Of course, that’s a dream world, especially when there’s so much at stake involving prestige and income. And don’t be deceived about the Ivy League cachet — its administrators and athletics directors will take steps, including recruiting athletes with the same proportionate subpar academic qualifications as any Big X school, to not be mocked as competitively effeminate.

Maybe this will be enough to get the fawning article about the ND football program off the top of the Chronicle blogs page. My stomach turns every time I see the ND president’s big smirky smile. Ew.

Happily, none of my students has been in serious trouble for a surprisingly long time. I hope when trouble comes again, one of those wonderful deans is still around . . .

In my experience, even if you choose not to let it define you, it defines you (in the way I take Historiann to mean this, to become an activist about the particular injustice). I think I would in any case be exactly who I am and have supported younger women in exactly the ways I have but I also see how my own college experiences are a part of reacting the way I do, saying what I say, and so on. This may be a sort of choosing too, though, a kind that lets you lift the burden.

Tony’s point about virtuous administrators is a good one. My guess is that they’ve retired, and they’ve been replaced by a new generation who respond to the incentives of the neoliberal university: it’s all a potential profit center, so whomever sells the most “product” while keeping their production (i.e. labor) costs low will be rewarded. We hear very rarely about the public interest, or about what’s good for the university as a whole. I also think that administrators are rewarded more for implementing new programs that sound good, but they rarely stick around to see if they actually improve retention, or time-to-degree, or student learning, or whatever they’re trying to improve. In fact, sticking around would only mean being accountable for your decisions, so that’s another reason to flee.

I was thinking about this the other day after getting the fiftieth e-mail this year asking me to nominate someone for Whatever-of-the-Year, which I guarantee you were each the brainchildren of administrators. These awards schemes, which just make more work for faculty who have to write these nominations and then have to sit on committees and judge them, are our substitutes now for merit increases or actual funding for our research. Because a few of us get rewarded occasionally (and a lunch, and maybe a sticker!) they don’t have to pay us, provide decent benefits, or think about the long-term.