There are a lot of things on this story that interest me because I teach at a university in southeastern Michigan. I don’t teach at university of Michigan. I totally agree with your examination of the excessive amount of administrators making things so expensive and we’ve talked a lot at our school about how administrators drive tuition dollars up. What doesn’t always get talked about is that universities like mine which is just like a regional state University, often have to compete with these prestigious places with a lot more amenities. I think it’s just gonna get worse because of the demographic cliff and a lot of elite schools are lowering their entrance requirements and taking people more from these regional schools. What happens when your regional school and you have to compete is that you end up adding your own shit and then that drives tuition up as well. I think that there does need to be something else that happens, but it’s so hard in this marketplace.
I am against defunding the schools, especially around research, and I personally know people who got their research, pulled for no good reason. However, the indirects for some of these places, I just wonder how rich these schools are getting and how much harder it gets to make education accessible when it’s funneled all to a few elite institutions. I could be wrong, but sometimes I wonder about how we’re funding universities. You’re either doing it through research dollars and huge donations or through tuition and the debt of the students and both of those seem kind of unsustainable if you want an accessible University system.
The second thing is that the thing is too bad is that the peonies are within view of the Mott’s Children’s Hospital and so kids with cancer a lot of times only get pleasure from seeing the peonies. I think a lot of people on different Reddit threads and different people on social media have talked about how they or their kids used to love the flowers if they were in the hospital , especially on the cancer unit. I don’t think anybody, save a few people, think this was a good idea. Even people I know who are very pro Palestinian are thinking this kind of sounds fucked up. I just feel like it’s so self-defeating and it makes me so mad because I just gets away from the actual issue and then if a few people question it, they just say you don’t care about dead kids and it’s just ugh. It is a public good and all you do is alienate people from your cause, which presumably is to stop university of Michigan from funding Israeli companies.
I also think that there’s still some lingering negative feelings that people have here about the uncommitted vote and how Dearborn went for Trump and it helps swing the state to him and so sometimes people are cynical about Palestinian protesters outside of university context. This makes it worse.
The opening discussion got me thinking. Is the expression 'Flaming Straight' a thing? I feel like it should be. Maybe a title for Phoebe's upcoming book?
The idiots vandalizing paintings to stop climate change have evolved into idiots killing flowers to save lives in Gaza. I predict the next stage will be abducting pets to stop deportations.
The critique of admin bloat definitely predates DEI as y’all discussed, but I think DEI has primed academics to have an instinctive defensiveness toward admin jobs. DEI is almost nothing but admin bloat, a sort of bonus HR with little practical purpose, which academics would abhor if it weren’t for its politics (which politics just tend to be a thin veneer over DEI’s corporate-friendly vision of pedagogy anyway). The faculty reaction to my uni cutting DEI was revelatory for me. Aside from DEI, I do think a lot of these other admin bloat positions are viewed as important in maintaining a politically progressive uni environment, and a lot seem to be filled by former academics too. All of this is magnified by academics’ (somewhat understandable, if entitled) kneejerk negative reaction to any job cuts at all in the ivory tower.
And one of the business professors at my uni outright refers to our students as “customers” in meetings, which is not a good sign.
Regarding the idea of unis as being about experiences other than education, that seems to have been the case for a long time, right? Growing up, I recall college movies being more about partying, extracurriculars like sports, and romance than academics by far, and my idea of uni life was sort of shaped by this. Pitch Perfect comes to mind, Animal House of course, Scream 2 has precisely one (surprisingly realistic!) classroom scene, etc. I can’t think of sports movies off the top of my head but they… exist. Only a few college movies/shows come to mind as showing a balance of drama and academics in students’ lives (eg Legally Blonde, Carmilla). Anyway, those weren’t made by unis, but having seen them, it doesn’t surprise me to encounter students who expect uni to be less about grades than it is, although the inclusion of activism in marketing seems new to me (and is news to me—I’m interested in looking into it).
That accidentally ended up as a wall of text; anyway, academia talk is catnip for me, and I’m happy that FC remains one of the few podcasts in its discourse ecosystem that has not dropped in quality.
You're right that university has always been at least partly about the experience. However, the nature of the experience has really changed. It's something very curated/structured now as I'm sure you're aware. There is much more continuity with high school than there used to be. An analogy might be the difference between how kids used to run around the neighborhood without adult supervision versus the scheduled and supervised play that has become much more prevalent.
Do you think unis decided that it would be safer if they took it upon themselves to make the experiences structured and supervised, as a replacement for potential wildness like Animal House? I never personally went to much of that sort of uni event stuff as a student, at least nothing beyond clubs or department events, so I’m a little forgetful of what unis offer.
It's a good question. My sense is that it reflects more general societal trends in the last three or four decades, e.g. increasing focus on risk-mitigation, expanding conceptions of harm, the fetish for quantitative measurement, intensifying commercialization. All of these things push in the direction of more and more structure, and the elimination of anything which is not amenable to it. These observations apply to nearly all areas of life, so higher ed is just a special case.
As to whether it was universities or parents that got the ball rolling, I suspect that it's the outcome of a positive feedback loop involving both. Once the changes began they became expected, and so more changes were made in an effort to better satisfy expectations, and so one. As to why anyone thought these changes were necessary (or even desirable) is a much deeper question of course.
On the flower assassins; I have a theory. The woke justice mania has created an army of psychos. In 2020; mayors, governors and other public officials along with legacy institution directors declared in an uber-coddling manner that the fake police violence crisis was so severe, that vandalism, theft and arson were socially acceptable. And for those employees who were resistant to email indoctrination cool-aid; DEI directors emailed coercively, “You are either part of the problem or part of the solution. If you are not outraged, something is wrong with you. DEI monitors will approach employees who have not yet joined discussion.” Those who are flower-assassin adjacent do not hear the voice of reason that would come from others because such apostasy is banned in woke environments.
re: the Brown administrators: -- this just seems obvious:
The admins should have no trouble succintly describing their work and how it benefits the university as a whole and the students.
If they can't, then:
a) Perhaps they are not the right person for the job and should leave
b) Perhaps the job doesn't actually need to exist
c) Both a and b.
Each admin could have chosen to just ignore the email and if a majority do so, it might mostly fall flat. That they chose to retaliate is, of course, telling.
Interesting statistics to contemplate are faculty/student ratios, faculty/administrator ratios, and student/administrator ratios, especially over time since the 60s.
re: the flower destroyers: I have zero tolerance for nonsense like that.
I dont know why people would be surprised about the straight lady being discriminated against. Gay people in my profession get away with murder because employers are afraid to fire them. Same goes with women too actually. Employers are terrified of discrimination lawsuits.
There are a lot of things on this story that interest me because I teach at a university in southeastern Michigan. I don’t teach at university of Michigan. I totally agree with your examination of the excessive amount of administrators making things so expensive and we’ve talked a lot at our school about how administrators drive tuition dollars up. What doesn’t always get talked about is that universities like mine which is just like a regional state University, often have to compete with these prestigious places with a lot more amenities. I think it’s just gonna get worse because of the demographic cliff and a lot of elite schools are lowering their entrance requirements and taking people more from these regional schools. What happens when your regional school and you have to compete is that you end up adding your own shit and then that drives tuition up as well. I think that there does need to be something else that happens, but it’s so hard in this marketplace.
I am against defunding the schools, especially around research, and I personally know people who got their research, pulled for no good reason. However, the indirects for some of these places, I just wonder how rich these schools are getting and how much harder it gets to make education accessible when it’s funneled all to a few elite institutions. I could be wrong, but sometimes I wonder about how we’re funding universities. You’re either doing it through research dollars and huge donations or through tuition and the debt of the students and both of those seem kind of unsustainable if you want an accessible University system.
The second thing is that the thing is too bad is that the peonies are within view of the Mott’s Children’s Hospital and so kids with cancer a lot of times only get pleasure from seeing the peonies. I think a lot of people on different Reddit threads and different people on social media have talked about how they or their kids used to love the flowers if they were in the hospital , especially on the cancer unit. I don’t think anybody, save a few people, think this was a good idea. Even people I know who are very pro Palestinian are thinking this kind of sounds fucked up. I just feel like it’s so self-defeating and it makes me so mad because I just gets away from the actual issue and then if a few people question it, they just say you don’t care about dead kids and it’s just ugh. It is a public good and all you do is alienate people from your cause, which presumably is to stop university of Michigan from funding Israeli companies.
I also think that there’s still some lingering negative feelings that people have here about the uncommitted vote and how Dearborn went for Trump and it helps swing the state to him and so sometimes people are cynical about Palestinian protesters outside of university context. This makes it worse.
The opening discussion got me thinking. Is the expression 'Flaming Straight' a thing? I feel like it should be. Maybe a title for Phoebe's upcoming book?
The idiots vandalizing paintings to stop climate change have evolved into idiots killing flowers to save lives in Gaza. I predict the next stage will be abducting pets to stop deportations.
The critique of admin bloat definitely predates DEI as y’all discussed, but I think DEI has primed academics to have an instinctive defensiveness toward admin jobs. DEI is almost nothing but admin bloat, a sort of bonus HR with little practical purpose, which academics would abhor if it weren’t for its politics (which politics just tend to be a thin veneer over DEI’s corporate-friendly vision of pedagogy anyway). The faculty reaction to my uni cutting DEI was revelatory for me. Aside from DEI, I do think a lot of these other admin bloat positions are viewed as important in maintaining a politically progressive uni environment, and a lot seem to be filled by former academics too. All of this is magnified by academics’ (somewhat understandable, if entitled) kneejerk negative reaction to any job cuts at all in the ivory tower.
And one of the business professors at my uni outright refers to our students as “customers” in meetings, which is not a good sign.
Regarding the idea of unis as being about experiences other than education, that seems to have been the case for a long time, right? Growing up, I recall college movies being more about partying, extracurriculars like sports, and romance than academics by far, and my idea of uni life was sort of shaped by this. Pitch Perfect comes to mind, Animal House of course, Scream 2 has precisely one (surprisingly realistic!) classroom scene, etc. I can’t think of sports movies off the top of my head but they… exist. Only a few college movies/shows come to mind as showing a balance of drama and academics in students’ lives (eg Legally Blonde, Carmilla). Anyway, those weren’t made by unis, but having seen them, it doesn’t surprise me to encounter students who expect uni to be less about grades than it is, although the inclusion of activism in marketing seems new to me (and is news to me—I’m interested in looking into it).
That accidentally ended up as a wall of text; anyway, academia talk is catnip for me, and I’m happy that FC remains one of the few podcasts in its discourse ecosystem that has not dropped in quality.
You're right that university has always been at least partly about the experience. However, the nature of the experience has really changed. It's something very curated/structured now as I'm sure you're aware. There is much more continuity with high school than there used to be. An analogy might be the difference between how kids used to run around the neighborhood without adult supervision versus the scheduled and supervised play that has become much more prevalent.
Do you think unis decided that it would be safer if they took it upon themselves to make the experiences structured and supervised, as a replacement for potential wildness like Animal House? I never personally went to much of that sort of uni event stuff as a student, at least nothing beyond clubs or department events, so I’m a little forgetful of what unis offer.
It's a good question. My sense is that it reflects more general societal trends in the last three or four decades, e.g. increasing focus on risk-mitigation, expanding conceptions of harm, the fetish for quantitative measurement, intensifying commercialization. All of these things push in the direction of more and more structure, and the elimination of anything which is not amenable to it. These observations apply to nearly all areas of life, so higher ed is just a special case.
As to whether it was universities or parents that got the ball rolling, I suspect that it's the outcome of a positive feedback loop involving both. Once the changes began they became expected, and so more changes were made in an effort to better satisfy expectations, and so one. As to why anyone thought these changes were necessary (or even desirable) is a much deeper question of course.
On the flower assassins; I have a theory. The woke justice mania has created an army of psychos. In 2020; mayors, governors and other public officials along with legacy institution directors declared in an uber-coddling manner that the fake police violence crisis was so severe, that vandalism, theft and arson were socially acceptable. And for those employees who were resistant to email indoctrination cool-aid; DEI directors emailed coercively, “You are either part of the problem or part of the solution. If you are not outraged, something is wrong with you. DEI monitors will approach employees who have not yet joined discussion.” Those who are flower-assassin adjacent do not hear the voice of reason that would come from others because such apostasy is banned in woke environments.
Have you two always said the word “bottoms” in that accent or this a new thing?
re: the Brown administrators: -- this just seems obvious:
The admins should have no trouble succintly describing their work and how it benefits the university as a whole and the students.
If they can't, then:
a) Perhaps they are not the right person for the job and should leave
b) Perhaps the job doesn't actually need to exist
c) Both a and b.
Each admin could have chosen to just ignore the email and if a majority do so, it might mostly fall flat. That they chose to retaliate is, of course, telling.
Interesting statistics to contemplate are faculty/student ratios, faculty/administrator ratios, and student/administrator ratios, especially over time since the 60s.
re: the flower destroyers: I have zero tolerance for nonsense like that.
I dont know why people would be surprised about the straight lady being discriminated against. Gay people in my profession get away with murder because employers are afraid to fire them. Same goes with women too actually. Employers are terrified of discrimination lawsuits.