We're many years now into the New Normal for public universities.  We've known for a while that this means permanent budgetary austerity.  We get regular quantifications of the continuing funding problem. Another one, from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, calculates that appropriations fell 20 percent per full-time student from 2008-13, and 26 percent for public research universities.   


Michael and I have had to use this space to make a couple of further points.  One is that the New Normal directly damages faculty and student welfare.  You can see more material on this in a talk that Michael and I gave at UC Berkeley last fall. It tied budgetary austerity to the the decline in faculty welfare--and to weakening faculty governance, which I'll be discussing here.


The other point we've argued  is that senior public university managers and boards have accepted New Normal austerity in practice.  This year, after much stormy drama in Oakland and Sacramento, and a declaration of victory from President Janet Napolitano, UC's state budget increments remained a quarter of UCOP's previously-stated need (see Alternative C in the chart).  


In addition, the past couple of years have clarified the kind of executive governance that the New Normal assumes.  An early example was the June 2012 Board firing-rehiring of the president of the University of Virginia.  Since then, the heads of university systems and/or flagship campuses in California, Illinois, Wisconsin, Texas, Iowa and North Carolina have attracted national attention because they do not bridge the professional-managerial divide but represent the managerial side.   The managerial side has a theory of governance I'll outline, because both faculty and students need to figure out a better response to it.

Theory

The theory rests on venerable autocratic practice in private universities, many founded by wealthy magnates who assumed they would be governed like their corporations.  Top-down presidentialism and governing board sovereignty were also adopted by 19th century public universities. They have been reinforced by a movement led by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which was originally co-founded by Lynne Cheney. ACTA's theory of governance is that the brand and the agenda of a university must be owned by its board of trustees, who are the most--really the only--responsible agents in academia.  


During the summer that the University of Illinois was rescinding Steven Salaita's job, ACTA issued a report called Governance for a New Era.  Its premise was that the unprecedented criticism directed at the country's higher ed system required much firmer leadership from the top.  

Trustees should take a more active role in reviewing and benchmarking the work of faculty and administrators and monitoring outcomes. Too many have seen their role narrowly defined as boosters, cheerleaders, and donors. They should ask the questions that need to be asked and exercise due diligence. They must not be intermittent or passive fiduciaries of a billion dollar industry critical to the preparation of America’s next leaders.

Shared governance—which demands an inclusive decision-making process—cannot and must not be an excuse for board inaction at a time when America’s pre-eminent role in higher education is threatened.

ACTA claims that only trustees see the big picture.  "That is why trustees must have the last word when it comes to guarding the central values of American higher education--academic excellence and academic freedom."  Faculty may opine about their own freedoms, as the University of Wisconsin-Madison Senate recently did in writing restored tenure rights. But the scope of these freedoms, in ACTA theory, should be at the sole discretion of executive boards.   

In the ACTA new-era governance model, UIUC's then-Chancellor Phyllis Wise was not violating shared governance by firing Prof. Salaita, but fulfilling it.  A hundred years ago, the autocratic executive was already Veblen's nightmare, and autocracy's statutory bases largely remain in place.  (See the UC Regents' Standing Order 100 for presidential powers, which cover most management powers that there are, including control of a faculty member's ability to communicate with a regent).  Specific instances of board authority have been contested, as in the 2014 Kansas twitter controversy that Michael analyzed in the LARB, and in the Salaita lawsuit that was largely validated in its first court test.  But the theory of board power is not being challenged as such.

As they go about their business of maintaining the university's brand, boards are asked to remember that universities are failing (this was a core thesis of the Spellings Report), that faculty as the traditional core are responsible for those failures, and that faculty will therefore accuse boards of damaging academics in order to deflect blame.   That's what faculty always say when their interests aren't being put first, ACTA teaches, so faculty complaints can (and must) be ignored.  Thus it was a kind of badge of honor for the Iowa board to defy the faculty view that semi-retired businessman Bruce Harreld was unqualified to lead the University of Iowa.  The key ACTA innovation is teaching trustees to claim professional authority in serving as the sole voice of their university, which must also be able to override faculty in speaking in the name of students.  (Hence Chancellor Wise's claim to be protecting them in de-hiring Prof. Salaita). 


As though on cue (h/t Ragman), Regina M. Millner, President of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, writes in Trusteeship Magazine, "The important role of governing boards in setting the agenda cannot be overlooked or underestimated." Part of that role, Ms. Millner makes clear, is accepting fiscal austerity as a driver of positive change.  

In Wisconsin, deep cuts in general-fund support for the University of Wisconsin (UW) System have prompted us to reconsider how we can better align our resources to meet the needs and interests of the state and its people. It involves not just doing more with less, but fundamental changes to our planning, procedures, and programs.

Ms. Millner isn't only not sorry about the politically-imposed cuts to the UW system.  She treats austerity as way to override planning, procedures, and programs that in normal times were controlled by academics.  Again, this direct intervention is, in ACTAworld, what boards are supposed to do.

Executive board rule obviously contradicts basic democratic political theory and the related understandings of political rights. Of course American corporations are not democracies, and over the course of a century and a half they have established a legal framework that supports the various forms of dictatorial or military-style command that we take for granted. "Workplace democracy" remains anathema and at-will firing remains a sign of the U.S.'s proudly anti-democratic workplace--proudly in the sense that our business culture equates suppressing democracy with suppressing inefficiency.  


And yet universities have historically injected the rights of professional expertise (though not of democratic citizenship) into command-and-control corporate management practice.  Universities have always represented a third mode of governance that is neither political democracy nor corporate despotism.  It is into this ambiguous zone of limited, ambiguous, academic self-governance--limited like the wi-fi signal that only covers your living room--that ACTA and subtler entities intervene, the better to assimilate university governance to the corporate model.  

Practice




The claim that university management is increasingly and deliberately unilateral would have been heretical to most faculty a few years ago.  Few executives and board members echo ACTA directly, and most top-down interventions seem driven by external crises. But recent events have shifted faculty perceptions.   


One example is the University of Wisconsin.  When Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative allies bundled budget cuts to the elimination of tenure from state statute, UW system president Ray Cross and Madison chancellor Rebecca Blank seemed to be caught between the pols and their faculty, in the classic bridge position. (For background, see Michael's overview or my IHE piece).  But over the months of negotiation, many faculty members began to feel that President Cross was trading stronger tenure away--and that perhaps Chancellor Blank was backing him against her own faculty.  Many concluded that senior managers' defenses of professorial status were fronting for expansions of their authority.


The issue blew up again two weeks ago, following the publication of an October 22 email from Chancellor Blank in which she stated that President Cross was not in fact backing the right of faculty to write new campus-based tenure protections.  The press coverage (local here and here and IHE here) and faculty analyses concluded that Board members and top officials were indeed going to impose weaker state standards on faculty rather than support faculty's professional claims.  Good faculty analyses include Prof. Nick Fleischer's "UW Tenure: the End" and Prof. Nancy Kendall's Open Letter to the UW Madison Faculty.   I'll come back to the Kendall letter below.


Another example comes from California, where the generally deferential UC Academic Senate objected this summer to President Janet Napolitano's disregard for Senate consultation.  On August 25, 2015, outgoing Senate chair Mary Gilly wrote to "highlight four notable instances from this past year in which we believe the Senate was insufficiently consulted on issues where its advice would have made a positive difference."   Two of these involved the Office of the President starting academic programs without running the plans by their academics.  The third was the "drastically lowered cap" in the defined benefit portion of the UC Retirement Plan, again imposed "without any Senate consultation." The fourth was UCOP conveying to the Regents a June 2015 Rand Health Report on UC Health System governance without any Senate comment.  


Chair Gilly concluded with the hope that non-consultation was not UCOP's preference but was thrust upon it by "difficult negotiations with the State government."  But her letter appears to have been prompted by a more severe comment from the University Committee on Planning and Budget (UCPB), in which the chair of that committee, L. Gary Leal, noted that "the November budget was actively withheld from UCPB until the day before it was presented to the Regents" (emphasis in original).  He listed a series of fundamental budget conditions, including the addition of 5000 students at a discounted general fund rate of $5000 per head, that were never discussed with the faculty.  "Even for the 3% salary increment," he adds, "where we (and other Senate committees) had very strong recommendations, the actions were quite different and the rationale was not explained or discussed either ahead of time or after the fact."


Replacing actual with merely formal shared governance isn't only a matter of bad organizational theory, for it has negative real effects. One has been UCOP's creation of a task force to change the UC Retirement Plan via the cap on eligible salary noted above and a new Defined Contribution plan (DCP), the latter in direct opposition to the recommendation of the last full review of the pension plan in 2010.  The lack of open discussion about the sources, motives, and goals of these changes has sown confusion and suspicion even among insiders to the process. One writes,

I have been asking UCOP for a copy of the agreement between UC and the governor [that supposedly requires the DCP], and no one can produce it.  No one can also say what its status is or how it relates to the state budget, but campuses are making decisions on 3-year degrees, transfer students, and online education on the deal that, as far as I can tell, no one has ever seen. I had to convince two members of the pension task force that the DCP alternative is not in the state budget.  So UC wanted it in the deal, it did not make it into the deal, and now UCOP is saying it is coming from the state or the governor.

When a few people order major changes to an institution with 450,000 students and staff without consultation, deliberation, or even written documents, it's a textbook case of oligarchy.  We need to be able to use such words, even as ACTA and the broader management culture define oligarchy as progress.




Responses


The traditional Senate response is to invoke consultation protocols and declare their value.  Prof. Leal does this well, noting that "UCPB has, in the past, been an important source of knowledgeable advice to the University administration." Having been there for most of the 2000s, I can confirm that this is completely true: UCPB got key issues right well before UCOP did, particularly the secular trend of declining public funding and the urgent need to explain it to the public. In a cooperative spirit, Chair Gilly ended by writing, "we look forward to improving communication between UCOP and the Senate and on devising better methods for responding to timelines that are external to UC."


In reality, the problem is not that the Senate can't communicate or respond quickly.  Faculty members write grants, teach classes, and give speeches on strict deadlines that we continuously meet.  Communicating to deadline is a core faculty competence.  Admin denies this ability only as a pretext for withholding information and avoiding discussion.  The Senate's appeal to UCOP conscience underplays the extent to which non-consultation is a deliberate strategy.


A non-traditional faculty response appears in the letter by UW-Madison Professor Nancy Kendall that I mentioned earlier. She starts by noting that a group of faculty and staff were right when admin was wrong, particularly on the point "that Act 55 would not simply move existing tenure policy from state legislation into Board of Regents policy." 


She elaborates this later: Chancellor Blank "told us Act 55 wouldn't fundamentally change tenure or shared governance. She was wrong.  She told us that UW-Madison would be able to make its own tenure policy, unencumbered by the System policies foisted on other campuses.  She was wrong." These statements are important both for establishing the factual record and for modeling faculty treating executives as equals rather than superiors, as members of the same community.


Prof. Kendall goes on to call out attacks on skeptics that labeled them as too extreme for reasonable faculty to work with. These attacks "need to be acknowledged and addressed--through public apologies where warranted, and through acknowledgment from those of us who have benefited from their efforts to educate us."  




Having highlighted the administration's mistakes, its presumption to stand above the critical community, its efforts to ostracize critics, and the need to reverse that ostracization, Prof. Kendall proposes faculty unity across campuses and status:

We are part of a system, but we have not acted as such, believing ourselves to be insulated by our “special” status as the state’s flagship university. This is elitist, it is morally shameful, and it is political suicide. None of us is more deserving of tenure than our colleagues at every other campus in this system. That is and must be the core of the tenure argument: every faculty member needs tenure in order to be able to teach, conduct research, and communicate our ideas freely, without political or administrative pressure. When some faculty lose tenure, the moral basis for arguing for tenure is undermined. Indeed, instead of throwing faculty at other campuses under the bus, or arguing that tenure is only important to help retain “star” faculty on our campus, we should be working with colleagues across the state to expand tenure protections to employees who currently conduct teaching and research on our campuses without these protections.

Prof. Kendall is calling for faculty solidarity--the clear prerequisite to meaningful influence--by articulating the ethical value of the freedom to teach, learn, and govern. This forms the basis of an alternative, education-centered vision of what the university should be. 


I share Prof. Kendall's organizational ethics (I've also argued for expanded tenure in the IHE piece linked above).  The related practical point is that she also offers more effective organizational behavior.  The critical self-governance exemplified by the letter cures boardroom blindness by immersing senior managers in the actual life of the institution. It supports the "learning organization's" proverbial "cross functional teams." It increases creativity by sharing data and expanding deliberation.  It makes criticism an asset rather than an excuse for shunning people.  It sees freedom and democracy as intrinsic to higher learning.   


Nancy Kendall's open letter seems confrontational, and it is.  But is also a better management theory than the hard-ACTA of its reports or the soft-ACTA of everyday senior managers, both of which hold universities back. 

Photo:  John D. Rockefeller and William Rainey Harper (respectively on right-hand side) at the University of Chicago, 1901

The Chronicle Review gave the title "Professorial Anger, Then and Now" to my essay on Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America, which has now been republished by Johns Hopkins University Press with a helpful historical introduction by Richard F. Teichgraeber III.  The piece is behind a paywall, so I'll say a few things out here.

Most things about academia angered Veblen on some level, like this very title about professorial anger which would have told him he was being relegated by Know Nothings to the status of entitled jerk.  It's true that what Veblen did was frosty, relentless, sarcastic critique, not blood and fire.

My piece outlines Veblen's four main arguments about why "the conduct of universities by business men" actually wrecked higher learning.  His point wasn't only that business folk engaged universities in competition for student market share that squandered resources, or that they twisted academic governance into oligarchy, though he did go into detail on these two.  He made additional points.  One was that business consciousness could not because of the game it played ever grasp or support academic research, like never.   He wasn't saying business people were dumb or evil. To the contrary, they were smart and cunning at a market game that Veblen insisted obeyed an essentially different logic than did unrestricted thought. To quote myself:

The business outlook was equally suspicious of originality. Chasing one another to provide the latest research in vogue, university administrators didn’t ask whether they had something original or special to offer. Their search for revenue led them to imitation, duplication, and the expensive enlargement of what Thomas Kuhn would later dub "normal science." They saw it, in Veblen’s analysis, as "‘bad business’ to offer a better grade of goods than the market demanded, particularly to customers who do not know the difference" — like the families of American undergraduates, who would believe almost anything in the hope of giving their children an edge. Veblen’s warning was that business opposition to scholarly standards of quality was not accidental or occasional, but intrinsic to business thought as such. Even administrators who started out as faculty members ceased thinking like professors and conformed to business logic.

In the essay I cover other dimensions of business thinking that Veblen saw as natural disqualifications.

I was equally interested in Veblen's detailed explanations of what academic reason actually is.  He worked quite hard to conjure forth the fragility and ephemeral nature of thought as it feels its way forward in the darkness. New ideas and surprising answers don't resemble research proposals or business plans for they emerge like movements in a dream.  He had quite a bit to say about the need to protect and serve thinking that was sufficiently unmanaged to produce real discovery and understanding in an economy that was trying to absorb everything into itself.

Prof. Teichgraeber writes about three decades of the "professor's literature of protest" that informed Veblen's critiques.  There was a professor's movement!  It had a result!--the founding of the American Association of University Professors almost exactly a hundred years ago.  The philosopher John Dewey presided. The AAUP's major issues--faculty freely communicating with governing boards, sharing influence over administrative hiring, controlling faculty hiring and grievance, and co-governing finances--are still up for grabs today.  During the post-World War II growth boom, universities enjoyed a kind of détente between faculty and administration, since most conflicts could be solved with program expansion and taking turns until all the players had a similar number of cards.  The allocation machine stopped working right: tenure track lines were converted to contingent jobs, which are now 2/3 of the higher-ed teaching workforce. A majority temporary faculty would have been incomprehensible to Veblen--if sadly typical of business's idea of a good efficiency.  This contingent-majority is now experiencing the intensification of senior management intervention into funding, governance, and education itself (Virginia, California, Oregon, Illinois, Louisiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina   . .). The post-war détente has come to an end.

Ironically this means that Veblen has more to say than ever.  End runs or overturning of faculty governace is being justified by Veblen's Nightmare--the apparently entrenched belief that business expresses universal reason that by rights presides over all human processes, including the making of knowledge itself.

To Veblen's Nightmare we can  add  Veblen's Vision, in which the scholars-scientists, recognizing that real research must be self-legitimating, finally write their own funding rules for the higher learning, and implement them.

As you may have noticed, recently university governing boards have been appointing Presidents and Chancellors under conditions of increasing secrecy and without wide consultation with faculty.  The University of Iowa is a recent case as is the University of North Carolina.  The following is a state from the University of North Carolina Faculty Assembly about the UNC Board of Governors' tendency to refuse to engage in shared governance.--Michael

The Leadership and Policy Statement of the University of North Carolina notes that the institution “operates under an arrangement of shared governance” that “honors the important traditional role of the faculty in the governance of the academy.” (http://www.northcarolina.edu/content/leadership-and-policy )

Regrettably, for the better part of a half decade, the UNC Board of Governors has repeatedly failed to follow its own stated principles of good governance. 

The UNC Faculty Assembly has faithfully advised the Board on best practices regarding admissions, tuition, financial aid, leadership appointment processes, curricular design, research and freedom of inquiry, and processes of peer review, yet the Board has repeatedly refused to acknowledge – let alone discuss – points of counsel they have been offered. Instead, they have frequently promulgated ill-advised policies and practices that have proven detrimental to the best interests of public higher education in this state.

The recent mismanagement of the Executive office of the University, from the firing of Thomas Ross, to the hiring of the new President, is but the most egregious in a long train of problematic governance actions.

The failure of the Board to seek the advice and counsel of the staff and faculty is both shortsighted and troubling. No student attends our campuses to be taught, no funding agency or organization provides grants of research support, and no business, governmental entity, or civic organization has come to our institutions seeking public service expertise, because of the teaching, research and service achievements of the Board of Governors or the President of the University. Yet the Board continues to act without the advice and counsel of the constituencies whose expertise they need to effectively govern the institution.

Over the years, the most effective and respected leaders of the University system and its respective campuses have argued that their success is contingent on the support of staff and faculty. We now appear to have entered an era when it is not support, but an ill-informed indifference, that defines how governing authorities in the University think of their relationship to those who carry out the core mission of public higher education. No institution of higher learning has ever achieved excellence and distinction without an active, engaged, and committed community of staff and faculty. It is then incumbent on the Board of Governors to now begin – as it always should have been -- cultivating effective shared governance if the University is to continue on the path of excellence and achievement.

The faculty will not prejudge the commitment of new President to the well-being of the University. But he or she must understand that the secretive character of this search, and his or her own indifference to consulting with staff and faculty when s/he was an active candidate for the position, will make it difficult to win the confidence and trust of the University community.

As this leadership transition unfolds, foremost among those confidence building principles must be a steadfast and unyielding dedication to seeking the best advice and counsel possible, and a readiness to stand against the debasement of institutional governance that has brought the future of the University into doubt.

22 October 2015

For the UNC system Faculty Assembly
Stephen T. Leonard, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chair

Gabriel Lugo, UNC-Wilmington, Chair-Elect

UPDATES:

Story comes to the surface about University of North Carolina's plan to hold emergency meeting to talk with president finalist Margaret Spellings (10/15).  This meeting is scheduled for Friday, 10/16, seemingly in an effort to bypass a bill not yet signed, which "requires the search committee to bring forward three candidates to the full board for discussion."

Amidst a call for John Fennebresque’s resignation (10/16) we see positive and negative discussion regarding What a Margaret Spellings Presidency Might Mean for North Carolina (10/16), with critiques on her political involvement (10/20) and her past actions combating LGBT equality (10/21).

Faculty continue to criticize UNC president search process (10/21), noting that '"The failure of the Board to seek the advice and counsel of the staff and faculty is both shortsighted and troubling.'  Concern over this lack of shared governance is widespread (10/22), as is the realization that Spellings is surely in (10/22).

Compiled by Alysse Rathburn

Chris here: Because U.S. academia is so decentralized and stratified, few new regimes have a national scope and can be hard to see coming.  The opposite is the case in the U.K., where the influence of Westminster can be felt at the same time on campuses across all four constituent countries, with the partial exception of Scotland.  External assessment increasingly defines and drives peer review in British universities.  In the hope of getting more U.S. academics thinking about the effects of external assessment. we're cross posting this piece from the UK's Sociological Review.  It offers a primer on the Research Excellence Framework and argues that it has had a negative impact on the depth and ambition of research in sociology--and by analogy, in other fields.

by Les Back, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths College London.

Twenty years ago public sociology was something you did in your spare time. Even writing for newspapers or magazines was thought of as an extra-curricula and extra mural pursuit. That all changed as a result of the debate stimulated by Michael Burawoy’s influential Presidential address to the American Sociological Association address in 2004 that called for a public sociology. Burawoy’s spirited appeal to revive sociology’s public mission licensed a wide range of productive arguments and unruly activities. I have always held the view that intellectual life is nothing if it is not addressed to a wider public.

More recently, and significantly in the UK, the emergence of the ‘impact agenda’ in British universities has forced academic researchers to evidence our influence on society and ultimately to justify our worth. In austere times universities are required to show that they are worth their salt. Indeed, this was legislated by the Treasury as part of the spending review in order to secure continued investment in university research. It is embarrassing to remember that some of us - at least initially - thought that ‘impact’ promised the possibility of institutional recognition for public sociology. Might the emphasis on relevance and engagement create a ‘public agora’ for sociological ideas of the kind described by Helga Nowotny and her colleagues?

Another President, this time of the British Sociological Association, had a very different view. John Holmwood warned in 2011 that it was “naïve” to think that the turn to impact would lead to an enhanced public sociology. Rather, he suggested in contrast that UK research would likely be “diverted into a pathway to mediocrity."  Surely not, I felt when I first read this piece: John, you are being overly pessimistic! How right he has been proved to be.

Academic research in the UK is evaluated and scored by periodic reviews of the research of every sociology department. This has taken different forms and the latest version is called the Research Excellence Framework. Sociologists are required to nominate four publication for review by a panel of senior academics within each field. Impact was institutionalized in the recent REF2014.  20% of the scores were measured through ‘impact case studies.’

The impact case studies were required to narrate and evidence the detail of the impact that the underpinning research had on society and they either focused on individual staff members or clusters of academics. These impact case studies were scored by ‘practitioners’ working in applied areas that were added to the overall judgment of the REF panel. In case readers need to be reminded, HEFCE defined public value of impact along the following lines:

Impact includes, but is not limited to, an effect on, change or benefit to:

• the activity, attitude, awareness, behaviour, capacity, opportunity, performance, policy, practice, process or understanding

• of an audience, beneficiary, community, constituency, organisation or individuals

• in any geographic location whether locally, regionally, nationally or internationally. 

Also, the number of impact case studies required for each unit of assessment varied according to the number of staff submitted for the assessment. Small submissions of up to 15 members of staff required just two case studies, while large submission of over 35 members of staff required five cases studies.

It seems clear that impact is here to stay. At present it is likely to increase to 25% of the grade for each unit of assessment in the next REF2020. A whole infrastructure is emerging to assess the assessment, where consultants act as ‘Impact Tsars’ and offer advice and software designers are developing digital tools to trace and matriculate the public imprint of our research endeavors.

The shame of the Research Excellence Framework is it secrecy: all the data on the process of the decision-making was destroyed. There is no mechanism for appealing or questioning these judgments. While the list of panel members is public, the specific reviewers are anonymous and therefore individual department's sociologists do not know who is judging them and whether or not they are qualified (see Derek Sayer's analysis). The level of feedback is insubstantial, while the results have profound consequences for each unit of assessment in terms of their income and academic reputation.

In large part the "impact agenda" has licensed an arrogant, self-crediting, boastful and narrow disciplinary version of sociology in public. This is impact through "big research stars" that are scripted – probably by the editors of the impact case studies rather than themselves – as impact "super heroes" advising cabinet ministers and giving evidence to parliamentary select committees. This version of public intervention is by definition narrowly concerned with evidencing its own claims. It is aligned with providing a kind of reformist “empirical intelligence” that nudges at the edges of policy and political influence. Reviewing the 96 REF2014 impact case for sociology, 80% of them can be categorised in this way.

That isn’t the whole story and 20% of those impact case studies entered showed radical ambition. What was inspiring in the best of the impact case studies is how they also point towards a different kind of model of public engagement by challenging campus sexism though collaboration with Students Unions or creating archives of political activism. In the most appealing and compelling cases, clusters of scholars worked together to try and shift the public agenda through evidence and critical enquiry that challenged conventional thinking be it around race and segregation or casual forms of class stigma and hatred. These examples offer an alternative way to think about how to hold to a public commitment within the current climate.

In 1967 Howard S Becker wrote an influential essay called ‘Whose Side Are We On?”. This essay is often understood simplistically as a sociological call to simply to align with the underdog. It is important to note that Becker’s argument is critical of sentimentality that also can be blinding while posing in colours of radicalism. Rather, Becker says it is not possible for a sociologists to stand outside the issue of value and values: “the question is not whether we should take sides, since we inevitably will, but rather whose side we are on."

For all of our radical affections and promises, a close look at the public portrayals of sociology in REF2014 show the ‘impact agenda’ to be tinkering with minor reforms. In the final analysis, this agenda puts us on the side of the political elite, Ministers of State, Job Centre Managers, Immigration Officers and the apparatchiks of prevailing government policy. Bluntly, it puts us on the side of the powerful.

Is that version of sociology worth its salt? Is this a compromise too far for the discipline? Some will say, “well this is ‘just a neo-liberal game” and this “isn’t all of sociology.” They are right. Not every sociologist in Britain has to write an impact case study--yet. They might also console themselves with the idea that this is just a language game: we need to play and not take it too seriously. I would suggest that these patterns amount to more than that. The ‘impact agenda’ is coming to constitute our self-understanding, guide our decisions around job appointments, and I would go further to suggest it limits the public ambition of our discourse. Remember that next time someone says: “I think that might make a really good impact case study.” This preoccupation is acting as a filter for our sociological attention.

It is a reminder to those of us who feel that sociology has or had radical potential that ‘the public’ is not necessarily populated by incipient transformative forces and potentials. Burawoy’s conception was limited by leftist assumptions regarding the radical potential of civil society. What we are seeing is something much closer to Antonio Gramsci’s characterization of ‘organic intellectuals’ who are tied to the interests of institutions and a narrow set of functions that are “organisational and connective”. Edward Said, commenting on Gramsci’s prescience, wrote that, as a result, “organic intellectuals are always on the move, on the make”. This is reminiscent of today’s “impact agenda” and the opportunistic way we have been steered to think about sociology in public, where the bottom line becomes “can I make this into a impact case study?” We are required – by our institutional commitments and responsibilities – to be on the move and on the make.

Today sociology’s radical ambition is being dwarfed by a conservative and timid version of the discipline. This is what we are seeing in the Research Excellence Framework, which itself produces an academic performance of self that is in keeping with its own definition of public value. There are other ways to think of public sociology that return us to Buroway’s intervention of more than a decade ago. His vision of sociology in public might be usefully supplemented with the educational ethos that is steeped in the tradition of extra-mural studies led by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall and out of which cultural studies emerged.  This was a communal vision of higher learning or what the Worker’s Education Association called a collective highway.


A sociology with and for the public, is, I would argue, one that is humble, collective, dialogic, inventive, artful and trans-disciplinary.  Here sociological ideas can offer a navigation device or a compass and a way of attending to what is before us but also to determine our direction of travel. That would be a future sociology worth its salt.  But it is not one supported by the REF assessment system.

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations and the American Association of University Professors write to protest the following remarks made by University of California Regent Richard Blum and then supported by Regent Hadi Makarechian during the discussion of a proposed Statement of Principles Against Intolerance at the Board of Regents meeting on September 17, 2015:

“I should add that over the weekend my wife, your senior Senator, and I talked about this issue at length. She wants to stay out of the conversation publicly but if we do not do the right thing she will engage publicly and is prepared to be critical of this university if we don’t have the kind of not only statement but penalties for those who commit what you can call them crimes, call them whatever you want. Students that do the things that have been cited here today probably ought to have a dismissal or a suspension from school. I don’t know how many of you feel strongly that way but my wife does and so do I.”

These remarks by Regent Blum explicitly invoke his wife, U.S. Senator from California Dianne Feinstein, and threaten negative political consequences for the University if the proposed Statement of Principles Against Intolerance is not revised so as to be agreeable to him and Senator Feinstein.  As such, they violate the spirit, if not the letter, of Article IX, Section 9 of the California Constitution, which declares that "The university shall be entirely independent of all political or sectarian influence and kept free therefrom in the appointment of its regents and in the administration of its affairs."

Whatever varied opinions we may hold on the proposed Statement of Principles or any other matter for University discussion, we should all join in rejecting any attempt by a Regent to influence University deliberations by calling on external political forces in this manner.

The complex and competing issues involved in developing a suitable Statement of Principles Against Intolerance are matters of discussion and intellectual inquiry within the University. The purpose of academic freedom is to protect such inquiry from external political interference, and it is the duty of the members of the Board of Regents to uphold academic freedom and to protect the university from external constraints on this freedom. So it is very troubling to hear a Regent make statements that directly undermine free inquiry and the independence of the University. It is particularly disconcerting in this case, because among the central issues are academic freedom and free speech.

We understand that individual Regents, in their private capacity, like many others in the community, may hold strong views on this and many other issues. However, in their official capacity, the Regents have the responsibility to uphold the rights of University administrators and faculty to determine internal University policies through established processes of shared governance free of external political pressure and threats from any source, including the Regents' own spouses, relatives and friends. We call upon the Regents, the President, and the Provost to provide explicit assurances that they will support and protect the independence and integrity of the continuing discussions of a possible Statement of Principles Against Intolerance.

You can find more information at: 

http://cucfa.org/2015/09/statement-on-regent-blums-remarks/

AND

http://academeblog.org/2015/09/25/cucfa-and-aaup-statement-on-uc-regent-blums-remarks/