taibbi bureaucracy

The Bureaucratic Backdrop of Recent Speech Controversies When universities “professionalized” education, they added a lot more staff, creating new bureaucracies that have now spread into the rest of institutional America Yesterday I published an article detailing a series of bizarre incidents, from an exhibit at the Smithsonian to an outlandish group letter at Princeton to an invitation by consultants at the Intercept to conduct segregated meetings. I didn’t have space to include a key section about where this might be coming from. These incidents and many others all have something in common. They grew out of an explosion of administrative staff in American institutions, beginning with universities. Throughout the long period of conservative rebirth that began with the Reagan Revolution, Republicans did a brilliant thing. Through groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and a slew of Washington-based think-tanks, they flooded the democratic process with free manpower. Small-time elected officials in the upper and lower chambers of state governments, men and women who in some cases barely had officers or support staff, were suddenly gifted the miracle of “model bills,” about everything from “regulatory taking” to tort reform, environmental deregulation, and other issues. If you scratched the surface on state political controversies, you often found an ALEC model bill underneath. In Scott Walker’s war against public unions in Wisconsin, for instance, ALEC was playing a significant role, not just in helping fund Walker’s own political career (many state politicians took advantage of a mysterious “scholarship fund” that helped politicians travel to conferences and enjoy other advantages) but also in helping craft legislation designed to restrict union political activity. In Wisconsin, Walker’s budget, for instance, included elements of ALEC’s Public Employee Freedom Act, designed (in the eyes of most union members, anyway) to chip away at the collective bargaining power of public unions. There was really no equivalent mechanism on the other political “side.” Unions provided some support, but it wasn’t long before politicians in both parties in Washington especially became dependent upon the combination of corporate donations and subsidized labor. Democrats might not have availed themselves of ALEC much (a newish organization called the State Innovation Exchange, or SIX, provides some of the same functions for blue party pols), but they did often rely upon think-tanks and other outside labor to write legislation, research bills, produce witnesses for hearings, do the heavy lifting in financial rule-writing sessions, etc. In the eighties and nineties, something similar happened in the academic world. Basically, “we got really rich,” one Princeton professor put it to me last week, laughing. Universities benefited as new legislation designed to increase college attendance meant a nearly unlimited supply of federally-guaranteed lending for prospective students. On the other hand, a rapidly constricting job market in the wake of the collapse of the manufacturing economy put an outsized emphasis on college degrees as a route to professional-class jobs. By 2013, the New York Times was calling the bachelor’s degree the “new high school diploma” and noting that in cities like Atlanta, 39% of employers were asking for college degrees even for administrative assistant jobs. The basic trap: going to college didn’t guarantee a good job, but not going almost guaranteed the opposite. As a result of these and other factors, tuition has risen for years at double the rate of inflation, and colleges hoarded money even as they pleaded poverty. When the University of Virginia raised tuition an astonishing 74% between 2009 and 2016, its former rector, Helen Dragas, accused the system of sitting on a $2.3 billion “slush fund” of reserves. Similarly, when the University of Wisconsin system was blasted by politicians for pleading poverty and raising rates even as it sat on a $393 million reserve, UW system president Kevin Reilly defended himself by disclosing amazing data about rival college systems whose behavior was even worse. The University of Texas system was sitting on $9.5 billion, for instance, while the University of Michigan was keeping $3.3 billion squirreled away. "It is absolutely true that the colleges are more awash in cash right now than they have ever been in the history of colleges,” says Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice. Anyone who has been on a college campus lately knows where schools spent some of the money. Cal State’s 166,000 square foot, $125 million Valley Performing Arts Center comes to mind, as does the $55 million recreational facility just for Clemson football players, or the $62 million Richard Fischer center, designed by genius architect Frank Gehry and looking like a luxury spaceship crashed in the Hudson Valley woods, gracing the edges of my alma mater, tiny Bard College. Space per student has tripled since 1970. The average aggrieved freshman in America today lives in an environment that comfortwise rates somewhere between the Royal Hideaway in Playa del Carmen and Saddam Hussein’s Tikrit baths. How did schools spend the rest? Just like NFL teams, they blew a bunch of it on high-priced positions for administrative staff. As is also the case with the NFL, the main jobs of many of these staffers were to be loyal to dingbat upper management. The faculty-to-student ratio has remained mostly static since the seventies, but the amount of support and administrative staff nearly tripled. As Washington Monthly described it some years ago, there were once two or three professors for every administrator, but instructors more recently are far outnumbered by “vice presidents, associate vice presidents, assistant vice presidents, provosts, associate provosts, vice provosts, assistant provosts, deans, deanlets, and deanlings, all of whom command staffers and assistants—who, more and more, direct the operations of every school.” The army of new administrators began inserting themselves in every part of the university mechanism: admissions, graduate school admissions, search committees, discipline, career training, health, security, dorm governance. Many of these new staffers had education degrees. The Monthly put it like this: Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year… In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students. In 1975, there were 446,830 faculty members, supported by 268,952 administrators and staffers. By 2005 the numbers were: 675,000 faculty members, surrounded by 756,405 administrators and staffers. Not all of these new “deanlets and deanlings” had jobs related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity. Some had titles that could mean different things from campus to campus (one academic I spoke with laughed as he confessed to not fully understanding, still, what a “Dean of Sustainability” does). What the arrival of all these people did mean, however, was a dramatic change in the relationship between students and faculty. The surface explanation for this was the “professionalization” of education, the idea being to help professors avoid the indignity of having to serve as sub-deans and advisors while also doing academic work. Although some professors liked the old setup, encouraging as it did a “Socratic” student-teacher relationship in and out of the classroom, others were happy to be relieved of the extra duties, so they could focus just on work. Quickly, however, all the new “deanlets” began either creating new work, or taking on advocacy roles previously managed by faculty. The “university became over-bureaucratized in every conceivable way,” is how one Ivy League professor put it. He cited a simple example: whereas once upon a time, a student would come directly to ask for an extension, that request might now come in the form of a email from a dean, or an assistant dean. “They’ll say, ‘Billy Jones has four exams in five days and his term paper for you is due in the middle,’” the professor laughs. “Might it be possible to extend?” “There’s a lot of hand-holding,” the professor explains, adding sadly, “I’m not as involved in my students’ lives.” Most faculty members at least initially welcomed the arrival of “diversity and inclusion officers,” or “diversity participants.” On some campuses, like Princeton, there were traditions that needed undoing, and legitimate atmospheric issues for some students of color. The complications came, at least as some educators tell it, when the sheer size of the non-academic staff began to overwhelm the academics. Whereas the initial focus of a lot of these staffers involved searches for new minority positions, there were suddenly new rounds of meetings that more and more focused on things like the language used in admissions criteria, university mission statements, department curricula, and other matters. Faculty at many schools, if they even bothered going to meetings at all, found themselves debating the meanings of words like “excellence” or arguing about the ideological components of things they’d never even thought about much, like freshman orientation. “Orientation used to be, ‘How do I find the cafeteria?’” asks one professor at a West-coast college. “Now it can last a semester.” An additional problem is that the pressure to publish — be a scholar who increases the prestige of the university — soon becomes the dominant concern even of tenured faculty, who find themselves relieved that someone else is taking over what were once mundane teaching responsibilities. This increasingly creates room for non-academic personnel to step into teaching-like roles. Some professors I spoke with blamed themselves for some of this dynamic, for not finding enough time for students, not developing those relationships, etc. By 2020 the non-academic staff in many schools and school systems effectively created new bureaucratic vetoes over academic matters. Perhaps more importantly, new processes were created that inserted non-academic staff into admissions, hiring, tenure evaluation, and other areas in dramatic new ways. One story that made a few headlines subtly explains some of the issues at work. Earlier this year, an academic doing post-doctoral work at Penn State named Colin Wright made a fateful decision to go on social media. Wright, who describes himself as “just a bug biologist,” had spent most of his energy to that point on published works with titles like, “Spatial proximity and prey vibratory cues influence collective hunting in social spiders.” But here he waded into the deep waters of human gender issues. He retweeted a Guardian article about a 1500% rise in cases of girls in Sweden aged 13-17 who declared discomfort with their birth-assigned gender. An explosion of such cases of gender dysphoria involving teenage girls especially has been observed in many places around the world, creating controversy. As Psychology Today put it in 2018, “transgender identity is now reported among young natal females at rates that clearly exceed all known statistics to date.” To some, like Wright, this statistical phenomenon begged for investigation. Was it, as he puts it now, “something like increased acceptance and people are more willing to come out? That's one possibility.” Or was it a social question, a peer pressure issue, more related to phenomena like bulimia or anorexia, where the child might be better served by treatment rather than transition? To some activists, however, that question itself is transphobic, as multiple academics of high standing have already discovered. A Brown University researcher named Lisa Littman published a study suggesting it was possible that increased use of social media, belonging to a friend group that included someone who’d come out as trans, conflicts with parents, and other factors she roughly described as falling under the heading of “social contagion” might be contributing to the rise in some of the cases. “More research,” she wrote, “is needed.” Despite the careful language, Littman lost a consulting job immediately after publishing her study. It was this study Wright referenced in his tweet about the Guardian headline, saying: “Two words: social contagion.” There was an online furor, and though I won’t delve into another cancelation tale (it seems subscribers have had enough of those), readers can probably guess what happened next. Wright will likely never work in academia again – “I’ve simply stopped trying” is how he puts it. What’s interesting is one of the particular concrete reasons Wright would have difficulty getting back into that world. New processes have been instituted forcing applicants like him to get past a non-academic committee before the experts in their own fields even see their applications. The most common exemplar is the “diversity statement,” in which applicants are asked to explain their contributions and planned commitments to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These statements have already aroused criticism from some existing faculty, who have compared them to the “statements of faith” academics in the fifties were often asked to sign to declare religious or anticommunist commitment. Wright, who says he applied to “maybe 150 colleges,” noted particularly the process for the University of California schools. The University of California system found a way around the problem of post-doctoral applicants who didn’t know what to say, when asked to make a statement. The solution is to give candidates the answers. In this “Sample Rubric to Assess Candidate Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” the Cal system essentially tells applicants exactly what to say, by telling them what candidates who get high scores wrote, and what candidates who got low scores wrote. For instance, on the question of “Knowledge of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,” Cal tells applicants that those with low scores might report: Little demonstrated understanding of demographic data related to diversity in higher education or in their discipline. May use vague statements such as "the field of History definitely needs more women." Meanwhile, under “plans,” those with high scores might have other things to say: Level of proposed involvement commensurate with career level (for example, a new assistant professor may plan to undertake one major activity within the department over the first couple of years, conduct outreach to hire a diverse group of students to work in their lab, seek to mentor several underrepresented students, and co-chair a subcommittee or lead a workshop for a national conference…) Wright’s issue with this is that the process may not be honestly trying to assess candidates, but rather asking candidates to demonstrate commitment to an outlined orthodoxy, even if insincerely. “They're telling basically a racist how to write the most perfect diversity statement,” is how he puts it. “It’s a political litmus test.” There are more stories like this out there in academia, but the reason I got onto the subject is because of what I started hearing in recent months in my own field of media. Increasingly, non-editorial personnel — many of them hailing from ed schools — are attempting to insert themselves into the editorial process. Numerous media companies are facing demands from such committees (sometimes from within the company, sometimes from the news organization’s parent company) for editors to write a commitment to “antiracist” principles into their charters. The problem, as noted in my prior article, is that “antiracist” may mean something very different from “against racism” in some contexts. The Intercept, in resisting such calls, addressed this exact issue. When a diversity subcommittee of its union wrote to editor Betsy Reed that “unit members are concerned that this commitment to free speech has detracted from a commitment to anti-racism in our coverage and in our workplace,” Reed responded by saying, “we should also consider the question of whether, in the name of anti-racism, there has been pressure to suppress non-racist ideas that do not align with the dominant view of how the movement should seek to achieve its aims.” There have also been calls within some news organizations to have non-editorial staff regulate such traditionally editorial matters as sourcing and word use. The backdrop of many of the louder recent controversies involving news media organizations like Vox, the New York Times and others included divides within newsrooms over the roles of such non-editorial committees in the reporting process. Will I invoke a complaint to H.R. for writing X, tweeting Y, pitching story Z? Will a tweet in support of a colleague put me on the radar of a committee in charge of hiring and/or advising on layoffs? Will I end up sitting in front of a specially-formed H.R. committee to explain a factually true tweet or broadcast comment (this happened at a major media organization in the last month)? A great deal of the criticism I’ve received for wading into this question of late has been framed as excessive interest in matters of relative unimportance. I’ve also been told a lot of these critiques are an example of “punching down,” that the proper focus of journalism is concentrated power, not generalized cultural movements that may be coming from the “ground up,” or from the traditionally disenfranchised. I don’t believe that’s what this story is. It looks increasingly like the salient problem in a lot of speech cases is not Twitter trolls, but ascendant bureaucracies within large institutions. These bureaucracies do have power, both within institutions and within society (because they impact the behaviors of those powerful institutions). In somewhat the same way that think-tanks and organizations like ALEC have had impact on American society through their hidden authorship of bills, rules, financial regulations, etc., this influx of academics and recent graduates pushing for influence in institutional America has a chance to seriously alter public thought about a whole host of issues. There may be positive successes in areas like correcting hiring imbalances, and the importance of that can’t be understated. But these bureaucracies seem also have at least three troubling features. One, they’re expert in finding ways to grow themselves (a classic example is the negative workplace climate review that concludes that more staff in the reviewing department must be hired to address problems). Two, they’ve introduced clear new paths for personnel infighting at a time of dramatically heightened job insecurity, wherein a group letter or a public denunciation on social media becomes a means of creating an advancement opportunity, or removing a rival or rivals ahead of a round of layoffs. Third, and perhaps most important, is that these committees – and not all of them are EDI committees, incidentally – are inserting themselves into processes that put them at odds with the traditional intellectual missions of their organizations. This is the H.R.-ization of debate. In journalism, we saw some dramatic changes in how reporters looked at their jobs in recent months, thanks in significant part to this dynamic. Some journalists and editors I’ve spoken with worried about using certain words in describing everything from protests to debates over lockdowns to foreign treatments of Covid-19. Still others described pitching stories that a year ago would have been automatically accepted, only to find hesitation now, or pleas from editors to “wait until things die down.” For decades the major issue for reporters was keeping business-side employees out of the newsroom (there are legends about some organizations where ad-sales types were not allowed on the same floor as editorial staff). Now there is a new Chinese-wall issue, and to be fair, I haven’t exactly conducted a rigorous numerical study of how serious it is. Anecdotally, however, it is for sure on the minds of a lot of people in this business, as it apparently has been for some time on campuses, as well as many corporate workplaces. My intent in hastily putting up this note today was to explain some of these angles to subscribers in the wake of some of recent pieces, but also to apologize for not having yet reported this story out in the way I normally would. To really do this subject justice I need to visit places like campuses and corporate offices in person, get hard numbers from many different types of organizations, hear from people within these new bureaucracies who could explain why this growth may be necessary, and so on. I do hope to get to all of this in time. I just haven’t yet, and to all my patient subscribers, apologies. I’ll try to get to all of this in a timely fashion. 814 732 ← PreviousNext → Write a comment… Joseph CareyJul 22 You’re right, Matt. I am tired of hearing about CaNcEl CuLtUrE oN cAmPuS. This is a niche story about bourgeois journalists and academics airing their personal and political grievances with each other in public. I don’t give a damn. These controversies should be beneath the notice of a serious journalist like you, but you’ve spent weeks droning on and on about it. This is tedious culture war nonsense and the high volume of comments saying stuff like “I’m a life-long conservative, Mr. Taibbi, and I LOVE this post you made” says a lot about who’s really tuned into this subject. There are momentous events happening around us every day that go under-reported, mis-represented, or ignored by major media that affect the lives and livelihood of millions of people: Wars, pandemics, economic crises, social upheaval in the streets and the state violence that causes it. Crooked financial firms, rogue intelligence agencies, and corrupt political institutions disrupt the average person’s life 1000x more than over-zealous corporate diversity boards. Please re-asses your priorities and write about something other than “PC culture run amok“ for a while. Thnx. 9Reply 161 replies by Matt Taibbi and others TommyJul 21 No apology necessary. For the record--I think a majority of your subscribers are content with the subjects you're choosing to write on. I would rather have you write what YOU feel passionate about than try to cater to what you perceive your subscribers want. Not accusing you of doing that at all but of all the comments I've read, ones that criticize your choice of focus are miniscule. Keep up the good work...I was thinking you'd start tackling this more in depth after your interview with Bret Weinstein and am very pleased to have been right. 93Reply 8 replies 730 more comments… © 2020 Matt Taibbi. See privacy and terms Publish on Substack