prevents is a constructive faculty-staff partnership that might look ahead to trying to do something that everybody (I hope) would welcome, which is to get the IRS to amend its guidance to acknowledge research-related travel by faculty as something different than ordinary business travel. E.g., right now the IRS guidance says, "If an employee is going to be living somewhere away from the main office for a work-related purpose, this is not a travel expense--it has to be covered out of the employee's own taxable income, and you particularly cannot expense residential costs intended to cover the expense of having family members there". I get that if we're talking about someone being assigned by the home office to go develop a new market for their products in a location that they've never been sold before--and then it's up to the employee and the company to talk about how to boost compensation to cover the costs of maintaining a household. But if I go to work in an archive for six months during my sabbatical and I want to draw on my research fund, I shouldn't be told that I can't draw on it to cover the costs of where I'm staying if I rent a place big enough for my family to join me. It's not the same kind of thing--essentially it's no different from the money my institution invests in a STEM lab, except that my research involves fieldwork in a distant institution.
You'd move something out of my chart altogether into a much better chart of "ways that faculty and staff can work together productively to accomplish institutional missions" at the point that you said, "Yes, let's lobby the IRS for a change in the guidance, and failing that, let's look at changing our compensation structure so that faculty with a fieldwork research practice get topped off by 5k annually (taxable) as an offset to the costs they incur while doing research". I mean, you wouldn't be able to recruit too many STEM faculty if you told them "hey, at least 10k of your lab expenses have to come out of your own salary" unless you were doing that via some kind of offset.
But these are conversations that can't be had in an institutional regime that reflexively moves almost everything behind the veil of confidentiality--and I really would maintain that you are too confident that most of what is assigned there is a Quadrant 1 case.
I think there's a specific version of the quadrant of fury that's very relevant today. That's when information is restricted because the administration thinks that everyone else would be mad, but also thinks that everyone else would be wrong to be mad. For example, because they want to appease conservative politicians to avoid worse outcomes or close programs that they think are unsustainable. Sometimes this is driven by different assessments of the world, sometimes by different values, sometimes by different orientations towards resisting bad trends. But in all situations this is extremely toxic to the relationship between the administration and everyone else.
Oh yes. This is fury X 2: it's not just "we know people will be mad" but the patronizing, condescending sense that "everybody is stupid to be mad" which then serves as the justification for keeping the information under wraps. ("We're not withholding information that people ought to hear, we're just saving everybody a bunch of needless hysteria".
Exactly. Although we should be mindful that it's hard to manage these conflicts of values in any productive way. It's just that the values being instantiated are so terrible.
One result of all this is that, when information does leak out, the implications are often catastrophic. Think of the leaked DNC emails in 2015- the content wasn't new (the party backs candidates it perceives as winners) but hte fact of leakage was
Completely. Information in the fury quadrant especially has a way of eventually leaking out and as you say it is an absolute catastrophe when it does precisely BECAUSE it was suppressed in the first place.
I think you give all this much more serious thought than do the higher-ups at most universities. I also think your colleagues who implicitly shame you for who you are target entirely the wrong person, creating divisions where alliances are desperately needed -- assuming these individual faculty share your concerns. The total sacrifice of shared goodwill for education to individual greed among administrators and those who desire to join them, by making high administrative jobs so lucrative, and by making the prospect of losing those golden eggs so terrifying to their holders, has corrupted the entire system. Those of us in the lower echelons of academia saw it first, long ago.
Oh, nobody's shaming me, and I don't object at all to those observations--they're usually a very friendly way of pointing out that I'm particularly mournful about this shift because I took an interest in so much of the information flowing around. I think it's just that everybody is seeing the routinization of opacity regardless of how much information they used to have access to--so much is being kept for no reason at all from so many.
But there is a reason, surely! Control. Power. I can't imagine why that wouldn't be everyone's concern, either (and also exasperated by performative identity stuff in elite academic circles, as if that weren't obvious. 😀)
No good reason, as I see it. But yes. Except as John Quiggan pointed out in another comment, it's not even a great way to optimize power and control--when you start the routinization that leads to everything being #3 and #4, you end up with it almost inevitably blowing up in your face, because academic institutions are inevitably porous and because you're trying to bottle up a hive of people with Ph.Ds who know how to work information.
You've just given me grounds for optimism! Thank you. 😀
I'm way behind on my reading, so this comment isn't timely, but I think this is overcomplicating things a little, at least when it comes to the change over time. To put it in terms of your quadrants, I think what's happened is that in real terms basically everything has slid to the left-- becoming less able to be shared-- but many faculty continue to think of the distribution remaining centered where it used to be. That is, there's been both a broadening of the range of causes over which a school might be sued and a lowering of the threshold for triggering a lawsuit (as society in general has become more litigious). At the same time, budgets have tightened for a variety of reasons, so institutions that are wealthy in absolute terms are relatively less able to laugh off the cost of litigation than they were in the past. Consequently a lot of schools have tightened up dramatically on what they're willing to share. Stuff that used to be in the "I shouldn't tell you this, but nobody will care, so..." category has moved firmly into "I am not allowed to tell you this, full stop" category for reasons that are unfortunate but legitimate.
People who remember the prior environment (and younger people who have bought into talk of the Good Old Days) frequently fail to notice the overall leftward shift in the issue environment, though, which leads to problems. As a result a fair bit of stuff that, in your nomenclature, properly ought to fall in "tragedy" is perceived as "incompetence," and a fair bit of "paranoia" is perceived as "fury." I catch myself doing a bit of this-- "Why are those idiots not sharing such-and-so?"-- but when I make myself slow down and think it through, there's almost always a solid (if regrettable) reason for the line to be where it is.
I think you are right about the *claims* made about shifting everything to the left, but I think just substantively those claims are either knowingly false (which is why Quadrant 3 produces such fury when it's exposed) or are generic, e.g., made as a reflex and not thoughtfully or on a case-by-case basis. Which kicks a lot of stuff into Quadrants 2, 3 and 4, with the attendant consequences.
I think the other change is that at a fair number of institutions, academic management at all levels no longer cares whether faculty think that they are doing the right thing behind the veil of confidence. E.g., thirty years ago administrators earnestly wanted to reassure everybody that a given decision was a "tragic" case where everybody would agree if they could only see it; now, I see a fair number of administrators being assertively indifferent about whether that's the case or not.
One example that I can see other people dealing with as well at other institutions is that the IRS has been steadily clarifying guidance to all workplaces about business-related travel expenses and there's been a kind of collective judgment that funds that support faculty travel to conferences and research-related travel expenses need to be reconciled with this guidance. I don't think that's in reaction to any major enforcement or review initiatives--it's about managing possible or perceived risks proactively. That is itself a discussion worth having--e.g., whether prophylactic compliance sometimes wastes money and resources and cripples mission-critical functions that were operating well. (And equally, whether 'compliance' is sometimes just a Trojan horse for 'cost-cutting' to make it seem as if there is no choice in the matter.)
But you could say that an institution making those changes *ought* to just say so, clearly. And yet from what I can see both locally and comparatively, many of them are not--they're just saying "you can't do that and you can't do that and you can't do that". When people reply "but I did that for years, what's changed?" more than a few institutions are saying "No, you never did that, it's never been allowed". Why do that, given that it infuriates people to flatly contradict what people know to be true?
I think the answer is that the people making the policy changes have decided that there are two legal risks in saying "we're trying to do better at complying with IRS guidance than we have in the past". The first is that the IRS gets wind of it and says "oh wait, are you saying you were not in compliance?" But this is roughly like threatening a high schooler that a D- will go on their permanent record and haunt them until they are in a nursing home in their 80s--most high schoolers know that is bullshit. The IRS retreated from enforcement to a major extent starting in the 1980s, and what they still do in those terms is strongly rationed to cases of major, flaming noncompliance, where they tend to be joined by accrediting agencies in the case of higher education. I mean, look at it this way: nobody was looking closely at the financial rectitude or compliance of the University of the Arts for the last ten years of its existence, plainly, despite what now seem to be massive irregularities and/or criminal misconduct.
The second and more disturbing reason, I suspect, is that the people changing policies think that if they say "yeah, we did fund that thing you're asking for in the past but we can't any more", they're potentially inviting a faculty employee to sue for breach of contract or at least to bring a grievance internally. But it is precisely *because* you're trying to gaslight people about what you used to do that you get people mad enough to consider reacting that way.
So this is a decision that I'd probably place in Quadrant 3 but pretty close to 0,0. There are elements of things that do need to be kept confidential, where everyone would agree that you have to be in compliance; there are elements of things where legal commitments require some confidentiality but where there's some potentially dubious stuff happening (like cost-cutting disguised as compliance) and there's infuriating gaslighting going on because the basic reasons aren't being shared at all.
And what this also prevents is a constructive faculty-staff partnership that might look ahead to trying to do something that everybody (I hope) would welcome, which is to get the IRS to amend its guidance to acknowledge research-related travel by faculty as something different than ordinary business travel. E.g., right now the IRS guidance says, "If an employee is going to be living somewhere away from the main office for a work-related purpose, this is not a travel expense--it has to be covered out of the employee's own taxable income, and you particularly cannot expense residential costs intended to cover the expense of having family members there". I get that if we're talking about someone being assigned by the home office to go develop a new market for their products in a location that they've never been sold before--and then it's up to the employee and the company to talk about how to boost compensation to cover the costs of maintaining a household. But if I go to work in an archive for six months during my sabbatical and I want to draw on my research fund, I shouldn't be told that I can't draw on it to cover the costs of where I'm staying if I rent a place big enough for my family to join me. It's not the same kind of thing--essentially it's no different from the money my institution invests in a STEM lab, except that my research involves fieldwork in a distant institution.
You'd move something out of my chart altogether into a much better chart of "ways that faculty and staff can work together productively to accomplish institutional missions" at the point that you said, "Yes, let's lobby the IRS for a change in the guidance, and failing that, let's look at changing our compensation structure so that faculty with a fieldwork research practice get topped off by 5k annually (taxable) as an offset to the costs they incur while doing research". I mean, you wouldn't be able to recruit too many STEM faculty if you told them "hey, at least 10k of your lab expenses have to come out of your own salary" unless you were doing that via some kind of offset.
But these are conversations that can't be had in an institutional regime that reflexively moves almost everything behind the veil of confidentiality--and I really would maintain that you are too confident that most of what is assigned there is a Quadrant 1 case.