Also, your point about the feminized workplace is duly noted. I have heard colleagues talk about this in private for the past decade. I have to give that a lot more thought.

My condolences to all the colleagues with delayed maintenance horror stories. The 1970s neo-Brutal that houses the Liberal Arts at my college was renovated five years ago, so no flooding. But the way the budget is looking, I suspect we’ll be buying our own light bulbs next year.

We just have to make sure to invest in irony detectors before this thing goes truly viral. Big thanks for the shout-out.

I mean, now tenured faculty will get a taste of working with low pay [esp. if there are no pay raises and even salary cuts for the next 2-3 years], they will be without offices [cuz I feel for the History dept. at Baa Ram U if you all have to work somewhere else for the foreseeable future...thank goodness it's the end of the term! "Deferred maintenance" is a horror], and now some tenured faculty who were able to skedaddle out of teaching those large-ish to mega-large, entry-level Intro courses filled with the illiterate, the unconscious, the unskilled, and the disaffected will experience how those students and they parents will rip their heads off if they don’t get an A just for showing up 75% of the time!

One must wonder if these problems will help motivate the silent, immobile, largely unsympathetic tenured mass into action for their own self-preservation, which may in turn help turn the tide back on adjunctification and further corporatization of the academy.

I doubt it. They’ll just admit more grad students to compensate with cheap labor. More the better if the dumb schmucks pay their own tuition!

This leads to a devaluation of work done at the university, including teaching at some research-oriented places. And let’s not get into the type of labor regularly referred to as “service.” Those of us who toil in the service industry are all too aware that the term allows Professor X to bow out to prepare for an upcoming lecture or make progress on the book.

So in some cases it is the worker who doesn’t have to do the work and in others it is the work that has to be done by those who are willing.

So what we face is a demand for “Excellence With All Budgeting Decisions Made by Administrators Who Know Nothing About What or How We Are Teaching.”

As a colleague of mine in the National Bark Service told an angry superior many years ago, in front of a disgruntled but suddenly bemused staff meeting, “No, less is not more, less is LESS, only MORE is more.” Still true after all these years.

In tough times, things perceived as central to the brand will be maintained, and even invested in more deeply; in good times, the brand can expand, and the investments get shared around more widely.

During every college football game on most tv (and basketball, too, I think) universities get a brief opportunity to air a commercial, in which they get to “brand” themselves as not only a sports school, but also as whatever else. One of my old schools, Brutus University, has taken to branding itself (in part) as giving people access to a particular sports cheer, which they show people re-creating across the globe. That is, part of Brutus U’s brand is explicitly social (as well as sports oriented): you will be a member of a community and you’ll have a secret handshake (sorry, “cheer”). Academics are secondary to this branding, it seems; and when they do show up in these commercials, it’s usually a montage: a science lab, a lecture hall, a faculty office, a gender-and-racially-balanced group of students laughing outdoors.

Increases in tuition and decreases in other sorts of support, of course, explicitly increase the importance of such branding efforts. If we don’t like these kinds of branding strategies, the best policy might be to work to find a new tuition-independent funding model.

I’ll get the think tank working on it.