F*ck me. When I chaired the U Faculty Senate I warned the administration AND the faculty this would happen. And I engineered some crucial tools for the UFS to arrest this madness: independent authority to appoint and fund bodies to pursue inquiries and read findings into the minutes (specifically over admin compensation), and a model process for forcing central functions like IT to meet faculty-defined principles. Byzantine stuff, to be sure, but I made sure a core group of colleagues understood what those tools were for. The president and provost sure as hell did, and they were p*ssed. And here we are. A university that burns through 25% of its endowment isn’t just trying to survive, it’s also trying to prop up its value while its parts quietly go on the auction block.
“The McKinsey-fication of everything is not helpful,” Rachel Sherman, the chair of the sociology department, told me. “We have departments full of economists and social scientists. I’m not saying let the theater department do this, or that we can dance our way to solvency.”
[This article about [The New School U] has really brought back some buried rage. Like this bullsh*t from NSSR’s sociology chair (whoop-de-f*cking-do ☝🏼 ➿) trash-talking the arts. Umm, TNS runs on tuition revenues, and the overwhelming majority of those revenues come from the arts. This is a bit like, say, Paris Hilton slagging off travelers. The saddest part: NSSR’s political power within TNS is inversely proportional to its contribution to the university as a whole. There are some great people in that division, but they were never the ones connected to central admin; those ones were always the arrogant fools who threw their weight around, as if it’d all go on forever. Frankly, if Parsons had figured out how to jettison the rest of TNS, it might’ve turned out OK.