Academia: Institutionality is the Thief of Joy

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I will never fully resolve my own ambivalence about the call to reimagine the university as nothing more than a workplace.

People make the call for all the best reasons. Universities and colleges across the United States and indeed the world are for the most part no longer managed as if they have a mission that goes beyond collecting revenues and selling services, much as the controlling interests in large-scale medical institutions are no longer particularly driven by the thought that safeguarding the health of human beings and the society to which they belong is a sacred duty that should drive every decision they make. We can disagree whether “no longer” is an accurate conditional in that it implies that the university or the hospital once upon a time were in fact driven by some deeper mission or more profound values. I think there are reasons to believe it once was true—or at least that the people in charge once believed that’s what they were doing. I don’t think so now.

So reminding us that these are just workplaces is a kind of realism in the face of that (maybe) change. It’s a caution that doing a ton of uncompensated labor out of duty and responsibility will never be remembered or loved by the institution itself. The older I get, the more I can verify that truth both from experience and from observation. You can spend months working together in a shared governance body to craft a intelligent, original, workable, humane institutional policy on an issue of enduring importance that is accepted by leaders and peers alike only to find that five years later, the institution doesn’t even remember that there is a policy the first time that it is put to the test, or that the university counsel has quietly amended or erased the policy in the meantime, or that a member of the board of trustees demanded the policy be annulled in favor of something else. You can spend endless hours working with students in a way that meets them exactly where they are in a deeply individual way only to have a newly hired mid-ranking administrator demand compliant standardizations that tramples all over that work.

The question is then “but shouldn’t work be more than work?”, which is usually where we get into some pretty deep disagreements—sometimes more than just disagreements—about where value, meaning and satisfaction ought to lie in the better worlds that are possible. I don’t believe there will be a Heaven after I die and I don’t believe that I have to just accept life as a sentence without parole to the worst timeline until the revolution comes. I want the best dispensation I can imagine while I’m here. So whether or not it was ever better, I still want something better at work for now. I want joy, I want beauty, I want values and purpose, I want to feel that I’m doing something good and useful that matters at least to the people I am doing it with and is cared for by the people who pay me to do it.

So I remain interested in what prevents that from happening and I remain unwilling to fully buy into a framework that answers, “Everything prevents that from happening; none of that can happen until the whole rotten edifice is torn down and rebuilt from scratch.” (I contain multitudes: yesterday I wanted Silicon Valley Bank burned to the ground; today I am not in an abolitionist frame of mind.)

The answer that all of higher education needs a massive transformation of its leadership culture so that the people driving us forward are more in tune with the values and purpose of higher education has some validity (if implausibility). It would at least lead to better strategic wisdom in the face of the horrifying existential threat posed by a political class that has decided to stop using higher education as an alibi for their failures to produce an economy that makes human life better and have instead decided to declare it a cultural enemy that needs to be outright destroyed as the first stepping stone to an authoritarian takeover. You can’t accommodate or adapt or partner with that, and the only way to really fight for survival is to be crystal-clear on what you’re fighting for.

But the more immediate—and more plausible—thing to consider that even the current leadership class might be able to process in some limited way is that the vast middle apparatus of higher education institutions is what is absolutely killing joy, passion, beauty, values and purpose.

I was a big part of an earlier strategic planning process at my institution that chose to primarily focus on making statements about what we collectively valued. Our president at the time believed—I think sincerely—that this move was a strong gambit in terms of institutional design, that if you built the right commitments, the behaviors and practices of everyone working and studying within the institution would align with those foundational statements.

It will surprise none of my readers, I think, that it didn’t work out that way (at least as I saw it) and that the gap between what the statements said and what people did was immediate. E.g., it was not so much a matter of a short alignment that degraded slowly over time but an instant and never-closing gap. We said that we valued scholarship and in particular urged faculty to pursue bold new ideas, to pursue their work autonomously and creatively. And then I found myself only a year later in a series of meetings with a low-ranking administrator charged with one particular form of compliance who said that statement did not apply to their specific area of responsibility, and that this area of responsibility required them to vastly multiply formal procedures that faculty and students would have to subjected to and forms of regulation and supervision they would have to submit to in their research work. The deep statement of values—and the existing highly productive practices—were not even a speed bump. The topsy-turvy character of this mode of institutionality meant that higher leadership needed more than a year to even agree that there was a gap between what we said we valued and the kinds of compliance processes that were being churned out of this one office, and longer than that to even slightly rectify the situation.

This is the sort of thing that produces sour appraisals like Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty or Gayle Green’s Immeasurable Outcomes, and I am sure I sound here like I’m not far off that register, which I suppose I’m not. But I don’t know that I blame most of the people who are in those roles. (The one person I’m referring to above I do blame.) If you’re handed a compliance task, the one absolute marker of failure that will land squarely and consequentially on your desk is if your institution is judged at some later date to be non-compliant. Nobody above you in your reporting hierarchy wants to hear about trade-offs or values or consider how to challenge or reject the compliance regime: you have been stuffed down a certain kind of institutional murder hole and you’re expected to stay there. You are not the kind of expert in process or compliance that faculty are as experts: you are not expected to discuss, evaluate, debate, consider, investigate or critically inquire into your assigned responsibility. You run the slide-decks, you collect the forms, you elaborate the procedures, you superintend the collation of data. Which makes you someone who frequently breaks circuits of joy, energy, purpose and belonging. You are—even if you do not want to be—the equivalent of a person attaching a concrete weight to the ankles of someone the mob wants to sink to the bottom of the river. You end up requiring two pages of contractual language added to the beginning of a syllabus, routinizing disclaimers and introductions so that they contain no hint of liability or institutional promises. You make prose unreadable in order to perform an alignment between your institution and other institutions or your institution and government. (Read the opening of this great essay on AI and writing in the Sydney Review of Books for a lovely example.)

If there is a difference between fifty years ago and now, I’d say that not only was the vast institutional middle administration less vast at all universities and colleges, it was much more driven by maintenance than compliance. It was also more driven by stewardship rather than action. That’s the other thing: proof of life for much of middle administration in higher education is that you are being asked to provision evidence that the institution is making good on its promises of internal change: that it is more responsive to problems, more aware of the everyday life of the university community. That it is making good on utopian promises made in response to controversies, that it is making everything safe and secure, and yet somehow in all of that, changing nothing fundamentally. You are also responsible for providing proof that everything is excellence, that the institution is full of leaders, that all the outcomes are wonderful, that the university has no enemies, that all is well between the town and the gown. That all problems are being solved and that there are no problems. Saying otherwise is left either to faculty (who get framed as being bitter, adversarial, interruptive, unconstructive) or to upper leadership (who generally restrict any reflective engagement with problems to the Room Where It Happens, out of view of the cheap seats).

Of course that charge to middle administration ends up short-circuiting any loops of actual discovery, passion, and complex dialogue that already exist within the instructional mission or the co-curricular life of the university. The surreality of that working responsibility drives any thinking person into hiding their real thoughts and observations as surely as someone in the 1950s might have hid their sexual orientation, or it leads to putting a premium on hiring people who can endure the contradiction by having no interiority that might perturb enacting two contradictory gestures at once.

So I don’t just hope for a (return? a novel arrival of?) joy, excitement, beauty, values and purpose for the sake of faculty, as if it is our privilege alone. I want everybody working (and studying) to have it. I think for many people in the institution, that means less institutionality—I think it means that work should be about the maintenance and stewardship of what is functioning well where it is functioning well and about collaborative transformations where they’re needed—where debate and discussion and honest evaluation are always allowed and encouraged and nobody sends out a compliance memo that issues forth from some redoubt where its sense and sensibility are beyond questioning.

Image credit: Photo by Aleksandr Kadykov on Unsplash