Bean-Counters Invade the Campus: Can a Philosopher Be Cost-Effective?
Sometimes I go hiking in the middle of the week, strolling slowly up the summit of San Gorgonio Mountain, for instance, to sit down and think. This is the life afforded by the University of California, where in the normal course of things my presence is required on the campus only every now and then. Summers are free from even these restrictions. Time is nearly all my own, to do with as I please.
But what happens if hiking pleases me more than doing research and preparing courses, what happens if I merely show up for my classes and then go home again to play or sit or drink? Now that I have tenure, nothing can be done.
Professors only rise in academic rank. They cannot be sent down again, once they’re tenured in. Yet the life of leisurely reflection is paid for by the public, for a purpose, and if that purpose isn’t served, then there’s no sense paying for it. So various suggestions are being made, for demoting full and associate professors, in some cases even to take away their tenure, to fire or retire them for incompetence or laziness. It all makes sense on paper, but it may result in cutting down the forest for the trees.
It would, of course, be better to rejuvenate those scholars dying of malaise. But failing that, it once seemed best to let the deadwood rot quietly away, rather than to take the risk of destroying everything that has taken centuries to grow. Times have changed.
In England, where leisurely reflection was perfected, Oxbridge scholars now sing the blues. Margaret Thatcher’s new education scheme would abolish tenure and bring on other changes which threaten cloistered quietude.
Thatcher would do away with tenure in favor of contracts. This might dispose of deadwood, sure enough, but it would also cut down whole departments as redundancies--in philosophy, geography or classics, for example--once it appeared to bureaucrats that there were too many persons holding on to those public jobs. In this way, Oxford dons could now be fired, once their work was no longer in demand, regardless of their individual accomplishments as scholars or as teachers. This new economy would extend to research contracts, too, where grants would from now on be awarded the way advances are for books. And if the work is not produced as stipulated, the money would have to be repaid, with interest.
British teachers and professors are apoplectic over these proposals, but the scholars are proving powerless against the cost-effective boys, not to mention budget-conscious politicians. The government, Thatcher claims, cannot afford to pay for metaphysicians and literary critics--a thought that might prove popular to those in economically advantageous fields, not to mention the general public.
The dons complain that a bureaucracy cannot be trusted to make the right decisions, to weigh the value of a degree in classics against psychopharmacology. Furthermore, turning research funding into contracts would encourage short-term projects over long-term gains. English scholars also point to the brain drain of their best and brightest, who are taking up positions in the United States in droves.
Actually, America’s public institutions for higher education have been thinking along Thatcher’s lines for quite some time, using cost accounting as the basis for decision-making within the universities, albeit at the state and local level. Although the onslaught against tenure and redundancies has yet to make its presence widely felt, cost-benefit analysis abounds, not just from the top on down, as is the case in England, but also from the bottom up, even from those same faculty whose jobs might one day be at stake. It is not just that new positions are awarded on the basis of bodies in the classroom, so that as the bodies come and go, positions follow willy-nilly. Faculty regard each other’s contributions in quantitative terms as well.
In the UC system, promotion and merit pay increases are largely controlled by faculty personnel committees. Yet faculty are often at a loss how to judge one another’s work. As specialties have multiplied from the sciences on into humanities, members of the same department can often barely comprehend each other’s research, much less can other academics on personnel committees. Consequently, it is all so very understandable just to count the pages, instead of reading what is written on them. And so the quantity and length of publications weigh heavily in awarding tenure and promotions, even though we all admit that too much is being written and too little being read. The same quantitative calculation works for teaching too, by adding up the scores on standardized evaluations, typically measures of a teacher’s popularity, in lieu of what was learned in class.
It seems too daunting to determine what makes for a good teacher or for a scholar’s insight, because that requires moral and aesthetic judgments. So quantitative claims are made instead. The trouble is, if the faculty are daunted by quality decision-making and resort to numbers games, who can blame bureaucrats and legislators if they do the same? In our brave new world it is no wonder if tenure and tradition should now be out of date.
It is hard to judge what you cannot understand. This is as true of the public as it is within the university. If faculty cannot command respect from the outside world for what it is they do on campus, then this may well result in a corresponding failure to be funded. Once public good-will fades, then state and local politicians might prove as intolerant of humanistic research, as Thatcher is in England. And unless something can be done by faculty themselves to clear away the deadwood, economic survival measures stand ready to cut the whole place down.
It is a dilemma of modernity. We resort to economic thinking once we’re paralyzed to make decisions otherwise. Cost-benefit determination takes the place of recognizing intrinsic worth. In a climate such as this, it is no wonder if a university decides to run its own affairs that way or if the government itself does so.
What is missing is the practical wisdom to discriminate, as well as the confidence that reason can be sufficiently discerning, unaffected by self-interest or ambition. Oddly enough, this was something the public was supposed to learn on campuses. Because so many faculty members lack a practicing wisdom of their own, they fail to serve the public in this way. As a result, these same faculty have become vulnerable because of their own paralysis of reason. And we run the economic risk of destroying institutions of higher education in the interest of efficiency, because the very conception of quality escapes us.
