Samuel Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence college, has been under fire lately for pointing out the obvious—that college staff, especially those with student-facing roles, are much more liberal than the average American.

This seems like a no-brainer, especially to anyone who has even a glancing affiliation with colleges. It’s not even a surprise that the left-leaning media doesn’t love the fact that Abrams is pointing it out.

But I believe there’s another reason that Prof. Abrams is under fire: nobody wants to admit that university staff exist.

There’s this myth, that is perpetuated by nearly every book or article I’ve ever read on the organizational structure of the university, that the academy is an eternal battle between the faculty and the administrators.

Unlike what you may be thinking (“administrative assistant”), in a college setting the term administrator is always used for upper level management—chairs, department heads, deans (and all the flavors of “deanlet”), AVPs, the Provost, and the university’s president.

To most faculty and administrators, academic staff don’t count in the organizational structure of the university, because most of them don’t have PhDs. This therefore disqualifies them from having a brain, or making any kind of decision, or influence.

Unfortunately for the faculty, who could not get anything done at a university without their staff, this is wrong. Most of the time, faculty come up with the ideas and the staff handle most, if not all, of the execution.

Faculty and administrators rely heavily on staff to get things done, without having any idea of how it all happens. They just say the words, and *poof* the action is accomplished.

Deep down, they know they don’t do anything, and Prof. Abrams is helping to unmask this fact.

Universities and colleges are really complex institutions. Trustees often have other careers. They’re looking at the economic health, fund raising, buildings being built, degree programs, and so on. They’re not in the weeds. you have to be in the weeds to see what’s going on. That’s why I wrote this op-ed.

So much attention is paid to presidents and deans and faculty and students. But there’s another pillar people seem to forget. That’s the growth in this huge bureaucratic glut that functions in an almost autonomous way.

From the inside, this is 100% true.

The staff were hired to do the things that the faculty don’t want to do, which include things like budgeting, maintaining files, and dealing with students.

I was surprised that, though media coverage of free speech often fixated on professors being very engaged in these fights, if we take an empirical look, which I did, one of the things that emerges is that faculty are generally quite disengaged from campus life and their students. Spending time with students is not something that most faculty like to do, despite reports often showing they are on the front lines protesting with their students. College administrators, meanwhile, are very heavily engaged. …

In this case, I believe Prof. Abrams meant “administrators” in the assistant sense, not in the dean sense.

Either way, it’s true. Faculty often show more loyalty to their discipline than to anything else. It puts a monkey wrench in any of the organizational theory books that assume that the university is something to which people are “hired.” No. Faculty perceive themselves as working for their disciplines and their peers inside that discipline.

If you are a super-liberal person who cares more about advancing social justice than you do a salary, one of the easiest things you can do is get a job in Student Affairs at a university. You can basically do what you want, get front-row access to impressionable college students, and get great health benefits.

And faculty, to keep their status as the big-brains who make everything happen in a university, are happy to perpetuate the myth that these staff don’t exist—often because the student affairs and academic affairs wings of colleges only intersect at the very top of the heap. But that is another story for another day.

It sounds like Prof. Abrams has a book coming out. I’m interested to read it.

Who is Denise Bennett, you might ask?

Denise Bennett is a faculty member who lost her shit about grant administration at the University of Idaho. The university then placed her on leave. She retaliated by livestreaming as she opened and read through the terms of her leave. And, in top-tier episode of “that escalated quickly,” the UI administration responded by excluding her from campus and sending out an alert insinuating that she was going to shoot up the campus on a meth bender.

The whole situation is a mess. Both sides are behaving badly.

You can read more at the UI Argonaut if you want.

Backstory aside, I wanted to take a closer look at the email that Denise wrote that has since been published to the internet for all to see. From my vantagepoint, I’ve heard similar rants before but it’s rare that they make it into print. Most of the time, faculty know better than to commit this sort of thing to paper even though everybody knows.

People who are outside of the university system probably don’t know, tho.

This email demonstrates one of the fundamental problems that drives the strife in universities today: on the one hand, universities usually are a cobbled together series of outdated systems that don’t talk to each other or provide any sort of meaningful output or feedback, which are then exacerbated by employees who have no idea what things are like from the faculty side AND don’t have any conception of how a system works; on the other hand, faculty resent having to do any type of administrative work or having to interact with others who are trying to do administrative work on their behalf.

Yes, that is an extremely convoluted paragraph. A pickle, if you will.

Let’s try it again: Faculty resent administrative work, so they don’t do it, so the university has to hire administrators to do the work that faculty aren’t doing, which causes bloat and policy creep, which makes it more frustrating for faculty to try to do administrative work, so faculty end up resenting administrative work.

While I know absolutely nothing about administrative systems at the University of Idaho, I think it’s safe to say that they are outdated, convoluted, and incomprehensible.

So you get statement like this one:

I
AM
BEGGING
ANYONE
TO
PLEASE
come up with a god damned system where I can see how much actual money there is FOR ME TO SPEND ON THE PROJECTS I WROTE THE FUCKING GRANTS FOR! All year I get “the system is changing” and now, after the first of the year, “there’s money, but you can’t spend it.” WHY THE HELL DO I WRITE THESE GRANTS? WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS? SOMEBODY GIVE ME AN EXPLANATION AS TO WHY LAST YEAR MY REPORT TO NEH WAS DUE BEFORE OSP EVER GAVE ME THE FUNDS?

Makes sense. It’s hard to do your job as a teacher/creative when you can’t use the money that you won to do so—especially when you are judged by your ability to bring in grant money.

But Denise doesn’t stop there. Things snowball from “I can’t get my grant” to a complete refusal to participate in the systems that make a university run.

I WILL NEVER GO TO ANOTHER MEETING INVOLVING THE WORDS ASSESSMENT OR STRATEGIC PLAN, I WILL KEEP UP MY END OF THE BARGAIN AS DESCRIBED IN MY PD, THAT’S IT.

I get it. Really I do. Most faculty get into the professorial business because they want to do research, or teach, or do their creative work with no interruptions. Unfortunately for faculty, they want to do that without thinking about how their courses interact with everybody else’s courses. That’s where things like assessment and strategic plans come in—to try to bring some sense of coherency to a bunch of individual faculty interests.

Is that ideal? Of course not. Administrators don’t know what faculty in each discipline should be teaching, which is why they delegate that job back to the faculty.

On the other hand, administrators never let faculty delegate anything to them.

I NEVER ASK ANYONE TO COME TEACH MY CLASSES! HEY OSP, COME TEACH MY INTRO TO PRODUCTION COURSE ABOUT THE 180 WILL YA? FUCKING JOKE. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE!

And yet, at the end of the day, Denise is happy to have a permanent spot at the very institution that is doing her wrong.

THANK GOD I HAVE TENURE,

See what I mean about a pickle? (There’s no clear solution.)

Is anything really going to change? (Doubtful.)

I’ll be interested to see how this situation is resolved.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has recycled an article from 2016 about how to talk about higher ed with those who are not initiated into its subtle and arcane rites.

From one perspective, you can now breathe a sigh of relief because you don’t have to spend any time thinking about how you can defend your calling against the nosy and presumptive questions asked by Aunt Thelma over Thanksgiving dinner.

From another perspective, the Cathedral doesn’t even care enough to update its propaganda two years later. Trust me, Aunt Thelma isn’t going to be asking about the “Trump chalkings” anytime soon.

This is why I’m taking the liberty of providing some new talking points, updated for 2018. These talking points may or may not reflect whatever updated, sanctioned rhetoric is currently used to talk about the academy. I call it like I see it, yo.

Why does college cost so much?

David Graeber can answer this one pretty well:

One thing it shows is that the whole “lean and mean” ideal is applied much more to productive workers than to office cubicles. It’s not at all uncommon for the same executives who pride themselves on downsizing and speed-ups on the shop floor, or in delivery and so forth, to use the money saved at least in part to fill their offices with feudal retinues of basically useless flunkies. […]

Health and education are equally hard hit: managers now feel they need to each have their little squadron of assistants, who often have nothing to do, so they end up making up new exotic forms of paperwork for the teachers, doctors, nurses… who thus have ever less time to actually teach or treat or care for anyone.

Other answers include: academics are taught a lot of things but not how to budget, athletics programs don’t actually pay the bills, and state funds are not going to keep a university afloat anyway.

What does the student-debt crisis mean? How much debt are students really in?

Graeber can take this one, too:

Well if you talk to young people fresh out of college, you don’t hear a lot of them saying, “Ah, the world lies open before me … what then would I best do?”

Sure, you heard that a lot in the 1970s, 80s, even 90s: “What do I really want?” Now, not so much. Most graduates are in a panic over how they’re going to pay their student loans and the real dilemma you hear is: “Can I get a job that will actually pay me enough to live on (let alone be able to have a family someday) that I wouldn’t be entirely ashamed of?”

Maaaaaaaaybe the scary stories about debt that is over $100k are just that, scary stories, but the reality for most of us is that student debt is a massive burden—we can’t discharge it through bankruptcy, it demands to be paid, and it eats up the small paychecks that we receive right out of college. For me personally, for a few years it was a choice between paying my debts and putting money in savings. Just because the majority of stories aren’t dRaMaTiC doesn’t mean they’re not shaping individual lives.

There was speculation that President-elect Donald J. Trump wouldn’t win white voters with college degrees, but he did. Why did that shift happen?

No one is asking this question in 2018. Let’s talk about Alexandra Occasio-Cortez instead.

What’s all this I’m hearing about trigger warnings and safe spaces?

I’m skipping this because frankly, it’s boring. Yes, it’s a trope that Millennials are sheltered delicate flowers who want to cry in dark corners and eat avocado toast all day instead of getting a Real Job ™. Yes, it’s true that many students are constitutionally ill-equipped to handle adversity.

But nobody is “shocked” to hear about safe spaces anymore.

Why is there so much attention on campuses to sexual assault?

Oh, I don’t know, why don’t you ask the people in power who got away with it for so long, like Avitell Ronnell or Larry Nassar?

Perhaps you’d prefer to talk to students who have been falsely accused of assault and denied due process?

Why aren’t college athletes paid?

Many of the problems that the university faces are caused by an identity crisis. The university is caught between two faces:

1. the corporate entity promising new and better jobs for each and every one of its graduates, run by and for businesses
2. the ivory tower where research is paramount and immediate application is secondary (so are students)

If you subscribe to view #1, of course athletes should get paid. If you subscribe to view #2, athletics don’t belong in a university setting and therefore the question is irrelevant. Until that question is resolved, don’t expect any real answers.

Here’s the thing. In the eternal battle between university faculty and administration, both sides are too busy entrenching their positions and launching zingers at the enemy to pay any attention to the third player on the battlefield.

Yes, there are the byzantine ranks of the faculty, where a multitude of micro-status-markers sort disciplines, programs, and individuals into very real pigeonholes.

Of course there are the administrators, who sometimes pretend that they are running a business instead of an ~institute of higher education~. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And then there’s the third team: the staff.

Neither administration nor faculty, we exist to make sure that things get done. Whether we’re department managers, grant coordinators, graduate program coordinators, fiscal specialists, executive assistants, or whatever, we tend to focus much less on the politics of university life and much more on getting things done. We are the anonymous people who do the work.

When someone decides to once again apply organizational theory to the university setting, they tend to focus solely on students, faculty, and administration (ie, senior and executive leadership). Maybe they’ll focus on adjunct and non-tenured faculty, if they’re really being generous.

But nobody ever talks about the fact that every person in a leadership position has an assistant, or that there are many isolated workers (because silos are a real thing) whose sole function is to make sure that decisions get made, budgets get (sort of) balanced, and the life of the university continues to function.

For every person out there making headlines, I can pretty much guarantee that there’s somebody behind-the-scenes making things happen.

I am one of those people. I want to know more about those people. I want to know why we are so conveniently overlooked, like pieces of furniture instead of active members of university culture and organization.

We are the ones who do the operational things that keep the university running, like pay the bills and keep up compliance regulations. Without us, university life would be a whole lot more painful for the faculty and administration.

Perhaps, then, we are the problem. We are the bubble that allow universities to continue to function, despite incompetent leadership who cannot keep sound finances or a viable vision for the future.

This is something that I would like to know more about. I seriously want to know how many decisions are made de facto by staff as they’re just trying to get the job done, when the boss is waffling. I want to know how influential, or not, staff are in the shaping of their units and departments. I want to know how much of a difference we really do make.

And this isn’t to stir up grievances. I don’t want to start throwing around the victim card. Most of us derive satisfaction from our work in other ways than recognition or money; we’re the ones who care about doing a good job. I don’t want this to sound like “Oh, poor academic staff who are never recognized or appreciated, boo hoo hoo.”

At the same time, though, any “study” of university culture without taking into account the staff is like studying the body without taking into account the lymphatic system.

Sure, it’s not sexy or particularly photogenic, but it plays a huge role in human wellness much like staff are the lifeblood of a university.

If we’re serious about wanting to solve the education crisis, academic staff can do a lot to correctly diagnose and suggest solutions to fix problems. We have a very frank and up-close look with the issues that plague higher ed, and most of us are happy to talk about them.

Just no one thinks to ask.

Peter Thiel calls it like he sees it (and he ain’t wrong):

“The analogy that I’ve used is that perhaps the universities today are as corrupt as the Catholic Church was 500 years ago,” Thiel said. “If you think about the eve of the Reformation when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church doors, there were all these priests that did not do very much work in much the same way that college professors and administrators are today. You had to pay these indulgences the way that you have to pay runaway tuition today.”

One of the first long-term questions I had about my choice (or rather, “choice,” long story don’t ask) of employment in the higher ed sphere was the debt bubble. What I didn’t know then, but know full well now, is that it’s not just a debt bubble. It’s also an awareness bubble, and/or an effectiveness bubble.

This is even belied by the fact that many faculty and administrator refer to their life choices as “academe” completely unironically.

What is interesting about the church structure in academia, however, is how multi-layered it is. Each university is its own cathedral (so to speak), but within the university are multiple competing interests. Faculty and administration are constantly at each others’ throats. There’s a huge rift between the sciences and the humanities. And professors in each disciplines are often more loyal to their field than they are their institution. One college president likens these to “guilds.”

So you have reverence for the specific university, usually headed up by the alumni of that university with the support of the administration. Sometimes the faculty join in, but not always. These people often see the university as never doing wrong.

Faculty, meanwhile, have loyalties somewhere completely different and are more often concerned with raising their national research profile than anything for their specific university. If anything, they choose the university that they wish to work at based on their own fame and caliber of research.

But even within disciplines, you have schisms. Maybe some faculty are funded by certain types of grants, and maybe a subset of those are the referees for those grants. Or editors of a journal, or whatever.

Academia–especially the research colleges, teaching colleges are more straightforward–is this shifting miasma of priorities.

One of the reasons universities are in trouble is because faculty are often incentivized to care for themselves and their career–looking to the discipline for guidance–over being part of a team at a given university.