Ave atque vale

 

March 16, 2024

My thrashers have returned. Peach tree in flower. White narcissi gathered under the dogwoods.

In response to the crises at UNCA I composed the following. I composed it to send to Mountain Xpress, though I’ll have to consider if it could do any conceivable good. Maybe mortifying the guilty is enough good. Maybe not.

Nobody associated with UNCA who had their eyes open is surprised by its present dire situation. That the university’s administration brought the crisis to pass is not open to much debate. At this point we regard a series of bad choices which cannot fully be explained by simple incompetence.  The destruction of our university had deliberation and intention behind it, which I have yet to understand. Assassination by administration. But why? 

It’s necessary to understand that college administrators are not a meritocracy, but a caste, handing off important positions to one another regardless of performance. A college administrator cannot screw up enough not to get a new position. Chancellors and provosts who should have been ignominiously fired skip unchastened off to other appointments. It’s not required that an administrator have any love for or understanding of the institution they serve. A more than casual interest in education can be a distraction to Corporate ideology. It is understood that the administrator will act chiefly for the furthering of her own career. Leaving ruin behind is not, by the administrative caste itself, frowned upon.  We had a few who loved us and many who had their eyes on some further prize. 

I spent thirty seven years as a faculty member at UNCA. When I arrived it was vital, forward-looking, gaining national attention as a dedicated public liberal arts school. When I retired, it stood barely on the level of a superior high school, its faculty and staff demoralized and in constant professional peril, its administration bloated, unresponsive, without vision or backbone. Culture and demographics are not to blame. The wrong people were perpetually–and intentionally–hired. Whether Phillips Hall or Chapel Hill is responsible I don’t know, but the administrators imposed on us were notable for their indifference– sometimes hostility–to the academic enterprise. Education was replaced by single-minded attention to the increase of numbers. Yes, both those causes can be served at once, but not by the people who came to us. Somehow, increasing the customer base by compromising the product never struck anyone as absurd. 

After a certain, quite specific, point, administration cultivated institutional contempt and divisiveness, doing whatever it could to undermine faculty authority. Overriding academic standards to let bad students slide by was meant to garner student favor and make the faculty look harsh. Graduating students who had not completed their requirements (I had this precise experience) demonstrated  how casual the violation of public trust was in our eyes.. Busywork initiatives were introduced to keep faculty from concentrating on scholarship and pedagogy, and to give the ever swelling ranks of administration something to administer. Title IX was weaponized, so its original commission to protect the vulnerable and offer opportunities to the under-served was lost, becoming, in the hands of a badly equipped and wholly unchecked individual, a bludgeon to terrify faculty and prevent the free exchange of ideas. There was no interest in verification or even reasonableness once it was discovered how much damage could be done by anonymous accusation. This ended the era of free and open academic speech, without which no university exists. “Critical Thinking” faded from among the university’s battle cries, because it was the last thing any administrator wanted. 

Administration exhibited contempt for our students in asserting that the least was enough for them. Why hire a good faculty member when a mediocre one could be had for less? Why hire tenure-track academics when adjuncts can be strung along at starvation wages? Why build programs or initiatives when it is cheaper to retain (and restrict) the ones you have? Our kids won’t know better, won’t need anything better in their circumscribed lives. Administration, rightly concerned with enrollment, typically went the wrong way to enlarge it. You offer something unique, something not known elsewhere, some inimitable excellence. UNCA Administration at no point in the last fifteen years has been interested in excellence. It assumed its clientele didn’t want excellence, wouldn’t know how to put it to use, wouldn’t notice the lack of it. I served on three committees at various time to get a Phi Beta Kappa chapter for UNCA. We were turned down every time, the half-articulated reason being our clearly articulated indifference to academic excellence. Why would an ambitious young person choose this? 

  Admissions, to increase numbers, began to admit students who were not prepared for college, and in some cases never would be. To retain those who ought not to have come in the first place, a system of “accommodations” was introduced, so compromising of academic standards there was no use in maintaining standards at all. Why should you have to attend class or do the work? Why have such difficult requirements? Why comprehensive exams or capstone essays? They’re so hard. You didn’t attend class, but if we fail you, we won’t get the next tuition check, and our graph lines will take a dip. Why have requirements at all?  Curriculum became an irritant to college administration. It does not quickly pull the graph line in the right direction. It does not immediately increase the banking of fees and the sale of diplomas. 

Ironically, neither did the prescribed dumbing-down. 

UNCA stopped being an institution of higher learning, but continues to be a degree-granting institution. UNCA , now, is not interested in what a student learns, or how well she learns it. Faculty are resented for wanting to insert a few lectures and a few exams or a bit of knowledge before the students can be turned into donating alumni. UNCA loses students because it has nothing to offer (except for those faculty members still faithfully soldiering on in the face of opposition and deprivation) but a cynical pocketing of tuition, too much of which goes to the Administration which imposed the system– you see the vicious cycle. I would not recommend UNCA, where I spent 95% of my professional life, to anyone. This breaks my heart. My legacy, and the legacies of hundreds of others, is gone. 

What’s the present solution? Cut programs. Fire adjuncts. Leave vital faculty positions unfilled, retain superfluous administration. Of course. In time of famine, kill the farmers and enrich the owners of grocery conglomerates. Any faculty or staff in the past two decades could have pointed all this out; administration was too arrogant to listen.