El Protoolio wrote:In colleges and universities across the country the administration, faculty and staff are more concerned with their petty politics and budgets then the needs of the students.

It's true.

Marc Bousquet, on his academic labor blog, wrote:Like The Wire? You’re Living It.

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There’s plenty to say about this in relation to campus administration...

My own take on this is that the faculty are in a culture-struggle with administration, and they are losing. This isn’t a theory that I have: as I explain in the introduction and Chapter 3 of How The University Works, it’s management’s own account of its program, to prosecute war on faculty and student culture by shaping institutional culture to its own purposes. Quality management is above all an engine for the promotion of a relentless administrative solidarity against traditional faculty values and traditional faculty institutions.

“Quality” processes are the Stalinist iteration of late capitalism, through which the class of functionaries exist in a separate world of servants and second homes while urging everyone else to accept scarcity for love of the mission. It’s no longer just teaching for love—it’s policing and soldiering and urban planning for love, game design for love, word processing for love.

Quality management takes advantage of the fact that most people don’t behave as the self-interested clots modeled by neoliberal economics. Most people are animated by profoundly pro-social impulses. To a limited but real extent, depending on individual factors, janitors do their work for love of clean floors. And it is the overt, cannibalistic intention of quality management to see that—to the absolute limit of the possible—they do that work for love alone.

Only management, in the quality scheme, isn’t done for love. One can see why. Management in the quality scheme is done for hate–for hate of democracy, equality, and the public, in service of a totalitarian culture of subservience to “leadership.”

In the quality scheme, management is paid more to do something most of us can’t do. Most of us can’t live in mansions while our neighbors can’t afford chemo; most of us really believe that accumulation has reasonable limits.

Only a very unusual person can do what the sleaziest small contractor does–pick up day labor, pay them less than the minimum wage to rebuild a suburban kitchen, collect fifty grand, and then dump the workers back on the street corner.

The task of academic quality management is to find those rare people and make them deans, provosts, and presidents.

http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/archives/81

burun wrote:

Dr. Venkman wrote:When traveling via the Long Island Rail Road, keep in mind that all the odd numbered cars have restrooms...

Ha ha you just admitted you ride the LIRR.

jermwelfare wrote:Maintenance technicians make a ton of money for doing very little, I know, I am employed at a high-end architecture firm. I rewire ballasts, fix urinals, hang doors, but not very often...... I've built road cases and speaker cabs at work, left for 3-4 hrs., gotten drunk and stoned, and returned only to find no new e-mails. I always say " I am paid well to do very little", I take naps in unused areas of the buildings, and look at shit on-line. During my reviews my boss is always saying what a great job I do....heh. I generally try to be nice and courteous to the people who count, and remain out of sight unless I'm needed......it's the same way I got through college, learn the system and abuse it.