Qualified Criticism: What Is A "Good" Administrator For?

What does it mean to say that Janet Napolitano is “unqualified” to be president of the University of California system? It suggests, in the first place, that other UC presidents have in fact had the necessary qualifications. Before becoming UC president in 2008, for example, Mark Yudof was president of the University of Minnesota and chancellor of the University of Texas. Before that he was an accomplished legal scholar. In other words, he has significant experience both as a faculty member and as an administrator. Does that mean he was “qualified” to be UC president? Or maybe it means that an administrator’s “qualifications” may not be the best way to judge if we want them to manage our university.

Yudof, we have to admit, was eminently “qualified” to be UC president. His “qualifications” were what allowed him to declare a state of fiscal emergency and orchestrate the subsequent 32% tuition hike. When Yudof became UC president, in-state tuition was $7,126—now it’s $12,946 (that’s an overall increase of 81%). It was because he was “qualified” that he treated workers as obstacles to efficiency, cutting their salaries and firing them essentially at will. For Yudof, faculty had no role to play in terms of shared governance but just stood in the way—“being president of the University of California,” he famously told the New York Times, “is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening.” For the same reason, he saw students not as an integral part of the university community but as a threat, consolidating a police force that consistently surveilled, harassed, threatened, and arrested them, beat them with batons, and shot them with rubber bullets—and even, on one occasion, with live ammunition. He was so “qualified” he was paid more than $800,000 a year to do this.

These days, as Yudof departs from the UC system, nobody is talking about such things. It’s all roses and tears—at yesterday’s regents’ meeting, he delivered his final, heartfelt statement. But the bottom line is this: Yudof was extremely “qualified” for the job, and he performed rather “effectively.” That is to say, he did the job that the president of a university is supposed to do. Privatize, corporatize, neoliberalize, financialize, whatever you want to call it, he did it—the University of California is a very different university today than it was five years ago when Yudof arrived. He was a “qualified” administrator and for that reason an “effective” president. And that’s exactly why we fought him at every step of the way. Because the university is not meant for him, or for the throngs of parasitic deans, deanlets, and deanlings who applaud and implement his directives. It is meant, rather, for students and workers, those who, as our comrades used to say, use it.

“Qualifications” mean only that the administrator is better at his or her job of restructuring the university—what it means is a great deal of experience at confronting, misdirecting, and neutralizing those of us who are standing in the way of the so-called “future” of education, the all-administrative university. We should not be calling for “qualified,” “better,” or more “effective” administrators to rule over us, police us, cut our salaries and benefits, fire us, raise our tuition, cut our classes, and make us miserable. We should be pushing, instead, for a university without administrators. Cut the head off the king!

UC President Napolitano and the "Securitized" University

Since the UC regents’ pick for Mark Yudof’s replacement was announced yesterday—and after getting over the shock—folks have raised a number of important objections. One such criticism is that Janet Napolitano is not qualified for the position, since she has never worked at a university in any capacity. The objection hasn’t been helped by the UC’s notoriously incompetent public relations machine, which clumsily identified the fact that her father was the dean of the University of New Mexico’s medical school as a clear sign that “a passion for education is in her DNA.” This claim, to say the least, does not inspire much confidence in the regents’ decision.

But this criticism carries some problems of its own. As others have pointed out (and most of the ideas laid out here are borrowed directly from the linked conversation), the notion that Napolitano’s lack of educational qualifications should exclude her over and above anyone else turns on a highly romanticized idea of the university as an institution dedicated primarily to education and run, therefore, by its educational employees, the faculty. However appealing this vision of the university is to many faculty today, and however true it may once have been in some decidedly utopian past, the fact is that today the university is not primarily an educational institution. As in the case of the conventional criticism of the “corporatization” of the public university, the answer here is pretty much the same: the university has already been “corporatized,” and it has never really been “ours.”

These days, the public research university is run not by its faculty or even its president but its CFO. It is not that Nathan Brostrom, the UC’s Executive Vice President for Business Operations, actually calls the shots when the regents sit down together at the table, but rather that he (and others like him) lays out the conditions in which every decision, from tuition hikes and out-of-state admissions to taking on debt in order to finance construction projects, will ultimately be made. As the university becomes more and more leveraged, its marching orders will increasingly come from Wall Street, which for its part is simultaneously reaping enormous profits off the securitization of student debt.

At the same time, Napolitano does signal a change, the recognition that it is no longer “business discipline” but “martial discipline” that is key to the university’s continued operation. It is an acknowledgment that the university in general, and the UC in particular, will continue to be a site of struggle. If the Occupy movement drew heavily from the student occupations of 2008-2009 in New York and the UC, perhaps Napolitano’s arrival reflects the state’s recognition of the possibility that struggles over the university can resonate and explode in unsettling and unpredictable ways.

UC President Napolitano, in other words, could be seen as presiding over the first fully “securitized” public university, in the dual senses of the word. Of course, the university has long formed part of the military-industrial complex. Napolitano’s appointment is meant to double down on the UC’s turn to federal research dollars and weapons development. The Washington Post’s article originally stated that “the university’s search committee was drawn to her experience in Obama’s Cabinet, believing that she might help the UC system advance its federally funded programs, including . . . nuclear weapons labs.” (Strangely this sentence, which we tweeted yesterday, seems to have been silently removed, although it’s still quoted in this piece in the Examiner.) Likewise, Napolitano is not the first member of the United States’ security apparatus to become president of the UC. Charles J. Hitch, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1961-1965, was appointed UC president two years later and served in that capacity for eight years.

But the specificity of Napolitano, perhaps, is seen in the convergence of these two forms of “security,” one financial and the other repressive. If our classic slogan “behind every fee hike, a line of riot cops” responds to the intimate ties between austerity and policing, the violence of financialization clarified and crystallized in the UC regents’ decision suggests that the terrain of struggle, while structured in many ways by continuities, has shifted in important ways. Maybe it's time to update that slogan.

(Image borrowed from UCMeP)

UC Student Workers Union Solidarity Statement with CCSF

UC Student Workers Union (UAW 2865) Stands with City College of San Francisco

Whereas City College of San Francisco (CCSF) is a critical part of the public education system in California, it is the largest public community college in the State of California (90,000 students) and has been a key public good accessible to working class San Francisco residents, people of color, immigrant students, and those seeking adult education opportunities in the city. 

Whereas the recent privatization of public education in California and nationally has taken many forms, from the closing of elementary and secondary schools, the imposition of charter elementary schools, the raising of fees at colleges and universities, the reduction of course offerings at community colleges, and the imposition of layoffs, pension reductions, and furloughs for workers at educational institutions.  These transformations have coincided with rising student debt levels and the financialization of such debt, as well as the expansion of for-profit education institutions, which have very low graduation and placement rates and engage in fraudulent advertising campaigns that particularly target working class communities of color.   

Whereas the western regional accreditation agency, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, has recently announced that it intends to revoke CCSF’s accreditation in 2014.  This decision comes after a series of reports threatening CCSF with disaccreditation.  The threat of disaccreditation is an attack—based on hollow pretexts—on a key working class institution of San Francisco.  The threat of disaccreditation is also a part of a broader project of privatization, which members of the ACCJC are financially and otherwise invested in.   

Therefore, be it resolved that the UC Student Workers Union (UAW 2865) stands in solidarity with the students, instructors, and workers of CCSF, and with the unions and organizing groups that have been standing up in defense of city college. 

Be it further resolved that the executive board of UAW 2865 will encourage members of the union to participate in upcoming actions in defense of city college, including the march to the Department of Education scheduled for Tuesday, July 9 at 4pm, and the letter writing campaign to the ACCJC. 

Be it finally resolved that the UC Student Workers Union calls on the management of the University of California (particularly the Chancellors of UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, and the Office of the President) to speak publicly against the decision of the ACCJC and in support of the continued accreditation of City College of San Francisco.         

Approved in a straw poll of members and officers present following a quorum call at the July 7 Joint Council meeting; statement to be finalized by the Executive Board. 

What UC administrators (don't) talk about when they talk about risk

UC Administrators are meeting Thursday, June 6th to talk about the management of financial and other risks, "ranging from campus protests to mega natural disasters."  They will attend various workshops, including Wes Balda's "Risk Managers Are from Mars, Faculty from Venus," as well as the "Civil Disobedience Training" advertised below:

On the same day, members of the UC student workers union and their allies are planning to pay administrators a visit, and to share stories about a very different set of risks, including racial and sexual harassment and discrimination at the workplace, unaffordable healthcare for children and elderly dependents, food insecurity, indebtedness, and the threat of technology- and austerity-induced joblessness.  These are realities contributing to our unsafety that workers and students face daily, and that members of the UC student workers union are trying to address through another round of collective struggle at and beyond the universities.  Hope you can make it out on Thursday to help kick things off: 

Press Release: Yolo DA Punts, Banker's Dozen Walks

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

YOLO DA PUNTS, BANKER’S DOZEN WALK

COUNTY AND UCD WASTE MASSIVE RESOURCES ON WRISTSLAP

DAVIS, CA

6 MAY 2013

More than a year after after Yolo County District Attorney's office filed 21 misdemeanor charges each against a dozen political protestors, threatening 11 years in jail along with a million dollars in damages, the case has been resolved. The resolution comes in advance of a trial that Assistant District Attorney Michael Cabral was seemingly anxious to avoid, perhaps unwilling to burn further County funds on another failed effort at political repression. Each protestor accepted an infraction ticket and nominal community service.

Last January and February, numerous protestors peacefully blockaded the campus offices of USBank. The branch shuttered its doors and abandoned the sweetheart deal through which it purchased captive customers from the university. Twelve students and staff were selected arbitrarily for the hyperbolic charges. Evidence gathered via subpoena now shows a national network of high-priced attorneys, public relations executives, security professionals, and corporate administrators deployed, not to protect bank or university community, but to exact as much punishment as possible. In the end, the UC administration, the bank, and the DA did not get their wish.

Evidence also shows that the prosecution was largely driven by the university's top administrators who, despite having high-salaried in-house council, elected to spend considerable public money on private attorneys. One upscale San Francisco firm was retained solely to avoid exposure of any internal documents regarding UCD's relations with the bank, and to conceal the administration's dossiers on students, staff, and faculty. Like the DA and police, the university seemed motivated by the need to send a message regarding the risks of protest — a message sometimes written in pepper spray.

In this case, the message turned out to be: no convictions, no bureaucratic revenge, and no bank. The absurd case is now history. The questions of the university's increasing entanglement with finance; the catastrophe of student debt; and the systematically brutal, excessive, and wasteful criminalization of protest remain very much of the moment.

for further information: Kristin Koster (530) 902-2493

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The Exploitation of Undergraduate Workers at UC Berkeley's Student Learning Center

Undergraduate students are workers in training.  Not only does university education train and sift students into particular lines of work, but the rising costs of education and associated student debt burdens also lock students into futures defined by waged work.  Undergraduate students are not simply oriented toward work they will have to perform in the future though; they also work for wages at the same time as they are enrolled.  Students have to pay for their food and lodging, and often hold down multiple, part-time jobs in order to do so, including food service, clerical, and academic jobs.  Some of this work occurs on campus, meaning that university administrators are not simply managing students' educational experience, but also managing their lives as workers.  Work on campus is often minimally compensated.  And, while some undergraduate jobs are covered by collective bargaining agreements, most of these jobs are non-union.  Students' lives are thus defined by often impossible attempts to juggle work performed for credit and work performed for (minimal) pay.

At UC Berkeley, a conflict is currently taking place that will determine how work at one of the primary places of undergraduate employment on campus will be defined, whether this work will be compensated, and whether it will be covered by a collective bargaining agreement.  The stakes of this conflict are very high: if university management prevails, they will have taken a step toward normalizing unwaged academic work, toward devaluing all academic labor, and toward diminishing the quality of academic support all UC students can expect.

The Student Learning Center (SLC) at UC Berkeley employs over 250 undergraduates as tutors, who provide support for other students around writing assignments, math problem sets, and other academic activities.  Tutors are assigned to particular tutees, facilitate group learning activities, and also work shifts at the SLC, where they help students who drop in to the Center with questions about a particular assignment.  The image below offers a sense of the scale of this work: on most days, all the tables in the SLC are filled with tutors offering support to tutees.

 
While university administrators have refused to provide any data on employment patterns at the SLC, anecdotally we know that in recent years -- following local austerity measures -- SLC administrators have begun to hire a significant percentage of tutors for unpaid, "practicum" positions.  Students seeking employment at the SLC are made to fill out an application form where they list their previous experience and other job-related qualifications.  The form then asks them to check boxes indicating whether they would be willing to work in paid and/or unpaid positions at the SLC.  If they check both boxes, applicants can expect to be told after their interview that no more paid positions are available, and that they are being offered an unpaid, "practicum" position, where they will tutor for four or five hours per week, and take a pedagogy seminar as well for a couple hours each week.  It has gotten to the point where tutors see these unpaid positions as a kind of required internship, or unwaged training period, to be performed for a semester before they have any chance of working for pay at the SLC.

All tutoring work throughout the UCs is covered by the collective bargaining agreement negotiated two years ago by the University and the UC Student-Worker Union (UAW 2865).  Thus, UC Berkeley's move toward what is essentially an unpaid internship program at the SLC undercuts the Recognition clause of the UAW 2865 contract, which stipulates that all tutors will be represented by the union and will be entitled to payment and workplace protections outlined within the other articles of the contract.  Given this clear and systemic violation of the contract, a couple of union head stewards, working together with a group of unwaged tutors, filed a grievance with UC labor relations a few months ago, challenging the practice of hiring unpaid tutors at the SLC.

The grievance is entering into its final stage, after which -- assuming the University continues to deny our claim -- the union would be entitled to appeal to third-party arbitration.  Now is an important time to put pressure on University administrators to adequately fund the SLC and to end the hyper-exploitative practice of running the SLC on unwaged labor.  The tutors and head stewards working on this grievance have been organizing on the ground, have put together a petition and have been publicizing the grievance.  If you haven't yet, please sign the petition calling on university administrators to fully fund the SLC and to pay all tutors for their work.

Against Civility: Dartmouth and the Logic of Administrative Discourse

These days, Dartmouth looks like the worst place in the world. By now most people are familiar with the story: after a group students protested the administration’s failure to take seriously the problem of sexual violence, racism, and homophobia on campus during a recent event for prospective students, they were targeted with rape and death threats on an anonymous student website. (Lots of screenshots are posted at the Real Talk Dartmouth blog.) On Friday, the Dartmouth administration sent a mass email to the entire campus announcing that disciplinary action would be taken in response—against not only those who made the anonymous threats but also those who participated in the original protest.

As some of you know, a small group of students disrupted the Dimensions Welcome Show for prospective students on Friday, April 19, using it as a platform to protest what they say are incidents of racism, sexual assault, and homophobia on campus. Following the protest, threats of bodily harm and discriminatory comments targeting the protesters and their defenders ran anonymously on various sites on the Internet.

With tensions high across the Dartmouth community, Interim President Carol Folt, the Dean of the Faculty, and other senior leaders across campus agreed that the best course of action was to suspend classes on Wednesday, April 24, for a day of reflection and alternative educational programming. This decision was made to address not only the initial protest but a precipitous decline in civility on campus over the last few months, at odds with Dartmouth’s Principles of Community.

This unusual and serious action to suspend classes for a day was prompted by concern that the dialogue on campus had reached a point that threatened to compromise the level of shared respect necessary for an academic community to thrive. The faculty and administration together determined that a pause to examine how the climate on campus can be improved was necessary. This was an important exercise that the Board supports. It is also important to note that there will be an opportunity for faculty to hold the classes that were missed as a result of Wednesday’s events.

Neither the disregard for the Dimensions Welcome Show nor the online threats that followed represent what we stand for as a community. As Interim President Folt indicated Wednesday in her remarks in front of Dartmouth Hall, the administration is following established policies and procedures with regard to any possible disciplinary action in both cases. As in every case regarding a disciplinary investigation, this process is confidential and respects the privacy of our students.

This email is an exemplary model of the genre of “administrative discourse.” It is not specific to Dartmouth or to private universities for that matter, but along with certain forms of university management have become generalized throughout higher education in the United States. We’ve seen some of this here at the UC, where the administration frequently makes the same kind of pronouncements. When students have organized actions against racism, sexism, and homophobia—which manifest in multiple forms from daily microaggressions to bureaucratic impunity to police violence—the administration often feels the need to make a public statement. These campus-wide missives are tepid, sterile, designed by committees primarily in order to avoid provoking, offending. Administrative discourse is the absence of language.

Some critics have observed that what is particularly problematic about the Dartmouth administration’s email is the fact that it posits a false equivalence between the students’ protest and the rape and death threats they received. Any equivalence is obviously not only false but intensely violent. As David Theo Goldberg wrote in the wake of a 2010 email from UC President Mark Yudof calling for “tolerance,”

To say that the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic incidents at UCSD, at Davis and UCSC are cases of intolerance is to imply that that those engaged in these expressions are saying awful things to and about people they reject. To call for tolerance is to address only the awful things they are saying, not the underlying and implicit rejection. It addresses the symptom, not the underlying condition of which the individual utterances are merely the manifestation. We should not say such things, it implies, even about people we find or whose behavior or culture we find unacceptable.

The same could be said of the situation at Dartmouth. But there is something else going on in these examples of administrative discourse. Both “civility” and “tolerance” smooth over the violence of the status quo, transforming it into a blank slate for unceasing dialogue—a dialogue that, for its part, never upsets the neutral “civility” of the status quo. At the modern university, furthermore, “civility” is more than an ethic, it is at the same time a form of governance. It is composed of countless instruments, from room reservations to student organizations, but the maximum expression of “civility” are “Time, Place, and Manner” restrictions, by which the administration designates those forms of “speech” that count as legitimate and acceptable and likewise those that do not. The latter, of course, do not even count as “speech” but rather tend to be seen as something approaching “violence.”

What these protests are, at least if they are to be effective, is disruption, an intervention against the normal operations of the university, against “business as usual.” That business, of course, is maximizing revenue streams—many of them public, but increasingly private. Disruptions threaten the flow of capital through the university’s veins, and as such they must be prevented. The university administration’s job, then, must be seen as one of a constant managing of threats which are political, financial, and literally embodied in the students. We are the crisis. The police, of course, is one mechanism by which the administration attempts to neutralize these threats, but as the last few years have demonstrated the police often provoke more outrage, and consequently more disruption, in the course of carrying out their brutal “duties.” So from the administration’s perspective there are more effective tools—such as “civility,” which governs the norms of legitimate action. “Civility” is a gentle policeman.

Beyond false equivalence, then, the problem with the Dartmouth administration’s statement is the turn to “civility.” Administrative discourse represents an attempt not to shift the debate but to neutralize it. By deploying “civility” it hopes to disrupt disruption, channeling energies away from blockage and confrontation and into forms of pure speech that in no way threaten the constant flow of capital through the neoliberal university.

BP and UCPD Off Campus!

Cross-posted from BP Off Campus . . .
 

[On] April 10th 2013, members of Occupy Cal's UC Berkeley student group Open University reserved the world-renown Sproul Steps to launch the new "BP Off Campus" campaign. (...) The latest venture of Occupy Cal, the bpoffcampus campaign has been been focused on the greatest privatization scheme on the #1 Public University, which is British Petroleum's $500 million dollar deal with UC Berkeley regarding biofuel research at the EBI (Energy Biosciences Institute). Briefly, this deal is at best, a greenwashing scam for one of the worlds dirtiest corporations, but more troubling is the precedent that Big Oil can buy their way in and dictate education and research at a public institution. Please read more about it here.

Though Occupy Cal doesn't boast the numbers it once had . . . the UC Administration and their lackey thugs in blue, the UCPD, are still gravely concerned, because they know they've been robbing students and the public at large for years, and a sustained student movement on campus would expose their corruption and sink them. That's the reason for the continued authoritarianism against student protesters like Occupy Cal. We aren’t content with one-day “Day of Action” rallies, tepid measures passed in student governments, stalled ballot reforms, etc; no, occupying space; be it Sproul Steps, the commons in front of city hall, classrooms, administration buildings, farms, libraries: we’ve determined it's the best way forward, as this strategy has been the main source of student activism victories in the past. Why else would the UC Berkeley admins send in armed thugs to break up a teach-in about biofuels, in a room that was properly reserved?! [The teach-in took place on February 16, 2013 --ed. note]

Fast-forward to . . . April 10, we set up our table in our officially reserved space without any trouble, but as soon as our famous Occupy Cal heart-signs came out . . .

 

. . . the police started to swarm: more UCPD showed up, said some Sproul regular tablers, than had in months.  The threat of a radical movement will do that.

The UCPD told us we had to take our table down and leave immediately, to which we responded, we reserved the spot as a student group. They replied "We'll check on that," to which we said: "Why don't you check before you start making illegal demands?" The UCPD came back later, with their tail between their legs, admitting that we did in fact have the right to be there; though if he got the order to take the bullhorn, he'd snatch it right from our hands. "Why don't you just follow orders?" we dared, holding the bullhorn out. "Why don't you just follow orders!" So they deployed a new strategy, bring out the Student Group Administrator (the woman in the white blouse in the above photo) to harass us with spurious regulations, that seem to have been made up on the spot.

We had a sign, (as part of our protest that we jumped through hoops to make sure we were playing by the "rules" in our temporary "Free Speech Zone"), that told BP to "Fuck Off." After all, why we should be overly polite to a corporation that has a long history of lying, cheating, stealing, polluting and murdering? UCPD and the administration connived and concluded that saying the word "fuck" was fine, but having the word "fuck" on a sign was illegal, and we needed to immediately take the sign down. We asked her: "Are you aware of where you are standing?"

Yes, we were on the Mario Savio Steps, where the FREE SPEECH MOVEMENT was launched.

The Admin insisted. We replied, "This sign isn't going down. Are you prepared for a PR disaster?" She continued to insist. We wanted to see the documentation of this rule, as we had never heard of such of thing (and having many, many protests over the years with signs that said "Fuck" on them with no incident) and our scanning of the "rulebook" found no such policy. Incredibly, this UC Berkeley official said it wasn't her responsibility to show us the rule in writing; could we show her the rule where we had the right to have a sign with profanity? UC Berkeley 2013 ladies and gentlemen! "How about the 1st Amendment of the fucking US Constitution" was the obvious answer.

The action wrapped up without any further major incidents, and it was one of the better Sproul actions in over a year with many new students actually stopping by and getting informed and involved. Which is noteworthy, considering how modern UCB campus culture is for students to ignore the dozens of tables and groups handing out flyers at Sproul Plaza and walk through as quickly as possible. Please spread the word of our campaign and our website bpoffcampus.org to your friends and networks. And please consider getting involved!

This campaign isn’t limited in scope to just the University of California Berkeley. There are overarching and interconnected causes of social justice, human rights, environmental activism, quality education for all, and ending the drug war and the prison industrial complex (just to new a few, broadly) are all within the vision @bpoffcampus. This campaign is a unique opportunity as a launching off point for all of these issues and more. Why? Activist goals can be achieved and demands can be met on campus with direct action in ways that CAN NOT be done by appealing to Sacramento or Washington DC. And even if you are not a student, the University of California belongs to ALL OF US Californians: we must take it back! The time is now!

With broad consensus of the world’s top scientists that climate change caused by excessive fossil fuel consumption uncheck will cause mass global extinctions, and the immediacy of new oil spills and pipeline bursts occurring virtually every week, action must be taken immediately to get Big Oil out of our colleges and out of our lives. We must expose the BP/EBI deal at UC Berkeley for the greenwashing scheme and privatization scam that it is, and kick the corrupt, lying, thieving, polluting, and yes, murdering corporation British Petroleum out now!