Friends,
Following is a memo I sent to our faculty, to the student paper, the
university' newspaper, and the local paper in Pittsburgh. I'd
appreciate comments. Sorry, it's a bit long.-------m. yates
Michael Yates
LAMBS TO THE SLAUGHTER
I do not think that many faculty members would challenge the notion
that the University of Pittsburgh is run by persons who are primarily
managers and not academics. Certainly those on the Board of Trustees
are managers and often have much experience managing large
corporations. Those employed by the Board, the Chancellor and his large
staff, function as managers, although a few of them (and increasingly
fewer each decade) have some reputation as scholars. At Pitt-Johnstown,
where I work, our administrators have never been scholars and no more so
than at present when the very titles so common to academe have been
changed to reflect the managerial and business-like role those who hold
these titles are expected to play. We do not go to the Dean's office
but to that of the Vice President for Academic Affairs, or VPAA.
As any management expert will tell you, the essence of management is
control, control over every aspect of the enterprise. In most
workplaces, the one element which can impede the ability of management
to control its domain is the human element. That is why managerial
control is essentially a matter of controlling the organization's
employees, or to use a word that college teachers don't like to hear,
its workers. Over the past 150 years or so, managers have devised a
number of techniques for managing (controlling) their employees. These
techniques have been theorized and systematized, first by Frederick
Taylor, and many times since by his disciples. It is possible to learn
these techniques and the theory behind them in business schools,
seminars, and learned journals. We must have no doubt that our
administrators have studied the theory and practice of managerial
control and that they are busy applying what they have learned.
The most comprehensive system of managerial control has been pioneered
by Japanese automobile manufacturers and is known to its critics as
"lean production." It is based upon the twin ideas that every aspect of
work must be controlled to the greatest degree possible and that the
employees must be led to believe not only that this is good for them but
that they have some real say in directing their enterprise. With our
faculty senate and its ideology of shared governance, many of us have
already absorbed the second idea (Pitt-Johnstown President, Al
Etheridge, has used "focus groups" which serve the same purpose and have
the advantage of being controlled by him more directly than the senate,
which on rare occasion challenges administrative authority). The first
idea, however, is more radical, and poorly understood by most of us and
not at all by many of us.
The control over work is necessary if management is to contain costs
and enlarge the organization's surplus. There are many aspects to lean
production, some of which need not concern us, at least yet, because
they are impossible (at least so far) to apply to teachers. For
example, the job of teaching college students is not as susceptible as
are most other jobs to Tayloristic time and motion studies (But see
historian David Noble's fine article, "Digital Diploma Mills," Monthly
Review, Feb. 1998, pp. 38-52, for evidence that this is being
considered). Nor is the utilization of "just-in-time" inventory, an
innovation in which a firm keeps no stock on hand but rather has it
delivered just as needed, usually by an outside contractor (Here again,
however, the use of part-time teachers called upon just as needed, i.e.
without advance notice, can be considered a form of just-in-time).
Those features of lean production which are applicable to teaching are
the detailed division of labor, systematic hiring, stressing the system
(what the Japanese call "kaizen" or constant improvement), and
mechanization. The use of the division of labor is based upon the
"Babbage principle" after the mathematician and entrepreneur, Charles
Babbage (inventor of the first computer). The idea is to substitute
lesser-skilled (or cheaper) labor for skilled (or more expensive) labor
whenever possible. This we see being done with a vengeance with the
proliferation of part-time, temporary, non-tenure stream, and (in
Oakland) graduate student instructors. As more expensive faculty retire
or leave, they will be replaced whenever possible with cheaper and less
secure people. For example, it makes no sense to managers that I teach
two sections of Intro to Economics, a course which, from their point of
view, can be taught by anyone minimally qualified. So when I leave
Pitt, I will not likely be replaced with a full-time faculty member but
with part-timers. The two other courses I teach each term can either be
dropped, or if needed, taught by other part-timers or shifted to the
remaining teachers on an overload basis.
Systematic hiring fits in nicely with the Babbage principle. The idea
here is to hire people who can be easily controlled. Of course, most
new teachers do not have to be controlled since they have already
learned that they must behave themselves if they want to get tenure
(this, in turn, is partly a function of the glut of new teachers brought
about by the use of part-timers, temporaries, etc.). But part-timers
and the like are, almost by definition, so insecure that they will not
rock the boat, no matter what the administration does.
The two most important control mechanisms, in my view, are the stress
now being placed upon our system and mechanization in the form of
computers. On an automobile assembly line, stress is delivered by
speeding up the assembly line, reducing the amount of materials
available to workers, or taking a person off the line. Sooner or later,
a bottleneck appears along the line, indicated by flashing lights. Then
the management focuses attention on the trouble spot and the workers,
usually grouped into teams, are expected to solve the problem, but
without the stress being removed. When they solve the problem (by
working faster, for example), management has gained a reduction in unit
cost. Here at Pitt-Johnstown and no doubt throughout the University,
the stress takes the form of recurring budget cuts (these are usually
blamed on outside forces but are really the result of a well-thought out
plan). We are then expected to continue to teach an increasing number
of students with fewer resources. We are encouraged to believe that we
must all pull together to get through the crisis, though a minute's
reflection would tell us that the crisis is permanent and has already
consumed most of our work lives and that we suffer (as do all of the
school's other workers such as secretaries, maintenance and custodial,
and food service employees) disproportionately to the top administrators
who continue to draw the largest salaries and whose staffs continue to
grow. We "alleviate" the stress by teaching more overloads, doing more
class preparations, agreeing to larger class sizes, foregoing
sabbaticals, never asking for release time, paying for our own
conference trips, making fewer copies of articles, concurring with the
hiring of more part-timers and temporary instructors, and so forth.
The electronic revolution confronts us with the most extreme assault on
our traditional patterns of work. The handwriting is on the wall. The
future will see more and more distance education, the cloning of
lectures captured on video and sent out over the web, the forcing of
faculty to put their courses online, increased electronic monitoring of
faculty effort, and other such methods of substituting capital for
labor. If you do not believe me, just read the Noble article cited
above. Teaching as traditionally practiced is labor intensive and the
labor is not especially cheap. These facts are inimical to sound
business practice, so the obvious remedy is to replace us with machines,
the prices of which have been falling for quite awhile. As Noble puts
it:
Educom, the academic-corporate consortium, has recently established
their Learning Infrastructure Initiative which includes the detailed
study of what professors do, breaking the faculty job down in classic
Tayloristic fashion into discrete tasks, and determining what parts can
be automated or outsourced. Educom believes that course design,
lectures, and even evaluation can all be standardized, mechanized, and
consigned to outside commercial vendors. "Today you're looking at a
highly personal human-mediated environment," Educom president Robert
Heterich observed. "The potential to remove the human mediation in some
areas and replace it with automation�smart, computer-based,
network-based systems�is tremendous. It's gotta happen."
It is reasonable to ask why all of this is happening. The
proliferation of administrative staff, the extraordinarily high salaries
paid to top administrators and research faculty, the tremendous
expansion of buildings, laboratories, and computing equipment suggest
that it is not a true financial crisis which is to blame. Rather, I
think that the universities have become centers of accumulation, or, to
put it more bluntly, places in which a lot of money can be made.
Universities today are more concerned about generating patentable
research, often the basis for spinoff businesses owned by researchers
and administrators, and the corresponding alliance with private
corporations (which supply computer software and hardware, purchase the
patentable research, form partnerships with researchers and
administrators, and supply employment for the higher ups in the academy
when they leave academe) than with anything else.
It may seem heretical to some for me to say it, but the University, in
my opinion, has no sincere commitment whatever to the education of
undergraduates. If it did, it would not be employing the lean
production techniques outlined above, all of which are harmful to the
production of educated human beings. If it did, it would not be
implementing in Oakland a system of "differential teaching" in which
those who don't publish enough or bring in enough grants will be
punished by being forced to teach more. If it did, it would not allow
professors to "buy back" their courses by hiring part-timers to teach
them (I was once hired to teach a course in Oakland by a professor who
literally begged me to do it and who had never previously met me and
knew nothing about my background.). Undergraduates are simply a major
source of the large sums of money needed to convert the university from
a school into a business. These expenses are the main reason why
tuitions have risen by a much greater percentage than have prices for so
many years. And now that further tuition increases are getting
difficult to sustain, the university is coming after us, ruthlessly
cutting the cost of instruction and pressuring us to work harder (I
should note that some money has to be spent on students, mainly to
entertain them. In addition, students must be led to believe that their
"education" is the reason why their wages will be higher after
graduation than they would have been had they not gone to college. It
really makes no difference to the university and, sad to say, to most of
them, whether they learn anything or not).
In the face of what is nothing less than an attack upon the craft of
teaching, the reactions of the teachers are remarkably passive. Here at
Pitt-Johnstown, some of us keep our heads firmly in the sand; a few of
us have actually become cheerleaders for lean production. Others
continue to rely upon the myth that it is Oakland which is at fault, not
grasping the fact that our administrators are firmly positioned in the
corporate hierarchy which is implementing all of these policies. If our
administrators were really on our side, they would understand that in a
war, the generals have to do more than make private pleas. They have to
rouse the troops to action. If UPJ wanted more money from the
University, it would try to put enough pressure on the University to get
it. It would mobilize faculty, staff, and students to write letters,
send emails, march and demonstrate in Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, raise a
fuss in public meetings, and other such direct actions until the
University capitulated. But, of course, this is unimaginable. No
matter how odious our administrators might think a particular university
decision is, they always go along. They know who butters their bread.
The university has decided to try to break the union of maintenance and
custodial workers at Pitt-Johnstown over pathetically small sums of
money (to the university, though not to the financially strapped and
hardworking employees), a truly rotten thing to do, but not so awful
that any of our administrators would take a public stand against it.
Probably the most common faculty response is cynicism. We distance
ourselves from the college and refuse to participate much in its
affairs. This is an understandable response; after all, the crisis
forced upon us causes a lot of pain and anguish. But even as we are
cynical, we do indeed continue to solve the pressures created by the
continued stressing of our system. We do give up our sabbaticals; we do
teach larger classes; we do pile on the overtime; we do not challenge
our division heads when they tell us there is no money for anything; we
act as if it is impossible to do anything about the shrinking of the
tenure stream faculty. We are in worse shape than the lambs sent to
slaughter. Unlike the lambs, we can think. We could resist but we do
not.
What might we do? In the end, our only hope is to organize ourselves,
both at our own workplaces and with teachers around the world. But for
most faculty, this is too big of a step to take immediately. So, in the
short term, perhaps we can do some things to show the administrators
that we know what is going on and that we do not like it. First, we can
begin to speak out, in meetings and in private conversations. When
administrators say something ridiculous or simpleminded, we must
challenge them. We can challenge administrative policies with speeches,
with letters, with petitions, with emails, to them, to the media, to
politicians, to board members, any way we can. Second, we can refuse to
participate in our own demise. We can insist on our leaves and let the
university turn us down (We just received a memo cancelling all
sabbaticals for next year. So much for collegiality on this matter.).
And we can appeal the decision and make it public. We can refuse to
teach overload. We can refuse to give up our syllabi and resist any
administrative prying into our classrooms. We can, at least if we are
tenured, refuse to give student evaluations; if we do give them, we can
refuse to show them to any administrator. These can only be used
against us, as is also the case for our year-end dossiers, which,
because the evaluation of them is subjective and based upon a personal
weighting of numbers or entries, are totally manipulable. We can refuse
to serve on committees, including those which hire new faculty members.
Third, we can offer our support to any group on campus, such as students
or other employees, who are resisting being sacrificial lambs.
Perhaps the cynics are right and nothing will come of any efforts we
make on our own behalf. I do not believe this, and the history of
resistance movements tells me that it is not true. But even if we
accomplish little, at least we will stop living on our kneew
