“Crisis Management” in Higher Education:
RCM and the Politics of Crisis at the University of Florida
Kim Emery
By 2005 or so, it had become impossible to ignore the sense of
crisis that hung over the American college and university. It had
become hard to see higher education in terms other than crisis,
and harder to capture its situation in other than crisis terms.
– Christopher Newfield
Among the throngs of staff, faculty, and students protesting across California last
year were many with signs reading, “We make the University!” Others bore placards that
supplied the complementary commentary: “You make the Crisis.” Importantly, this
attribution of agency in the creation of economic crisis – and of the crisis itself as
manufactured, “socially constructed,” and above all unnecessary – does not deny the
reality of budget shortfalls. Instead, it carries the crucial insight that the system
responsible for this reality – what commentators call “globalization” or “neo-liberalism,”
“capitalism,” “the economy,” or simply “the market” – is itself a human invention and
social product.1
Therefore, while it would be foolish to argue that higher education in the United
States is not currently in crisis, it simultaneously remains not only possible, as Newfield
For encouragement, advice, and assistance helpful to the development of this essay, I am especially grateful
to Joe Ramsey, Joel Adams, Wesley Beal, Candi Churchill, John Leavey, Mark Piotrowski, Todd
Reynolds, and Phil Wegner.
1
Bill Readings, in his prescient, now classic The University in Ruins, clarifies that “globalization is not a
neutral process in which Washington and Dakar participate equally,” and suggests that “‘Americanization’
in its current form is a synonym for ‘globalization,” insofar as “’Americanization’ today names less a
process of national imperialism than the generalized imposition of the rule of the cash-nexus” (2-3). See
also Jason Read’s incisive “University Experience: Neoliberalism Against the Commons”; Sheila
Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy; the AAUP’s advice on refuting
those who invoke the economy generally and the recent downturn specifically to excuse “dramatic”
restructuring of academic employment; and Marc Bousquet regarding the extent to which “managerial
values [now] interpellate the faculty and students as well.” Although Bousquet observes that “The
knowledge has taken hold everywhere that ‘markets’ are real but ‘rights’ are insubstantial, as if ‘marketdriven’ indicated imperatives beyond the human and political” (93), recent protests offer hopeful evidence
that this hold may be loosening.
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implies, but also necessary to consider the situation in “other than crisis terms.”
Confronting crisis requires us to think outside it. A refusal to submit to its terms helps to
reveal, among other things, that crisis now marks not a failure of management, but one of
its modes. Indeed, in the case of higher education, the sense of crisis no longer indicates
a temporary aberration from “business as usual” but has instead become the norm. This
normalization of “crisis” – as the governing logic, dominant rhetoric, and ambient
structure of feeling in higher education – may be taken to index not the unique mission
and significance of colleges and universities in the post-industrial United States, but
rather the extent of their absorption into the general operation of a no longer “new
economy.”2 Crisis, in this context, marks not a point of resistance, but its evident futility
– insofar as crisis has come to represent not a weak point in the system, but a familiar and
well-integrated mode of its functioning.
My effort in this essay to conceive the current situation in “other than crisis
terms” thus begins with the identification of this solidifying form of administration in and
of higher education: not the management of crises, but management by crisis. It is also
informed by the local experience of crisis here at the University of Florida, where I have
worked for the past 16 years. Because local tactics are conditioned by larger strategies,
even as the reverse is also true, it is my hope that an account of events in Florida will
prove helpful in coming to terms with the more general situation of higher education in
the United States today. Because our experience here has been in many ways extreme
and in other ways unique, I suggest it be taken to dramatize and probe the quicksilver
strategies of late-capitalist crisis, rather than assumed to simply exemplify its methods.
Although a sense of crisis may be ubiquitous on US campuses, its appearances are far
from homogenous. I am convinced, however, that these variations in form mean that we
have more, and not less, to learn from each other across social and economic locations.
Broadly speaking, the notion of management-by-crisis can be conceived in
analogy to the more general strategy of “management-by-stress,” of which it is a
symptom, tactic, and variation. “Management by stress” (Slaughter; Weissmann) is the
underlying engine of the “continuous quality improvement” philosophy endemic to
2
For extensive documentation of this absorption, see Slaughter and Rhoades. Newfield also makes clear
that once popular predictions of a “post-capitalist,” “post-managerial” emergent “knowledge economy”
have failed to pan out (37-38).
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management culture in late capitalism (M. Bousquet 104). The idea is to continually test
– or “stress” – the limits of employee productivity, in the service of endlessly increasing
efficiency and, thereby, profit. As Marc Bousquet explains, “Key ‘stressing’ strategies
include compelling ‘teams’ and individuals to ‘act entrepreneurially’ and compete with
each other for raises or continuing employment, the continuing outsourcing of work
elements to lower-cost casual employees, and a pyramid of reward that provides jobs for
life to a few while the vast majority are consigned to a permanently temporary existence”
(105). Wal-Mart is one example, but academics will also recognize these elements in
“responsibility center management” (RCM), “merit pay” plans, the expansion of adjunct
and grad-student teaching, and the drastic decline in tenure lines.
In Florida, the narrative arc of crisis management includes all of these elements,
but is mitigated by the presence of public-employees unions and complicated by the
vagaries of Florida labor law and other local particularities. Nevertheless, the story of
these past ten years makes clear several critical features of “crisis management”
characteristic of its general functioning:
•
the practical symbiosis of cultural and economic conservatism
(and the necessity, therefore, of both “cultural” and material resistance)
•
the hypocrisy of “efficiency”
•
the enormous hidden human costs exacted
•
the creative capacity of late capitalism to incorporate and appropriate a
wide variety of local forms
•
and, finally, the normalization of crisis
To demonstrate how these features sustain and strengthen one another in the context of
local circumstances, I will turn now to the example of struggles at the University of
Florida over the past ten years.
Higher Education in the State of Florida, 1999-2009
The story of higher education in Florida over the past decade is fraught with crisis
and defined by struggle. It began with a napkin and has ended in deadlock. Its lessons
are complex and incomplete, but not entirely indecipherable. The most obvious are
these: here in Florida, the rhetoric of crisis has been both crutch and corollary to a
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sustained and in part successful attack on public higher education, public employees,
unions, faculty rights, student access, and academic freedom. Although this attack itself
might reasonably be concluded to constitute a “crisis” – certainly I have experienced it
that way myself at times – I am convinced that it is better understood as business as
usual: predictable in all but superficial variations, consistent with the broad-scale
privatization of public higher education generally, and at least arguably emblematic of
the crisis endemic to capitalism itself. In telling the story of what has happened in
Florida over the past 10 years, therefore, I will seek to connect local events to the larger
strategy of management by stress. In particular, I read the University of Florida as a kind
of case study in “crisis management” by examining the manipulation of crisis rhetoric
over the years 2001-2009 in the context of accompanying struggles over the structure of
higher-ed administration at both the state and local levels. Because the University of
Florida is a partially unionized workplace in a “right-to-work” state, crisis managers –
from Governor Jeb Bush to local boards and national think-tanks – confronted relatively
empowered but also inevitably divided resistance. Because that resistance has been – in
part – successful, it may be taken to offer an instructive example for those engaged in
struggle with their own local variations of stress and crisis. I will begin, however, with
the story.
1999-2002, Reorganization
In 1998, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment eliminating the
elected position of Education Commissioner and creating a new body to oversee the
state’s “free public schools.” Although then-Attorney General Bob Butterworth warned
at the time that this change “strengthens the governor immensely,” voters might be
excused for failing to predict that Jeb Bush, who took the governor’s office in the same
election, would construe the amendment as an opportunity to dramatically reorganize the
state’s public universities, as well. As then-Senator Bob Graham and others pointed out,
the phrase “free public schools” has not, in Florida, traditionally been understood to
include the state’s universities – because they are not (regrettably) free.
Nevertheless, “The remarkable transformation of Florida’s university system
began,” as the St. Petersburg Times reports, on this basis. In 1999, Bush and then-
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Speaker of the Florida House John Thrasher “began talking over dinner” and wound up
“drawing on a napkin.” The resulting sketch outlined a radical re-organization of the
state’s system of governance for education, aptly summarized by the St. Petersburg
Times:
The state Board of Regents would be abolished. New boards at each
university would be created. They would have broad powers, including the
authority to set budgets, create programs, and hire and fire the school president.
A new Board of Education would oversee the whole public education
system, from kindergarten through college.
And Bush would appoint all of the board members, giving him
unprecedented control over Florida’s education future.” (Klein and S. Bousquet)
In the parlance of Florida politics, this concentration of power in the hands of the
governor was widely referred to as “decentralization.” F. Phillip Handy, “the Orlando
multi-millionaire and Bush ally who ran the ‘transition task force’ that recommended
these changes” and then served as Chair of the Florida Board of Education, dismissed
concerns about top-down management, explaining, “It’s a corporate model, and it
works.”3
Initially, both Handy’s seven-member “superboard” and the local boards of
trustees were directly appointed by the governor. Subsequent to the success of a
rearguard ballot initiative spearheaded by Graham, however, the local 13-member boards
now include one faculty and one student representative. The referendum also reestablished a statewide higher-ed board, now called the Board of Governors and endowed
with (as yet to be tested) Constitutional powers. Except for a single faculty
representative, its members are appointed by the governor. The Boards of Trustees are
3
Indeed, “It happens in America every day at Cisco (Internet systems), at Dell (computers), at well-run
companies everywhere,” he is quoted as explaining, before going on to claim, “If anybody has the courage
to follow us, this will become the model for the United States” (Trombley).
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now appointed in part by the governor (six members) and in part by the Board of
Governors (five members).4
Although the official rationale for this radical overhaul was a perceived need for a
so-called “seamless” education system, several observers pointed to powerful legislators’
recent frustration with the Board of Regents, which had declined to construct new
medical schools at Florida State and the University of South Florida, for example,
preferring to focus on the one in Gainesville. Although accurate, this explanation of the
politics underlying the reorganization offers only a partial account, as it fails to fully
appreciate the intersection of interests and objectives the new system would be called
upon to serve. These would emerge, however, over time.
Before assuming office on January 1, 2003, the first Boards of Trustees were
introduced to their responsibilities at a state-sponsored training orientation in which they
received instruction from Anne Neal of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni
(ACTA), who collected $5000 from state funds for her services. Although best known
for the cultural conservatism exemplified in their attacks on “anti-American” faculty after
9/11, their exploitation of the Ward Churchill plagiarism accusations to disparage area
studies and multiculturalism generally, and their insistence that granting an English major
without requiring a class on Shakespeare is “tantamount to fraud,” ACTA also does
extensive work behind the scenes with governors, other policymakers, and, especially,
trustees. ACTA’s “Institute for Effective Governance” (IEG) offers a wide range of
“services tailored to the specific needs of individual public and private boards,” including
continuing education, annual retreats, institutional evaluations, curriculum assessment,
presidential search consulting and assistance, and “individualized consultations.” Their
“Advisory Services” focus on student learning assessment, curriculum reform, and
“ensuring intellectual diversity” – otherwise known as increasing the representation of
conservative viewpoints. Phil Handy is among the prominent conservatives to have
served on their advisory board (ACTA, “Institute for Effective Governance”).
4
Not surprisingly, the “new” boards looked very much like the old ones. Also, unsurprisingly, the
fledgling Board of Governors’ next move, over the strenuous objections of faculty representative Richard
Briggs, an M.D. from the University of Florida, was to delegate most of its authority to the local Boards of
Trustees.
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Cultural conservatism is only part of the story here, however. Another, more
public battle was also taking shape on campuses across the state as the new Boards of
Trustees began to make clear that they did not intend to negotiate with long-established
unions. Faculty, for example, had been represented by a certified collective bargaining
agent since 1976. The statewide contract between United Faculty of Florida and the
Board of Regents had required that the parties come to agreement on terms and
conditions of employment, prohibited unilateral changes, and guaranteed recourse to
neutral arbitration in case of disputes over interpretation and implementation. The new
Boards of Trustees, however, contended that because that agreement had been signed by
UFF and the Board of Regents, the state’s obligation to faculty would expire with the
contract. In other words, as the Chronicle of Higher Education explained, the state “used
the reshuffling as an excuse to discard longstanding union contracts” (Gravois). Perhaps
the Board of Regents was required to recognize the union, Trustees argued, but the Board
of Regents no longer existed. At campuses across the state, locals of the Police
Benevolent Association, AFSCME, and Graduate Assistants United, as well as the UFF
faculty union, scrambled to protect employee rights against the state’s creative
interpretation of labor law.5
One lesson we can draw from this backstory, I suggest, is to be suspicious of
crises invoked to justify dramatic change. The pretext that Florida’s problems with
preparing high school students for college somehow required this radical reorganization
of the state’s system of governance for higher education was flimsy at best. Another
lesson, however, is that logical consistency is far less important than logistical strategy;
in this case, the message clearly mattered less than the means. Because Bush had solid
control of the state legislature, the governor’s office had little trouble imposing its plan.
This history also points to the effective coordination of cultural and economic
conservatism: in this case, the conjunction of curricular oversight with union-busting.
Although ACTA’s Neal denies that her organization was involved in the reorganization
scheme, ACTA has played a prominent role in similar efforts nationally. In 2005, for
example, the group conducted a case study of the University of North Carolina system in
5
Most were eventually recognized, either voluntarily or as a result of the successor-employer decision
described below. AFSCME, however, agreed to divide their bargaining unit, resulting in legal limbo and
ultimately weakened representation for a large portion of the employees they had traditionally represented.
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which it concluded “that the governor should have authority to appoint the Board of
Governors, plus all boards of trustees” – a system analogous to Florida’s new structure,
and also, as a professor emeritus of public law and government characterized it, “directly
contrary to the policy of political independence that historically has characterized our
university and that has been a major factor in its achievements” (Sanders).
“Specifically,” the ACTA report suggests, “if UNC could more quickly respond to
market forces and needs, develop a statewide strategic plan that is responsive to those
needs, and include the private sector as a direct partner, it would operate as a more
effective oversight board” (Palmiero 52). Neal put it even more plainly to the press:
“The power to appoint is the power to lead,” she explained in the Lexington Dispatch.
“This [would allow] one person to set the agenda.” Not surprising, ACTA also exercised
influence on Capital Hill during Jeb’s brother’s administration, offering invited testimony
before Senate committee hearings on “Intellectual Diversity” and in House hearings on
higher education accreditation. A March 2003 ACTA roundtable, “Restoring America’s
Legacy: What Trustees and Alumni Can Do,” included participants Karl Rove, Ed
Meese, and Bruce Cole, Chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities under
George W. Bush.
As Newfield argues and these examples suggest, the culture wars are not merely a
distraction from damaging economic policies: cultural conservatism all too often
supplies the rationale and the political muscle to inspire, accomplish, and affirm
structural changes conducive to market determinism. ACTA, for example, seeks to
dissociate federal student aid from accreditation requirements and to open accreditation
to free-market competition, on the logic that established accrediting agencies are too
focused on “inputs” such as student/faculty ratios and diversity efforts. They prefer to
assess measurable “outcomes”; hence, their advocacy of standardized requirements and
quantified comparisons. From the establishment of traditional “core curricula” to the
“efficiency” of standardized course content to the refusal to recognize academic labor
unions, neo-liberal economic organization and cultural conservatism are made to serve
one another – suggesting, perhaps, that market determinism is conservatism’s most
cherished cultural tenet of all.
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2003-2005, Recognition
Meanwhile, in Florida the faculty’s current union contract was scheduled to
expire on January 7, 2003 – only six days after the new Boards of Trustees assumed
power. Determined to ensure that their most recently acquired rights would stay in force
at least until legal remedies had run their course, faculty across the state organized
certification card drives demanding the chance to vote in a union election for the
representation they already had. Although the threshold for requiring an election was
signed cards from 30% of the bargaining unit, UFF collected upwards of 70% in only a
couple of months. These were submitted and authenticated in the fall of 2002, thus
guaranteeing that current terms and conditions of employment could not legally be
changed until an election was held or a bargaining agent was otherwise certified.6 The
University of Central Florida broke the stalemate in January 2003, voluntarily
recognizing the union; several other campuses eventually followed suit. The Trustees at
Florida State, the University of West Florida, and the University of Florida, however,
held out – and the state labor board, called the Public Employee Relations Commission
(PERC), ruled with the Trustees, holding that there was no continuity between the
defunct Board of Regents and the new Trustees and hence no legal obligation to
recognize the unions or negotiate with them. (In Florida, PERC commissioners are
appointed by the governor.) In February of 2005, PERC’s finding was finally overturned
by the First District Court of Appeals, which held that the new Boards constituted a
“successor employer,” observing that the state cannot “unilaterally terminate its
obligations under a collective-bargaining agreement simply by reorganizing the executive
branch” (Gravois). At both the University of West Florida and Florida State University,
the Trustees insisted on a vote, and on both campuses the union won big: 91% at UWF
and 96% at FSU.
At the flagship University of Florida, however, the struggle continued, as the
Trustees decided to challenge the composition of the bargaining unit. UF’s board
petitioned PERC to add as many as 2600 new voters from the Health Science Center,
Law School, and Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences to the roughly 1800 faculty
6
Because card-check elections are not recognized, the union remained uncertified despite this
demonstration of super-majority support.
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from core academic disciplines who had been represented by UFF for nearly 30 years.
They also asked that several groups of faculty (including teachers at the developmental
research school, counselors at the student infirmary, and many department chairs) who
had been in the bargaining unit and hence protected by the collective bargaining
agreement since 1976 should be removed from the voter rolls and left with no chance of
retaining their rights. The motivation for this move was made clear in a leaked email
from a UF vice president to a confused faculty member from the Institute of Food and
Agricultural Sciences: UF’s president at the time, Charles Young, did not want IFAS
faculty (or anyone else) to unionize, the VP explained; instead, he “wants IFAS faculty to
vote because he doesn’t want us or anyone else in the union.” That is, “he wants the
faculty to vote against certifying UFF to represent the faculty” and “believes that if IFAS,
the Law School and Health Science Center are included in a vote the chances of rejecting
the union are improved.”
In July of 2005, the State Supreme Court declined to hear the Trustees’ appeal of
the appellate court’s successor-employer decision. In August, the Independent Florida
Alligator reported, “UF remains the only state institution not to acknowledge the faculty
union United Faculty of Florida after a July 28 Florida Supreme Court ruling” (Richards).
On September 9, PERC ruled against the UF Trustees’ petition to change the bargaining
unit. And on November 18, 2005, three years after UFF-UF had demonstrated supermajority support and nearly five years after the whole mess started, UF faculty finally sat
across the table from the bargaining team representing the Board of Trustees and began
negotiating their new contract.
The long struggle over UF faculty’s right to union representation underscores the
significance of market determinism to the current political crisis in higher ed. As
Newfield contends, the crux of this crisis is the subjection of cultural knowledge to
market logic that has characterized development for much of the past four decades.7 In
Florida, this has recently taken the form of revisions in the structure of governance meant
to render the university more responsive to market demands. The state’s brazen attempts
7
In Newfield’s analysis, interwoven political, economic, and cultural crises “characterized the post-WWII
period, but became acute and unresolvable in the 1970s” (23), when “the assault began in earnest” on the
emergent cultural vision “of full political, economic, and cultural capability that would be in reach of more
or less everyone through higher education and related public services” (3).
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at union-busting represent only the most obvious example. Newfield argues that “we
need to see society, industry, and the university . . . as experiencing three parallel crises”
resolved to the same effect: the dominance of market determinism over cultural
development (23). I would suggest, moreover, that this struggle is ongoing, staggered,
and scattered; it is staged repeatedly in arenas large and small, local and transnational.
Indeed, any easy opposition between market determinism and cultural development risks
obscuring the extent to which the rise of market determinism is a cultural development.
As the advent of RCM affirms, ACTA’s insistence that UNC subordinate social
and intellectual ends “to market forces and needs” is not an aberration, despite its
superficial incongruity with high-minded appeals to the importance of studying
Shakespeare. By interfering with the ostensibly “free” functioning of market logic, the
faculty union threatens both the ideological foundation and the material relations on
which the neo-liberal takeover depends. Most crucially, perhaps, academic collective
bargaining represents a potential to confront and complicate the superstructure/base
paradigm that holds them separate.8 It threatens to expose the lie that culture is somehow
less real than market relations and does not take material form, that material relations
obtain in an objective reality ontologically prior to and untainted by “culture.”9
2006-2009, Retrenchment
In July 2006, as faculty union negotiations – slowly – proceeded, the UF
Provost’s office suddenly announced that they had “uncovered” a significant fiscal deficit
in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), a union stronghold. The Provost
8
This is assuming, of course, that the union is not ineffectual, co-opted, or actively complicit. See M.
Bousquet for further discussion.
9
Newfield is clear in his conviction that “society’s well-being” will require “resubmitting the economy to
[cultural development]” (15)—in the University and in general. Oddly, given his illuminating attention to
specific legal and political maneuvers that have driven things the other way, he is somewhat less clear
about how “culture” might reassert its claim. In a pivotal chapter on “English’s Market Retreat,” for
example, he suggests that literary theory of the late twentieth century should be blamed for providing only
“weak” models of subjectivity. In arguing that “theory of the Foucauldian period offered only weak,
indirect, highly mediated agency and thus little in the way of institutional or market management,”
however, Newfield risks confusing a theory of agency with agency itself. In suggesting that English
departments look to companies “like Citibank and General Electric” to learn “some new moves,” he points
to these corporations’ capacity to “manage, control, engineer, dominate, and subordinate markets to their
needs,” but thus offers to scholars a model of “strong agency” antithetical to the anti- and extra-capitalist
values to which we might wish to make the market subordinate. (142-158). Neither a new theory of agency
nor an imitation of the neo-liberal agency we oppose will make market forces submit to cultural objectives;
stronger unions, however, could help.
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claimed that CLAS had been accruing “debt” for several years and suggested the college
would face “program cuts and layoffs” (Stripling “UF”; “Probe”). The Dean called a
College-wide meeting for September 1, at which he unveiled a “Five-Year Plan” to “stem
the debt” (Sullivan, email). This plan called for combining some departments and
reducing others. English, for example, was slated to lose eight and a half faculty lines by
fall of 2010; German and Slavic, six; and Math, six and a half. Moreover, the
Department Chairs of Math and English were to be removed – an aspect of the plan the
Dean acknowledged privately had no connection to budget concerns (Sullivan,
conversation). The proposed cuts quickly became “a flashpoint of controversy”
(Stripling “Cuts”), and the local paper editorialized that, “Basically, a five-year plan to
reorganize the college, while reducing 54 faculty positions over the next three years, is
being foisted on the faculty . . . with little concession to principles of collegial
governance” (“Crises”). Chastened by the show of resistance, most of it organized by
humanities graduate students working through an ad hoc coalition called CLAS Unite and
supported by Graduate Assistants United (GAU),10 University President J. Bernard
Machen sought to distance himself from the controversy. At a meeting of the Faculty
Senate on September 21, he insisted, “This is not my plan,” and in an email sent the same
day he claimed to “have absolutely no problem with additional dialogue and discussion
within the college about this plan.” Nonetheless, Machen confided to journalists, “the
existing plan [would] move forward” until and unless faculty could devise an acceptable
substitute that produced the same savings (Stripling, “Cuts”); the faculty College Finance
Committee quickly discovered that the Provost’s office had imposed conditions that
precluded all reasonable alternatives. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the plan
itself was crafted in the Dean’s office, but directed by the Provost – including an email
exchange in which the Provost reminds the Dean that “it’s not as if the decisions are
really debatable” and refers to the intended outcome as a “coup” (Fouke).
10
The coalition importantly included undergraduates, many associated with SDS, and faculty, as well, and
the efforts of both CLAS Unite and GAU were well served by the activity of grad students from across the
campus. Because those involved worked collaboratively and collectively, my sense that humanities and
especially English grads were central to the movement cannot be clearly documented. The exemplary
solidarity of these activists obscures the historical record of specific individual contributions; however, the
CLAS Unite wiki does identify Joel Adams, Wesley Beal, and Donovan Hulse as committee heads.
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Hence, what had ostensibly “started off as a fiscal crisis,” as the Gainesville Sun
described, quickly “evolved into a crisis of confidence and credibility” (“Crises”).
Several departments were merged, but the threatened layoffs did not immediately
materialize. The Dean resigned later that fall, and the Provost was forced out 16 months
later, when the central administration was restructured “to help make the university more
‘entrepreneurial’” (Stripling, “Provost”). However, despite the facts that the College is
back in the black and the “Five-Year Plan” was ostensibly abandoned, the English
Department has in fact suffered more extensive cuts than were called for. For the
academic year 2009-2010, we are down four lines from the five-year plan’s projections
for 2010-2011; without new hires, the department stands to shrink to 44 faculty members
– as opposed to the plan’s projected 51 – by the end of 2011 (UF English). Somehow,
the “coup” came off even as the “crisis” faded.
Reorganized under a chief financial officer – rather than a chief academic officer,
or provost – UF appears well on its way to realizing the Trustees’ “long-standing desire”
to “make the university quasi-private in nature” (Stripling, “Provost”). By 2008,
Florida’s falling housing market had made talk of fiscal crisis credible, and progress
towards this goal began in earnest. The year had begun on a positive note, as faculty
union negotiators secured the Trustees’ tentative agreement on new, more restrictive layoff provisions in January. In May, the union and the Trustees signed a memorandum of
agreement providing that the layoff clauses and nearly 30 other negotiated provisions
“shall be implemented and shall remain in effect” until such time as the full contract has
been completed and ratified by both sides. Dated May 2, the document specifies, “This
Memorandum of Agreement shall take effect July 1, 2008” (Memorandum). The
Trustees’ bargaining team assured UFF-UF negotiators that the time lag was needed only
to ensure that procedures could be properly implemented; they promised that no actions
prohibited by the agreement would be imposed in the interim. In June, however, the
Trustees issued layoff notices to nine faculty members, seven of them in the College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences; four of the seven CLAS faculty served notice were tenuretrack, and two were in fact up for tenure that year (Crabbe). Although these layoffs
clearly violated the new provisions, faculty were forced to grieve under existing
protections negotiated for the statewide union before 2001 and specified in the long-
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expired agreement with the now non-existent Board of Regents. Staff fared even worse
in the aftermath of the Trustees’ union-busting, suffering large-scale lay-offs and a
seriously weakened local.
Faculty union negotiations dragged on and 2009 began with the January
arbitration hearing on the first faculty layoff case to make its way through the grievance
process. On May 14, 2009, the neutral arbitrator found unequivocally in the union’s
favor, and ruled that the faculty member be reinstated. The other faculty members who
had brought grievances were subsequently reinstated, as well. Evidently spooked by the
strength of union protections even under the older, weaker contract, the Trustees
responded by sabotaging their ongoing negotiations with the faculty union: they put the
agreed-to layoff provisions back on the table; asserted they were not in effect, despite the
signed document of the previous summer; and laid off more faculty in summer 2009,
including at least one tenured full professor, whose grievance is now in process. Other
provisions that had been settled and signed off on also reappeared – first Conflict of
Interest, then articles addressing appointments and leaves. Faced with the Trustees’ new
strategy of moving backwards, the union declared impasse on September 18, effectively
freezing existing provisions before additional faculty rights could be put in peril.
Over the summer and fall of 2009, top administrators engaged in a delicate
double-speak, as they attempted to explain the need for continued program cuts and layoffs in the face of stable legislative appropriations, increased tuition, and upwards of $80
million in stimulus funds. The University continued to fire existing faculty while hiring
others, and to shrink the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences while expanding
elsewhere. The upper administration argued that the “crisis” UF currently faces requires
not savings per se, but restructuring: we must reinvent ourselves now to prevent painful
cuts in the future, the rationale runs, even when doing so requires both spending and pain
in the present.
The lesson here is not simply that management lies when convenient, nor that
universities generally are increasingly top-down, centrally managed corporations more
concerned with growth and profit than with academic freedom (or, it scarcely needs to be
said, concern for or commitment to its employees11). What’s new is the way in which the
11
Thanks to Joe Ramsey for reminding me to say it anyway.
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logic of crisis is increasingly normalized – even to the point that the rhetoric of crisis
becomes unnecessary. Now the threat of a possible future crisis is itself considered crisis
enough to warrant layoffs and program closings. Confronted earlier this year with the
evidence of his own rosy optimism about the improving fiscal outlook and the College’s
admirable performance, one frustrated dean demanded increased productivity while
refusing to identify any specific areas in which performance should be improved.
Faculty should take responsibility for identifying areas in which we can improve, he
insisted – because whatever our resources or circumstances, shouldn’t we always strive to
do more with what we have? This conception of an infinite capacity for increased
production from limited resources has its corollary, of course, in the idea that current
levels of productivity can be maintained despite ever-diminishing levels of support.
Here, Responsibility Center Management reveals its roots in the Continuous Quality
Improvement philosophy. Management no longer requires even the rhetoric of crisis:
resources will be removed regardless of circumstances. In other words, we are now
required to act as though the institution is in crisis regardless of the actual situation.
Crisis is the new normal.
Management Culture in Late Capitalism
The system that Jane Slaughter characterized two decades ago as “management
by stress” has evolved today into “incentives-based budget systems” (IBBS) designed to
confer “clear rewards and sanctions for performance” (Hearn et al, 286, 288). The goal is
not simply “to stretch production arrangements so as to eliminate any slack” (Weissman
1), but, as with management by stress, to recognize that “once the system has been finetuned, it can [and should!] be further stressed,” continuously (Slaughter 3). The genius of
IBBS is that it shifts responsibility but not full control downward to local “centers,”
effectively incentivizing the “team concept” promoted under management by stress. In
both systems, “resources can be taken away” (Slaughter 3) in the interest of “maintaining
a high level of tension” (Weissman 1), but IBBS is better at compelling workers to take
resources away from themselves – increasing “efficiency” in one area, for example, in
order to move resources elsewhere (from which they will likely be removed, eventually,
in order to encourage further efficiency). As GE management explains in a leaked
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directive on “Positive Leadership Development,” deprivation and crisis are critical
components of this leadership strategy: managers must continually stress the system by
removing resources and/or upping demands because “productivity will fall without that
false tension being maintained” (qtd in Weissman 2). Under IBBS, moreover, many
tasks of management itself are in-sourced to cheaper labor, forcing faculty, for example,
to make the difficult decisions about where and how to compromise quality in the interest
of meeting administrative demands. Although Hearn, et al., curiously conclude that
“IBBS approaches may well contribute to the success of the [higher education]
enterprise,” they accurately identify the systems’ central feature: “local units’ academic
decisions have direct financial consequences for the unit” (288, emphases added). This
“consequential link between decisions and unit outcomes,” unfortunately, secures the
supremacy of financial interests over intellectual concerns – and induces faculty to act
accordingly.
This context makes clear the critical distinction between such “insourcing” of
managerial labor to less well-paid faculty members and the “age-old dream of labor” of
“post-managerial work” (Newfield 38). The “false tension” maintained by the purposeful
provision of inadequate resources creates a “false situation” in which academic values
(and cultural development, generally) must be subordinated to economic “necessity.” For
the faculty member/managers, however, this tension and situation are all too real:
funding is finite; departments must economize; faculty must make cuts or have them
made “for” us. Submitting to “crisis terms” entails accepting impossible choices:
between trying to teach writing in large lecture sections or entrusting introductory
composition courses to inexperienced and exploited incoming MA students; between
hiring term-contract lecturers without academic freedom and secure employment or
admitting additional graduate student/employees with dismal career prospects; between
offering cash-for-credit online classes or laying off junior faculty.
That the introduction of RCM at the University of Florida has followed so closely
on the heels of well-publicized “crisis” should come as no surprise: RCM has been billed
as a way to “generate new revenue sources” and “increase our self-reliance” in
economically uncertain times. In reality, however, RCM represents less the antidote to
crisis than its incorporation. Materials provided by the University explain that the system
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is expected to increase “risk-taking,” “innovation,” “flexibility and timeliness,” along
with “self-reliance” and a “willingness to reduce or discontinue lower priority programs
and services” (“Introduction” 12). In essence, RCM is the internalization of the crisis
that is late capitalism: the exploitation of risk, flexibility, self-interest, competition, and,
especially, disposability under the expanding reach of market logic. David Harvey has
recently observed that “Capitalism never solves its crisis problems; it moves them around
geographically.” However, just as outsourcing has its complement in “in-sourcing”
(including the increasing exploitation of student labor described by Bousquet), “crisis”
can be moved both laterally and vertically. RCM is a system for in-sourcing crisis by
strategically structuring and then shifting painful management decisions downward in the
organization. The “perma-temp” status of most academic labor took root in the context
of a putative “crisis” invoked to justify otherwise untenable employment practices. It
now has its corollary in the Routinized Crisis Model of RCM – a system in which
innovation is driven by deprivation, workers are made to manage themselves, and what is
advertised as “decentralization” disingenuously drives standardization, economic
stratification, and the consolidation of market ideology.
ADDENDUM
In the time since this essay was completed, the two tenure-track faculty who
grieved their 2008 lay-offs have both been awarded tenure; the lecturer who grieved and
was reinstated remains employed at the University of Florida. The tenured full professor
who grieved his 2009 lay-off also won his case and has been reinstated, along with the
two other faculty members who grieved their lay-offs that year (one on the tenure track
and one on term appointment). The English Department was permitted in 2010 to fill a
longstanding opening in Rhetoric and Composition, but remains significantly
understaffed. Elsewhere in the state in 2010, the United Faculty of Florida successfully
arbitrated on behalf of twelve tenured faculty members laid off by Florida State
University, effectively winning reinstatement for more than twenty tenured professors
(Jaschik, Sergent). The nearly simultaneous election of conservative Republican Rick
Scott to the governorship, however, has rendered collective-bargaining rights, higher
education, and public employees newly vulnerable in the state of Florida.
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In our ongoing discussion of this manuscript, Joe Ramsey raises the very real
possibility “that the admin[istration] from the beginning saw the layoffs not necessarily
as a set goal but as itself a stress test – not just of the production capabilities of the
affected departments – but of the faculty’s willingness to roll over.” Indeed, the whole
ugly (and expensive) episode has undoubtedly served as what he aptly terms, “a political
stress test, in effect.” I am less sanguine, however, about Joe’s conclusion that it amounts
to “a test which, from the standpoint of the institution, failed” – even if only, as he wisely
warns, “For the moment.” As at the bargaining table, the purpose of such maneuvers is
not always or only to force material concessions, but also and often to flush out
information, gain political advantage, buy time, or extend and exhaust the opposition.
The audacity and sheer tenacity of UF’s war on its own employees temporarily rattled the
faculty union and certainly strained its resources, both financial and human, but UFF-UF
has emerged the stronger from it. The AFSCME local, in contrast, appears severely
shaken. GAU just celebrated its 30th birthday and is going strong.
Postscript: As this essay proceeds to publication, bills recently introduced in the Florida
legislature that would have prohibited payroll deduction of union dues for public
employees, required recertification if arbitrary membership minima were not met by July
1, and eliminated tenure for community and state college faculty did not pass. Indeed,
thanks in part to the governor’s overreach, UFF-UF has doubled its membership this past
year.
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Copyright © 2010 by Kim Emery and Cultural Logic, ISSN 1097-3087