Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor, and the Professional Turn

Preface

Preface F or all its promise as the noble leveler, higher education today is part of the great divide in the United states. at once an engine of opportunity and disequilibrium, it is at odds with itself. For faculty, perhaps no gulf is greater than that between itself and what is frequently referred to in an ominous tone as “the administration.” in the iconic picture of the professoriate is portrayed the paragon of inner-directed existence, a life of the mind answerable only to its own calling, governed by its own rules, and subject to its own review—in effect, autonomous. and yet much faculty work jostles with that image. professionals in higher education as elsewhere have been swept up in the wave of management that has made itself at home in the workplace as well as in every other place. indeed, from work to leisure, policy to poverty, child rearing to anger, there seems scarcely an aspect of human existence that is not in need of management. the sense that someone is always looking over your shoulder, measuring your every move for best effect, and inviting you to judge yourself and others by common standards of worth has for many been largely internalized. since the sixties, the tremendous expansion of access to higher education has swelled the ranks of professionals. yet rather than fulfilling the promise of becoming the new mandarins whose knowledge reigns, those who pass through college have increasingly found themselves to be subject to new management . this brave regime bears the conviction that every bone and sinew must be engineered to maximize all manner of output; even job satisfaction must be maximized as all effort is enlisted in the process of generalized accountability . the practice of management has been grounded in the application of x • pReFaCe rationalizing the knowledge required for greater output, which is measured in the aggregate according to the logic of a standardized mass. now, such administrative effort effects a way of being that is at once intimate and expansive , where getting the feeling just right results in wholesale transformation, and tightly targeted initiatives or small movements in ranking are leveraged to dramatic claims of victory or defeat. a reasonable enough impulse in the face of this onslaught is to take flight from the managerial imperative—assuming, of course, there is somewhere else to go or that you cannot or will not take the insipid desire to discipline with you. another—doubtless more queasy—response is to look inside this calculus and see how it might be figured otherwise. if management is indeed so profoundly formative of education and higher learning is tooled by and toward it, the denizens of academe—students, faculty, administration alike—may do well to consider where else it may lead and what else we might aspire to than obeisance to scarcity-inducing norms of accountability and excellence. if management teaches us to run things, where do we want to go and how should we organize ourselves to get there? Far from acceding to the mantra “if you cannot beat them, join them,” this book examines what else might be done with the surfeit of mutual management in our midst. it seeks to understand what is happening within higher education in order to recognize and value the alternatives that lie already to hand. Rather than seeing administrative work as something to be bemoaned, refused, resisted, or avoided, this is an exploration of what else might be wrought from the generalized condition of management than the dulling drain of overwork. there is, no doubt, a dollop of hubris in this internal or immanent approach to revaluing and redirecting extant capacities for managing the institutional surround. the will to manage otherwise springs from my own experience of more than a dozen years of various administrative charges—to say nothing of the years before i joined the bureaucratic ranks yet subject to the managerial imperative. as a college student, i had been deeply instructed by various kinds of political engagement, including being in a collective that ran a radical bookstore at the University of California, san diego, where i started my undergraduate studies as a premed student; my tenant organizing in Berkeley, where i transferred to study sociology; and my participation in various campus protests. When i graduated in 1979, i went to work in a paint factory. in 1980, as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, i went on strike with the graduate student union, subsequently lost my...