Former university presidents: stop blaming faculty for your mistakes

As a professor for almost 50 years, I certainly do not absolve faculty of all responsibility for the plight of higher education today. But I am struck by the recent ramping up of a tradition of more than 60 years of university presidents (especially former ones) publicly blaming faculty for every problem that universities and students face.

In the 1960s and 1970s, faculty and students were both blamed for universities’ awkward and vacillating stances on the civil rights and then the anti-war movements, with some university leaders supportive and others remaining silent or opposing students and faculty. Later, faculty were accused of introducing new forms of discrimination by supporting affirmative action, broadly defined from equal opportunity to Diversity-Equity-Inclusion. The real sources of discrimination, of course, were universities’ historic practices – often under the influence of trustees and/or politicians – which their leaders had done far too little to overcome.

These illegitimate, unprofessional manipulations typically contradict administrators’ wholesale statements about the moral and intellectual roles of colleges and universities in advancing the social, moral and civic orders. As false reasons for higher education’s missteps, they join the excessive financial “cost” of tenured faculty, never truly “shared governance” and purported “resistance to change” by faculty. The multiple failings of administrators, trustees, legislators and, most of all, leaders themselves are ignored – or perhaps not even recognised.

Take former Macalester College president Brian Rosenberg’s new book, Whatever It Is, I'm Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education. The Dickens scholar, who led the private liberal arts college for 17 years, repetitively asserts but does not document consistent and powerful faculty “resistance” to “change”, which he blames for the absence of the latter.

This flatly contradicts a 75-year post-war history of constant change. Examples include changes in entry requirements, general education and specialisation strictures, “student experience” (this is becoming ever more “exceptional”) and, especially, financial aid, amid constantly rising tuition and, especially, hidden fees. And if that change has not always been well planned, funded, implemented or monitored, that is not faculty’s fault. Is the view from a tiny college (2,300 students, $70,000 (£56,000) tuition) really so obscuring?

Now “retired president in residence” at Harvard Graduate School of Education, Rosenberg picks and chooses small, unrepresentative examples to spin an unsustainable narrative that blames everyone except the CEO.

Rosenberg is not alone. He has louder and shriller companions. Former Indiana governor and Purdue University president Mitch Daniels recently joined the blame deflection game, publishing an article in the Washington Post, “How the tenure trap paralyzes higher education”, asserting that if only it were easier to fire academics all in the higher education garden would be rosy.

When he was termed-out as the Republican governor of Indiana in 2012, Daniels was appointed (by trustees whom he had either appointed or reappointed) as president of his state’s major, technologically-oriented public research university, Purdue, despite having no relevant experience; the major mark he had left on education was to foreshadow right-wingers’ hysteria over books they don’t like by banning critical but not Marxist historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the U.S. from all Indiana public schools – even though the book was not used in any Indiana schools at that time.

Nor, it seems, did 10 years as Purdue president teach Daniels much about higher education’s financial realities. The fact is that tenured professors are now a small minority of all new hires and a decreasing percentage of all active instructors – Daniels is wrong logically and historically to assert that they are in any way responsible for current budgetary problems. Indeed, tenured professors are the victims, not the cause, of the sector’s current financial problems. Wage costs at universities are considerable, but most of the money pays for the untenured faculty and non-teaching staff with whom retiring tenured faculty are typically replaced.

Daniels also ignores (or is unaware of) the whole reason that tenure – career-long, not lifelong, as he misleadingly asserts – was established: the long struggle for faculty free speech, including First Amendment rights. Job security is especially important to protect scholars against political ideologues in university presidents’ offices, who might otherwise seek to fire those who make public pronouncements with which they disagree.

So appealing to right-wing politicians in red states such as Daniels’ Indiana and my own Ohio, these “blame-the-faculty” voices ring as loudly as they do damagingly. We need a new discourse and set of proposals about higher education that are at least based on current and historical realities – complex and conflicting as the historical currents often are.

Ex-presidents’ articles and books are probably the last places we should look for such remedies given their apparent blindness to where the blame for our current predicament truly lies.

Harvey J. Graff is professor emeritus of English and History, inaugural Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies and academy professor, Ohio State University. He is currently writing Reconstructing the “Uni-versity” from the Ashes of the “Mega- and Multi-versity”.