Birthday cakes & matzoh balls: the University of Missouri's strategic plan & the demise of the state university

According to the new president of MU, The University of Missouri Press will be shuttered. There's been an uproar, of course, but it feels postmortem.  (One echo of that uproar is mine, here. Ned Stuckey-French and a friend started a Facebook page in support of the press, which now has over one thousand members.) The rationale is being delivered. According to the Columbia Daily Tribune of June 1, 2012, MU's President Timothy Wolfe, "a former software company president, compared the move to Wal-Mart setting up a successful store in the same location where an independent store went bankrupt. The same products were sold, he said, but Wal-Mart's business model was more successful." He neglects to add the obvious, that Wal-Mart put the independent out of business as part of its business model. In a letter to "friends of University of Missouri Press," sent to anyone who complained, Wolfe writes: "In 2009, in an effort to save the press, University of Missouri administration also began working diligently with the press to redefine its business plan and develop new revenue streams. In all, five consultants from a variety of organizations and with different areas of expertise were hired by the university to provide input and guidance about how to sustain the press long-term."  And so it goes: the university hires no fewer than five consultants (and their retinues) and even they cannot turn a profit. The press is not a revenue stream. 


"Revenue stream" is not the only current in this stream of business language coming from President Wolfe, a former software executive with no university experience.  Like so many others eager to strip the university system of its financial weaknesses, this administrator knows how to spin a web of economic need to make it appear necessary that "inessential" parts of the system get cut (elsewhere he states that the press did not fulfill the university's mission). "With another year of flat funding for the university and an increasing realization that university resources must be aligned with strategic priorities, we made the difficult decision to discontinue our subsidy to the press beginning in the 2013 fiscal year."  If the press has not offered up a large enough revenue stream, that means that the university offers it "a subsidy," or--one can almost hear him utter the words--a kind of academic welfare.  And those queens will surely take advantage of their welfare checks.  

But a revenue stream is crucial to what he terms "new, more sustainable models" for publishing, which "[utilize] a new business model, [according to which] publications could include much more than text, such as simulations, audio and other elements." Because such a move, from a university press to none, is required in order to come up with a new model of publication(!), the action by the president was kept secret: "Out of respect for notifying the remaining ten employees at the press, this decision was not discussed publicly in advance, but please know it was vetted by system and campus administration, including vice presidents, chancellors, provosts and curators."  According to former employees, they had no knowledge they were being laid-off until they heard about the announcement from third parties. Such is the business model of "respect," I guess.  And it hardly goes without saying that these advisers to the president included only other administrators, so many of them, and no faculty.  That faculty are the people who actually read the books, use them in their research, teach out of them, and god knows, need to write them to get ahead in their careers (tenure is not far behind in this renovation, is it?), means nothing to this President.  And he is not alone.

My fascination with the demise of MU press has lead me to the University of Missouri's "Strategic Plan," which I've read with the queasiness of a Cardinals fan watching yesterday's no-hitter against her team.  (You can find the pdf of the plan by googling "University of Missouri strategic priorities.") This plan was written by and for administrators; faculty has precious little to do, aside from dream of ways to pay themselves in this "bad economic climate," and to think about tenure decisions.  The faculty input, as stated under section 3.2 "shall be conveyed to the campus and system administration to help shape future budget allocations."  The verb choice ("to convey an opinion") is curious, but of course apt. And "to help shape" offers no promises to take faculty input seriously, to put it mildly.

This strategic plan begins with a mission statement, which includes the usual: teaching, research, service, economic development.  The nobility of scholarship and teaching as "driven by a sense of public service" comes up in this paragraph.  What follows shows the extent to which this university--like so many others--uses "public service" as a euphemism for doing more with less, a lot less.  The vocabulary of the strategic plan, its lay-out (goals, followed by bullet-points, culminating in who is to do what to achieve the goal) belongs to business.  The first point under the subtitle, "Educational objectives," reads this way:


2.1 Leverage the interdisciplinary networks of the initiatives to create a climate in which students, faculty, staff, alumni and administrators engage across demographic, social and interpersonal differences through curricular and co-curricular activities that prepare students for lives and careers in a multicultural global community

Now, I teach English 100 (composition) once every four semesters and I hardly know where to enter that sentence, let alone how to get out of it with dignity intact.  But there's more, which follows the sub-sub-title, "Action Needed":

--Create a database that will track interdisciplinary networks within each initiative and across initiatives.
Responsible: Informatics Institute and members of "Architecture of Collaboration" (Mizzou Advantage-funded project)

I'm not going to argue that our economy is flush with resources, that we can expand all the programs a university has to offer, but I would argue that the strategic plan IS about creating jobs, not simply stream-lining.  Who is going to create the database?  Who is in the Informatics Institute?  Who belongs to the "Architecture of Collaboration," whose quotation marks scare me?  And what is Mizzou Advantage?  These are all sub-institutions that require funding, support, and personnel. 


Google Mizzou Advantage and you find a website devoted to public relations and to the all-important pursuit of revenue.  They're creating "networks" of collaborators in four areas, it seems, including food and the media.  We're talking real world here, not any airy fairy place of intellectual inquiry: "MU faculty and staff have formed networks of collaborators, both on and off-campus, to focus on real-world problems centered around these areas.  Their efforts will help secure external funding, recruit top students, attract prominent scholars and scientists, create jobs, and improve quality of life." As for students who benefit, the benefits will be "real," not intangible: "MU is also developing new educational programs in these four areas to give students a competitive edge in the global marketplace." Click the "partners" tab and you get a request for businesses to collaborate with MU.  And so it goes.

If you go to the Informatics Institute website, you discover an attempt to join computer resources across the campus and the region.  The institute itself has a director and several staff, of course.  I can't leave the site before quoting this bullet-point, about research objectives:

• Building teams of faculty members and professionals to foster main informatics research thrusts;

It's very difficult to parry such thrusts, such spears to the heart of the English language.  I'm hardly the first, nor shall I be the last, to note the piss poor writing skills of most university administrators and their ghost writers.  But I feel blinded, or is it blind-sided, by these sentences, these objectives, these bullet-pointed, bullet-addled documents. I want to argue that we should all be reading these documents, parsing them, considering their arguments, engaging their authors.  If we do not, we're doomed.  (That we might be in any case goes without saying.)  One more choice administrative sentence before I go.  This comes from "Goal 2: Build the Mizzou Advantage, a set of five focused, interdisciplinary initiatives that capitalize on existing strenghts and bring new international distinction to MU."  It's the first sentence in the section "Food for the Future":

"Birthday cakes and matzoh balls, the economic power of U.S. agriculture, Cézanne's fruits, the importance of nutrition to health, humanitarian efforts to end hunger around the world--these all attest to the central role that food plays in every aspect of human life and our urgent need to better understand its production, distribution, consumption, and cultural meanings." The paragraph ends with this assertion of the importance of food: "It will draw faculty from other disciplines eager to work collaboratively on this theme, central to human existence."

The problem with writing like this is that it so lacks nutrients, even as it suggests we might eat cake. But how am I to tell a student that he or she must use detail, write with precision, use examples, when the very leadership of the university is writing sentences like these.  Hey, they've got jobs, and my students most likely will not.  Perhaps I should resign myself to that cliched and yet beautiful future pointed to by our outgoing Chancellor, Virginia Hinshaw, (seriously, click that link) when she writes in her last newsletter: "All of this [she refers to bullet points, of course] has been possible because we paddled hard toward a shared goal, and our momentum is now strong because of partnering, both internally and externally."


Note: The book jacket above is for James Caron's University of Missouri Press volume, Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter.  Jim is a colleague of mine.  He worked for many years on that book.  One of the University of Missouri Press's specialties has been in Mark Twain Studies. 

"What is our children learning?" and other late summer notes

On stepping down from his post the other day, our last English department chair sent us a long report. He's a man possessed of an apocalyptic streak in the best of times, but in recent months the times have met him on the level. While he's able happily to tell us that our crumbling building will be renovated next year to the tune of millions of dollars, he also passes on a reminder that we have lost 15 full-time faculty in the department since 2006. (I don't believe that includes the several faculty now on leave because they have left.) We are mostly losing bodies to retirement, and those are the bodies who have taught Literary Studies. Our curriculum now resembles a Soviet-style literary encyclopedia: one is hard-pressed to find the 18th Century or 19th Century Romanticism or even much Modernism to go with your little remaining Shakespeare. Composition and rhetoric has become a revolving door. Creative writing (a very popular concentration, indeed, with one third of the graduate students in it) is down to a skeleton staff. In the last ten years or so we on the poetry side have lost Nell Altizer, Juliana Spahr, and Faye Kicknosway/Morgan Blair. We gained Robert Sullivan for a few years, but lost him. Albert Wendt was here for several years as Citizen's Chair; he and Reina Whaitiri added amazing energies to the writing program, especially for Hawaiian and Pacific Islander poets. They're gone now. Cultural Studies is still relatively healthy, but will soon lack energies given it by students who have read widely and closely in literature.

I could say a lot more about the demoralization that is upon us, but won't for now. Let me just say that UHM, which is quickly becoming Manoa Community College, is not alone in suffering public neglect. The public schools have just started up again. At least this year there will not Furlough Fridays, or two Fridays a month when Hawai`i's budget was somehow salvaged on the backs of parents needing to find day care, if not mental enrichment, for their children. As Mari Matsuda notes in her essay in The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, "A true economic stimulus would flood the schools with funds" (99). Then teachers would have money to spend on their days off--and not days off foisted upon them by the state's economic crisis and an intransigeant governor who would not raise any new funds to ease it. Then students would be educated to take jobs beyond those in tourism and the military, sectors that dominate our economy the way Big Sugar and pineapple did in the past.

Last year my daughter Radhika, who is 8, had almost no science in her curriculum, let alone art or music. She had a teacher who was out for months with knee surgery and a substitute who spent almost all those months trying to figure out how to control the class. At least in the elementary school, parents still come around, attend assemblies, go to Lei Day and cheer for their children. My husband, who works part-time at a local high school, says parental involvement tends to end with grade school. The public high school kids are on their own. Some of them are on what he terms the "school to jail" program. Others are being set up for jobs in the service industry, jobs that won't pay the rent here. The best come to UHM, where they can get a good education (but see above).

In his essay on the university, Neal Milner argues that at least part of the solution to the mess is a nitty gritty approach , climbing "down to the local and the personal," as Anthony Grafton writes (106). "Cultural change," Milner writes, "involves small-scale, everyday grunt work--persuading, reassuring, keeping in contact, and resolving conflicts." That last item must gall Milner, who worked in the ombudsman's office until it fell victim to the budget cuts. That was a place where students and faculty went to talk about their workplace conflicts. And so we return to the departmental memo, and see how likely that might be, given this--and other similar--verbiage:

5. It should go without saying that faculty who are assigned to
department committees are also expected to (1) make themselves available
for committee meetings and (2) attend all scheduled meetings. What should
not be acceptable are eliminating whole days in the week from one's
potential availability for meetings, eliminating other hours that can be
rearranged when needed (e.g., office hours), and failing to provide timely
information about availability to committee members. Such situations may
need to be brought to the attention of the chair. Members should also
expect to be doing work outside of regular committee meetings in
preparation for meetings and/or in consultation with other members.

That's a situation--faculty not doing their committee work--that sounds more nitty than gritty. It's one among many that suggests that we cannot be easily "reassured," especially as we see the building getting emptier, even given the promises of renovation and (heaven forfend!) a new elevator. Milner has more to say about the cynicism that infects us in his essay in The Value of Hawai`i, edited by Craig Howes and Jonathan K. Osorio and published by UH Press. I'm not writing this with any answers in mind. Nor do I feel abject despair over the situation, although that feeling beckons like an over-sweet candy. It's awful to see an institution (higher education, if not any particular university) being destroyed by a thousand tiny and larger cuts.

It strikes me that the public university is quickly becoming a bit like a small poetry press, requiring an entirely local (in all the senses of that word) fullness of care. If we are not given adequate technology, let's bring our scissors, our glue, and our wildness to class with us, and hope that the lights are still on.

____________________

Another--happier--note. This summer has brought several poets to O`ahu, including Jules Boykoff, Hank Lazer, and Endi Bogue Hartigan, with whom I had coffee just this morning. Craig Santos Perez has taken the radical step of actually moving here. Jules and Kaia Sand will be coming in October for readings and talks. Some subjects of conversation:

--Hank: we talked about loving poetry that you can't remember as soon as you've read it. What's that! He was thinking of Lissa Wolsak's new collected, which he is reviewing and I have written a sequence of poems off of (with, around, over, under, about). A long conversation on forgetting ensued--rather on the difference between forgetting and recognizing that there is a residue to one's reading. How that residue affects us, or re-emerges in our own work, is something worthy of more thinking.

--Jules: oh, Jules mostly taught my daughter new soccer tricks. But we talked a mean streak about politics & poetry. His description of a project on leaf-blowers found its way into a line in a poem I was writing about their being our Aeolian harps. I write as one churns away in the field out back.

--Endi and I talked (but not long enough!) about the influence of Hawai`i on work that is not, strictly speaking, about it. I'm looking forward to reading her poems with an eye to the influence of her growing up here. Again, not an "about" per se, but a series of riffs. She has a new poem about prepositions, apropos.

--Craig will be guest editing a couple of projects for Tinfish next year. I'm going to put the press on sabbatical with me, and try to resist the urge to return immediately to the field of publication. The process is exhilarating, but wearing. And wearing out was how I felt before the summer's calm (before the leaf blowers).

And now they're off, for now, and the mynas are on again.
Having edited this, the mynas are off, and leaf-blowers are dopplering again.

Later: Al Filreis has written a kind blog post about Dementia Blog. " To witness is to adjust. The illness becomes the medium." I wish I could say it half so well as that.