George MJ Perry has lately published two superb commentaries on dysfunction in higher education, both citing Prof. Kenneth Westhues's classic, The Envy of Excellence: Administrative Mobbing of High-Achieving Professors (Mellen Press 2006).
Perry is always worth reading at "Abuse of Process," and he publishes widely besides. I met Perry virtually through the most recent Niagara Conference on Workplace Mobbing (NCWM) in July. I became a fan immediately, and we connected after the conference.
Perry and I have in common an interest in the intersection of law, journalism, and sport. Perry is a track-and-field athlete, sport performance coach, businessperson, and writer. As well, Perry is a U.S. Navy veteran who specialized in submarine warfare, coincidentally the same as law librarian and veteran Misty Peltz-Steele, my wife and chief strategist.
At the Niagara Conference, Perry led an informative and riveting panel, "From Organizational Mobbing to Public Exile." The panel posited the credible and distressing thesis that contemporary media transform workplace mobbings into public cancellations—see the congruity I described in 2021—thus compounding the trauma inflicted on mobbing victims. The panel discussion touched on the adjacent subjects of media ethics, defamation law, and the right to erasure in data protection.
 |
| RJ Peltz-Steele with Google Gemini CC0 1.0 |
Since at least the early twentieth century, universities have flirted with America's penchant for "running things like a business." But like government, non-profits, and other non-businesses that try to be something they are not, universities' scattershot copycatting of business practices creates new harms to the institutions and the people within them.
More than "flirting," I'd say full-on embracing.
The thesis resonated with me, especially working at a public university that is not the state system's well endowed "flagship." Faculty achievement at my university often is quantified in dollars, i.e., how much grant money a faculty member brings in. Meanwhile we take precious few measurements of student attainment and do almost nothing to assess how our alumni enrich the world.
Similarly, curricular programs are assessed according to cost-benefit analysis. As a result, market demand in fields such as business and technology drives resource allocation to those departments. The likes of liberal arts are edged out. Poorly remunerative fields such as journalism operate at threadbare minimums.
My university is not unusual in this vein. But that's not how universities are supposed to work. In the classical conception, the university is a bastion of knowledge for its intrinsic worth. It is axiomatic that the preservation and dissemination of knowledge in all fields is essential for the advancement of human civilization. The founding of the University of Bologna in 1088 marked the endpoint of the Dark Ages, a time when Roman knowledge and law were rediscovered.
Today, higher education, especially in the United States and increasingly elsewhere in the world, is dominated by private commercial interests, a worrisomely pervasive demonstration of capitalism run amuck. In such an environment, the historical, civic responsibility of the public university should only be heightened over financial incentives.
Yet funding models for public universities such as mine run flatly contrary to the civic mission. Budgets come vanishingly from public subsidies, and rather from sport-aligned private fundraising (the "flagship" model) or eat-what-you-kill tuition and fees (the rest of us). Unsurprisingly, the result is a higher ed system that reflects ever expanding socioeconomic disparity as nakedly as K12 schools funded by property taxes—the original American sin, one might say.
Perry observed the irony that universities teach business, management, and public administration, yet seem themselves not to understand the important social role dictated by their not-for-profit status. And among the many hazards of running a university like a business is a deterioration of professional relationships built on trust, or what Westhues described as "unwritten rules [and] reciprocal loyalties."
Instead, academic interaction is reduced to the bottom-line letter of the business contract. Characteristically, at my university, where faculty are compulsorily unionized, the collective bargaining agreement (CBA) is the be-all-end-all. If a benefit or privilege is not in the CBA, faculty can forgeddaboudit. If there is a faculty duty in the CBA, then it is meticulously enforced, regardless of whether it serves evolving educational needs.
Perry quoted Westhues at the Niagara conference: "'Academic life has grown emptier, merely contractual. A market mentality has penetrated into more and more aspects of life. When everything has a price, nothing really matters.'"
That very deterioration of professionalism on the university campus leads to the problem Perry wrote about in an earlier piece in late October. For "Reality's Last Stand," he published "The University's War on Excellence." The piece explained why workplace mobbing and social cancellation occur with alarming frequency in the academic environment.
"Elaborate contracts are the prototypical 'inaccessible texts,' of which university bureaucracies are particularly prolific producers," Perry posited. Corollary to arcane contracts and procedures are written and unwritten human-resource assessments of who is and who is not a "team player." Such "[i]naccessible texts are easily weaponized in workplace mobbing," he wrote.
Antithetically, but correspondingly with the civic responsibility of the university, faculty are in a "weird" and very not-corporate employment arrangement. The administration works for the faculty, not the other way around. Tenure is a feature of this arrangement. It was designed to protect faculty from firing or other adverse employment action, both to shield expression of informed opinion on matters of public affairs, and to shield unpopular decisions in academic governance.
This arrangement is all but forgotten in the contemporary university-as-business model. Tenure has withered on the vine, as universities figured out how to circumvent it contractually. Courts shirked any role in social accountability for the university and deferred to reductionist contractualism. Perry aptly quoted Paul Siskind, legislative director at New York Healthy Workplace Advocates:
"Tenure, as a doctrine, says you can only be fired for just cause. In real life, employers can come up with very flimsy reasons and even lies that justify their 'just cause.' There is no accountability outside of the school itself unless you work for a union school, and then you have a grievance process."
But that, too, is a shallow promise.
"Due process doesn't mean that the procedure itself has to be fair and it doesn't mean that the outcome has to be fair. It just means they have a procedure and they followed it."
Mobbing researchers such as Prof. Peter Wylie (video) have demonstrated that unions, owing to their nature as collective actors, are as likely to be perpetrators of mobbing as defenders of victims.
With professional values undermined and labor guardrails stripped away, faculty are no longer shining guardians of the ivory tower. They are mere cogs in the machine, toiling to satisfy corporatocratic taskmasters. In this environment, excellence and merit give way to group-think and sycophancy. Base instincts run roughshod, and conditions are ripe for social dysfunctions in the workplace, such as mobbing.
At a union meeting last week—I went in my capacity as a representative of the law faculty, though I am not a union member—the brokenness of the system was evident. Rank distrust of the institution and abysmal morale were cautiously buoyed by "blue wave" election results. But, I thought but did not say, I have no confidence that purportedly labor-friendly legislators will care to effect any systemic change. They have in the past rather only shifted benefits to their own favored interest groups.
"Universities are upstream of culture, society, and politics," Perry observed. Ultimately, dysfunction in the university "is a cultural problem within universities, not a legislative or regulatory one."
So fixated are today's universities on the almighty dollar, I am skeptical that the ship can be turned around; that the creation and transmission of knowledge might ever again be the overriding university mission; that, dare I suggest it, we might reimagine universities as institutions that are supposed to lose money. Universities are supposed to be investments in the greater good, generating unquantifiable intangibles in the people who support, protect, and grow our very democracy and the rule of law.
I hope my skepticism is ill founded. It is disappointing to think that in the journey of human enlightenment since 1088, we are not on an ever ascendant curve, but on the downslope of a repeating waveform.
