I’m writing from an unusually warm family vacation in Minnesota– that’s a picture of a beach area that I liked. Since I’m inside and being air-conditioned for a while, I thought I’d write a brief post on the sort of contrast of opinions I’ve heard very recently about what’s wrong with universities nowadays.
Shortly after arriving for this reunion of sorts, my father, who is fairly conservative and definitely not an academic, wanted to show me this editorial in the Des Moines Register, “Gartner says Iowa’s state universities need to change quickly.”. Basically, former regent member Michael Gartner is all over the place with the problems of the universities in Iowa, blaming it mostly on lazy and shared-governance seeking faculty, the places not being run enough like businesses, and (and I swear I’m not making this up) binge drinking by the students.
At almost the same time, an alert EMUTalk reader sent me a link to this CHE piece, “The Strategic Plan: Neither Strategy Nor Plan, but a Waste of Time,” which is from a book called The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters by Benjamin Ginsberg. The headline is almost all you need to know about the Ginsberg piece, especially for those amongst us who have had to deal with some kind of program review paperwork mumbo-jumbo.
Anyway, the conservative point of view is that the problem is the faculty, and the liberal point of view is that the problem is the administration. I tend to agree with Ginseberg, though Gartner is not completely wrong, either. The troubling thing for me is that the Gartner view seems to have a lot more play with non-academic types like my family.
