College Guide
Blog
Mark Kleiman’s gracious rejoinder to my letter to Janet Napolitano as she takes the reins of the University of California reminds me of an old joke:
A rabbi of Chelm is assailed by two neighbors demanding he settle a dispute. The first presents a devastating indictment of the second’s housekeeping, garden management, child-rearing, and more. He listens and says, impressed, “You’re right!” The second woman denies all these assertions, and then accuses the first of setting a terrible moral example for the neighborhood, entertaining strange men at all hours, dressing inappropriately, and the like.
The rabbi says, “that’s terrible, you’re absolutely right!”
His daughter says, “but Daddy, they can’t both be right!”
After reflection, he says, “you’re right, too!”
Yes, we can. Mark is right that the president of ten campuses, each with a chancellor, isn’t in the same position as the president of a one-campus institution. Much of what I said to Napolitano is, as Mark suggests, more directly relevant to the chancellors, though they are always academics and not new to the business. It’s also true that if Napolitano doesn’t take on Mark’s charge to get the funding tap reopened, she’s not doing her job. But doing that is not, in my view, just a matter of reciting the facts about UC’s importance to the state and society, and glad-handing important pols. The citizens of California have withdrawn their traditional support for us, admittedly through very noisy and flawed political machinery, because they do not see us as creating net value for money. Without rebuilding that support, neither smooth lobbying craft skills nor “radical political action”, whatever Mark means by that, will work.
Why don’t voters realize how wonderful we are? Mark and I can see, and after all, we’re paid professional experienced expert professors, highly qualified in assessing the precise wonderfulness of public programs! He and I and all our colleagues are happy to tell everyone how great we are, and we do. My students write down what I tell them in class and repeat it back to me; outrageous that the public doesn’t show the same respect.
Well, it is the case that any elite institution is an easy target for the ignorant and the cynical, and there have been those who like to take a shot for a quick hit of publicity. We can’t do much about that directly, but it’s important to remember that there was a time when we were viewed quite differently and such ridicule didn’t resonate with established memes. The really enormous salaries we pay more and more administrators, only some of whose positions are justified by the growth of regulation and red tape that afflicts us, are an easy target. The president has some control of this and needs to wield it.
The wonders of our research accomplishments are actually difficult to honestly represent to the public, partly because an advance at the frontier of science or anything else is hard to even describe to someone who isn’t conversant with the territory bounded by that frontier. Sometimes we come up with something that makes a gee-whiz news story, but it’s rare. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to round up the hi-tech business leaders who hire our graduates in the sciences, but UC is a university, not a STEMersity, and we need to do a much better job explaining why we have English, Art Practice, Music, History and similar departments. Come to think of it, it wouldn’t hurt for entertainment business leaders, artists, and such to step up and explain how a liberal education - and a liberal arts scholarly enterprise-makes a society worth living in.
We (faculty) are simply not able to make this case outside our own echo chamber. For one thing, we come across as arrogant and entitled, disrespectful anyone who doesn’t share our view of our own merit and importance. We don’t offer evidence, we don’t demonstrate our value, and we are unskilled at explaining what we know to people who know something else. I think we’re also a little spoiled by mostly interacting with an audience that knows we are giving them consequential grades. More important, university faculty demanding public support for the university inevitably come across as self-serving, even when we dress it up in pleas to reduce the students’ tuition. There’s a big affective difference between food stamp recipients and the unemployed demonstrating and lobbying for better social services, and tenured professors who earn six-digit salaries for nine months, with really nice benefits, lobbying for our company to be given more money. Affective: it doesn’t matter to be right on the facts when you sound like you’re just trying to tilt the pinball machine of life even further your way.
Finally, and here I am surely inviting a lot of my colleagues to call me really mean names, the research we do, at least, is not uniformly wonderful. A lot of repetitive, unsurprising stuff is getting published, research that is not essential to the work of others and only gets four or five citations ever. A lot of it is written in private disciplinary gobbledygook incomprehensible outside a small circle of adepts, and unenlightening to colleagues in related (much less distant) disciplines. There is too much showing ourselves to be really smart, and not enough making other people smart.
Facebook
Twitter
Comments
(You may use HTML tags for style)
comments powered by Disqus