I’ve recently started reading Dr. Patricia Gumport’s 2019 book Academic Fault Lines: The Rise of Industry Logic in Public Higher Education, a research-heavy book that covers how market rationales have influenced higher education.

A sociologist and professor of higher education at Stanford, Gumport’s work is a substantially more robust macrocosm of my rationale for writing this series of opinions on the restructuring of Emporia State and University of North Carolina Greensboro. It’s been a great read that I would recommend if you’re a glutton for dense and dry social science texts.  

I’m only about 150 pages into Academic Fault Lines, and the portions which have most engrossed me have been the interview sections taken from Dr. Gumport’s case study on industry logic within higher education. Focusing on the voices of professors who are working with and against efforts to introduce market rationales of efficiency and funding into higher education, it’s both revealing and distressing to read how a specific managerial class developed in higher education and how their voices often become magnified to the detriment of the voice of professors. From Academic Fault Lines:

“…an administrator came over and said, ‘You people have the toughest grading standards in the college, and it would help enrollment if you would start easing up on your grading because people are not going to take economics if they’re getting Cs and Ds. They’re going to take courses elsewhere.’” 

This brings me to the topic of this opinion. Cuts, restructuring, and firing of tenured professors are not inevitable nor permanent. University structures change, decisions are rolled back or doubled down on, and different administrators create different priorities for their universities. 

However, in that process, how are professors in targeted programs holding up? How are the people who serve students in their journey to learn fairing in a job environment that is insecure, demoralizing and possibly teetering on elimination?

This is the third and final part of a series of opinion articles on the cuts at UNCG and comparing them to the restructuring at ESU. To gain a better understanding of the situation at UNCG, I spoke with three of their professors and got their thoughts on the cuts, the process, and the direction they see for the university.

The first part of this series cover how the cuts at each university were processed before they began and include faculty input on the matter. The second part focuses on the cuts themselves and how we can view them in a way that explains their intent. Now, I want to focus on the morale of professors within a university system that seems critical of higher education’s goal of access and is more focused on vague goals of financial solvency. 

When the restructuring was announced at ESU in fall of 2022, it was impossible not to notice how poor the morale of my professors was. For some people, this is a criticism of their work ethic which ought instead maintain equilibrium regardless of the broader academic environment and threats to their job security. This is a position I find fundamentally anti-human and am not interested in engaging with. I think it’s normal to fail to maintain composure when your job may be on the line, especially if that professor has a vested intellectual interest in maintaining a good learning environment and views the restructuring as threatening to that environment. I think this failure to maintain composure and the damage to morale a top-down, managerial restructuring can cause is an intentional move to inculcate job insecurity into faculty.

“That’s enough to make people quit, which I think is what they want,” said Dr. Alicia Aarnio, an astrophysicist and assistant professor at UNCG. “How am I supposed to stay around to teach out students who are going to be grieving the entire way through? Because they know that they’re the last. And I know as soon as they graduate, I’m out.” 

Tenure is a threat to the marketization of higher education because it’s a conserving force: you can’t be dynamic if there’s tenure because you can’t fire people at the drop of a hat to align university interests with market forces. This conserving force is fundamentally a good thing: it shields professors from market forces and thus shields their research, allowing it to advance and preserve ideas which may not be immediately financially relevant. That’s an aspect of universities that advocate for restructuring downplay. Therefore, restructuring often targets tenure (as was the case at ESU and UNCG) by creating a work environment hostile to targeted programs. 

This is why I believe that poor communication and rationalization for cuts is intentional: these are administrations that don’t want qualified tenure track professors and would rather hire outside of the tenure track to create more vulnerable employees. If you don’t justify your cuts, you scare away professors which would rather have secure jobs. This is something that I think is contradictory to the goal of creating a good learning environment. 

“I think that a big goal of this all along is to drive people away. They want to get rid of as many tenure lines as they can and can do that by making life miserable and making people feel insecure,” said Dr. Mark Elliot, associate professor and associate head of UNCG’s history department. Elliot is also president of UNCG’s American Association of University Professors (AAUP) chapter. “My take on this is one of their top goals is to shrink the amount of tenured faculty as much as possible at the university. That will weaken the ability of faculty to, you know, advocate on behalf of themselves on behalf of their job security, their pay.” 

I think there’s been a systemic failure at ESU to include voices on restructuring and program cuts because faculty voices would largely oppose them. It would be nauseating at this point to enumerate the full list of failures by administration to adequately include faculty voices in the restructuring process, a failure that is still ongoing. 

Administrative failures to give the faculty senate adequate time to address the restructuring, the faculty exclusion from Kansas Board of Regents hearings and votes, and the limited input by faculty before cuts are announced are all a microcosm of the administration’s failings. 

It’s difficult to find ESU professors willing to speak their mind on the restructuring due to perceived job insecurity and a lack of specific detail and clarity by the administration on the restructuring’s rationale, which is why this is largely an opinion series. That makes it very hard to write about what is a clear event at ESU because one party likely perceives consequences for speaking about the restructuring while the other party has failed to adequately explain its rationale. The lack of transparency and adequate involvement from faculty is probably the reason for such morale. 

Again, from Academic Fault Lines: “When academic programs and positions are eliminated in academic restructuring, the results are more readily accepted if the process involves faculty consultation, whether through establishing academic governance or ad hoc task forces, as well as when criteria are mutually agreed upon, so the decisions appear objective and rational. Conversely, when academic restructuring occurs top-down, especially if done swiftly and without faculty input, the lack of procedural legitimacy not only demoralizes those whose positions were eliminated, but also damages organizational morale.” 

I really wish the administrations at ESU and UNCG would read Gumport’s book and publicly engage with its ideas. I don’t claim it to be a cure-all for their woes (and there are plenty of passages that could defend their decisions), but I don’t think the administration has defended its ideas adequately either. 

It’s not like the issues surrounding industry logic and the controversies of restructuring are new to higher education: Gumport’s book began as a case study in the 1990s. With over three decades of history on the controversies surrounding restructuring, you would think either administration would more publicly and thoroughly defend its actions instead of trying to move on. 

This brings me to UNCG’s situation, one which is still in comparatively nascent stages of restructuring and yet has maintained the characteristic of lacking deliberation between the administration of UNCG, the NC university system and UNCG faculty. UNCG’s faculty senate voted in January to censure its chancellor and provost and, more recently, voted ‘no confidence’ concerning Provost Debbie Storrs and what many faculty believe to be cuts targeted at the school of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that a vote of ‘no confidence’ is reflective of low faculty morale and university policy– policy that the university would hold mediations on if they wished to preserve those faculty, their morale, and the quality of education at UNCG. Regardless of even the number of people who voted, the willingness of enough people to hold such a vote is a strong indicator of a sizeable chunk of the faculty’s morale.

However, if the goal of UNCG’s administration is to create an insecure job environment that discourages vocalizations of dissent on managerial policy, then it would make perfect sense to refuse to moderate or alter their positions. 

The desire to move past the decision, to act like it cannot be mediated, is even more frustrating in the context of recent statements by UNCG Chancellor Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr over the vote of ‘no confidence.’

“’There are over 800 eligible people to vote. Today, out of 339 votes cast, 53 percent voted for the resolution of no confidence and 47 percent voted against. Those who voted in favor represent less than a quarter of the eligible voters,” he said.

If 181 of 800 relevant people vote ‘no confidence’, that’s a substantial portion of stakeholders. 22 percent of stakeholders formally expressing their concern is enough to dramatically damage an institution’s legitimacy, the morale of its faculty, and probably enrollment in the long term. Those are the kinds of numbers that should probably warrant mediation, open communication, and better justification of the decisions being made if the administration is unwilling to budge. 

If Chancellor Gilliam Jr. truly is concerned about the vote because “it will also diminish the courage and invaluable contributions of the many people who are preparing for the University’s next chapter,” then I would recommend he take steps to demonstrate that he is equally concerned for the morale of faculty who feel like they’re being targeted.

“My sense when I got here was that this university had a clear sense of its identity and its mission, and I was thrilled to be here, to be part of that accessibility was a huge deal. I was hired during the pandemic, so people’s morale was quite low. But for me it was an amazing place to be. I felt excited to be part of the community,” said Dr. Faye Stewart, director of the women’s, gender, and sexuality studies graduate program and associate professor of German studies. “Now I feel discouraged, devalued. I feel as though the administration is trying to send the message that we have not been doing our job well or not been doing it well enough.” 

The future of an institution with perceived poor organizational legitimacy and low faculty morale is difficult to determine beyond a reasonable doubt, but it’s not a positive omen. 

I believe it is incorrect to assume that higher education does not require reforms considering enrollment trends and public trust in higher ed. I believe it is equally incorrect to assume drastic restructuring actions that don’t adequately involve faculty will not negatively reflect on enrollment and student success. It is even more foolish, then, to take these actions and refuse to mediate with stakeholders who feel targeted and dispossessed of their ability to improve their own job conditions. 

I believe Gumport’s book contains valuable insight on how to deal with the challenges facing higher ed so that we can preserve the institution we have given the responsibility to develop society’s knowledge. For that undertaking to be successful, people need to be respected so that they have the drive necessary to tackle these challenges.

I do not believe that ESU or UNCG have treated faculty with the respect necessary to tackle these challenges. I do not believe these restructurings had their justifications properly explained and vetted. 

I do not believe in the educational future that these administrations are selling to America.