Two images of the modern academic sit uneasily beside each other. One is the image of the ivory-tower idealist, the institutional Don Quixote, the radical who rejects free-market competition as a means of organizing our professions, institutions, and ways of life. The other image — more true to life — is the frazzled workaholic who feels guilty taking a weekend off, who compares the academic job market to The Hunger Games, who perseverates on news that the economics department just got four more tenure lines while “we” have gotten none. Academics tend to bristle at systems that reduce our lofty objectives to just another form of cutthroat competition. But cutthroat competition provides much of the structure of our professional lives.
This dilemma is a source of discomfort for many of us. We attempt to resolve it by externalizing the conflict altogether. We say we are captured by a neoliberal system that imposes competitive strictures on us, and that if the ground is always shifting beneath our feet, it’s not because we want it that way, but because the ground is really a treadmill.
There’s some truth to this view. Over the past decade, states have collectively reduced public funding for higher education by $9 billion, while state investment per full-time student fell from $8,489 in 2007 to $7,642 in 2017. This, in turn, has increased the student contribution to college budgets by nearly $2,000 per student. Funding cuts reflect waning support for the idea that a college education is a public good, and they place a greater burden on colleges and universities to compete for enrollments, grants, and tuition dollars. The consequent survivalist mentality filters down through departments, faculty members, and students, nudging all of us to do more and to do it better for the sake of showcasing our value in a zero-sum competitive system.
The continuing Covid-19 pandemic throws this phenomenon into stark relief. It cost about $80 billion to bail out the automotive industry in 2008-10, and about $700 billion to bail out Wall Street in 2008.The Department of Education estimates that eliminating tuition at all public colleges and universities would cost about $79 billion. Yet the possibility of a higher-education bailout to help us through the pandemic is not even on the table. Unlike the putatively competitive automotive and investment-banking industries, there is no relief from relentless competition in higher education. The expectation is that we compete or perish.
The way forward is therefore not to double down on competition. The way forward is to cooperate across divisions. And we can’t do that without making budgeting more transparent and collaborative. Faced with layoffs of both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty members — in addition to custodians and culinary and maintenance workers — faculty members at Ohio University have already started down this path, creating an open-source, alternative budget that proposes to avoid these and any other layoffs by trimming from senior administrative salaries and athletics subsidies, among other expenses.
The Open Source Alternative Budget is certainly a work in progress, and it has sparked contention over issues such as whether to trim the salaries of the highest-earning faculty members as well as the highest-earning administrators. There is also uncertainty about whether enrollment in the fall of 2021 will bounce back, as the document predicts. I suspect that the Ohio administration is not thrilled to debate these questions in full view of the public, a scenario they might have avoided if their budget decisions had been made in cooperation with the faculty.
The point here is not that budgeting processes must be open to the public, but that they should be more transparent and collaborative within our institutions. One way to begin is to hold at least one “State of the Budget” forum per year, where faculty and staff members would get updates on key financial data — a breakdown of revenue and the operating budget; an overview of investment strategy, salaries, maintenance, capital and construction projects, and so on. Faculty members don’t like being told something just is what it is without an evidence-based explanation. Opacity undermines trust. Administrators don’t like it when faculty members make unreasonable demands or carp about things that administrators are in no position to change. Being transparent about the budget addresses both of these problems. It’s also the beginning of a more collaborative process, one in which the faculty, among the most important of what we now call “stakeholders,” might actually hold some of the stakes.
Faculty members are not the only campus employees with expertise. The people who put together our budgets, for example, are experts in that domain. Regardless of field, the average professor can understand a budget if introduced to one. But few of us are experts in accounting or financial management. A transparent and collaborative budget process does not mean undermining the judgment and experience of financial officers and senior leadership. It means participating in decisions about what our institutions choose to value. Every budget is both a technical document, dependent upon forms of financial expertise, and a moral document, indicative of an institution’s nonpecuniary values.
Alongside this call for a more transparent and collaborative budgeting process, I would like to offer a more radical — if longer-term — proposal. We should re-evaluate the divisional model of organizing our institutions into administrative clusters of humanities, social science, and natural-science departments. Divisions do what the name suggests: They divide us, both epistemologically and functionally. Cooperative governance — whether building a budget, making staffing requests, or allocating research funds — is more difficult when the humanities look sideways at the social and natural sciences, the social sciences look sideways at the natural sciences, and everyone wonders what “they” get that “we” don’t.
For my part, I’m optimistic — if not quixotic — about such cooperation as a model of institutional governance, in part because I’m fortunate to work at a college where we’re pretty cooperative and transparent. Our president and senior administration have been open with our faculty about where we stand financially and how we plan to address the challenges brought on by the pandemic. Our entire faculty recently received a detailed financial report from the CFO, including a breakdown of several budget scenarios for how we can pull through Covid-19 disruptions.
It may be a function of scale, the fact that at a small liberal-arts college it’s virtually impossible to get along, let alone thrive, if you don’t engage in some degree of cooperation with people in different disciplines and sectors of the college. But small institutions may offer lessons, even if not all of them readily scale up. I’d like to think that if we start with a cooperative mentality and work across divisions to hash out our values and needs, coming to the table together is more likely to succeed in producing real change than coming to the table as competitors in a zero-sum game.