Name: The fall of the faculty
ISBN: 9780199975433

The fall of the faculty

Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--Administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience---are setting the educational agenda. The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers---ostensibly because of budget cuts. Many of the newly minted---and non-academic---administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal "life skills" curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience---one defined by intellectual rigor. Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. As troubling as this trend has become, there are ways to reverse it. The Fall of the Faculty outlines how we can revamp the system so that real educators can regain their voice in curriculum policy.

What Hacker News says

nonrandomstringAug 2024

> just how serious should she... be taken?

Very seriously indeed if you value higher education and research.

Lot's of people do. Over a decade ago now, Ben Ginsberg wrote "Fall of the Faculty". Political scientists like Wendy Brown have picked apart not only the evidence, but done deep analytical work on the reasons for the disintegration of academia in the West. Even Peter Thiel (who I profoundly disagree with on almost everything) has given knock-down commentary that I find impossible to ignore on how academia went to seed, and is now unfit for teaching, learning and honest research.

From a personal perspective; I worked in universities for over 30 years. What we have now is unrecognisable from the institutions I started teaching at in the early 1990s. Almost all human values have been expunged and replaced by a puppet show of performative theatrics, led by MBA educated impostors and career administrators. It is fake to the core. I no longer recognise these places as universities. I've seen brilliant colleagues go crazy, retire early, turn to alcohol and drugs, commit suicide, or just wander off to live in the mountains and grow vegetables. I refuse to believe all those smart and dedicated people are/were "weak". Academia is a very toxic place and I would not advise any "smart and sensitive" person to go into that life if you value your health.

When you consider how much it costs a nation to educate someone to PhD level and then look at the churn and attrition, it's a massive bonfire of wealth.

I've written numerous pieces in the Times Higher on specific failings of universities, but one cannot halt a juggernaut of change with words alone. Now I am left only with curiosity at how higher education will change and what will come after.

My response has been to conduct and publish my own research independently outside the "academic system" and to start my own companies for teaching. By my standards, both are successful.

edit: grammar

thread

nonrandomstringFeb 2024

My heart goes out to fellow professors there, and everywhere. It's like watching a city being bombed. The devastation of universities across the Anglophone world, in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, is crushing.

It's not just the long march of lunatic "leftist" ideas, it's also financialisation, professional management, technological dehumanisation, crippling debt and plummeting mental health of students.

Everything Ben Ginsberg wrote in "Fall of the faculty" and Prof. Wendy Brown said about globalisation and education has come to pass. The attacks on universities are sustained and rabid, and they come from every corner of the political and intellectual spectrum, from inside and outside universities, from political idealogues, industry, the media, fringe groups, and populist disdain.

No enemy action could have achieved what we have done to ourselves.

thread

nonrandomstringDec 2022

To rank five things causing massive loss to Western society, I'd say they were;

- War (the ultimate sacrificial alter of value)

- Sickness (premature death snatching away human capital)

- Child and domestic abuse (trauma inhibits)

- Corruption (financial loss and crisis)

- Professional management (a deep sickness of motive)

What is the real cost of employing millions of people to bullshit each other? Benjamin Ginsberg first rang alarm bells on "The Fall of the Faculty" over a decade ago. Since then, the damage done to education, research and academic life by the infection of bureaucracy is immeasurable. To think of all the good professors leaving the vocation, the students who drop out disillusioned, and the piss-poor educations they receive, the debt, and mediocrity of vision, it's heartbreaking. Our universities have been eviscerated. The result for industry and society is a colossal bonfire of wealth.

thread

robwwilliamsJun 2022

Yes, great book about just this:

1. Benjamin Ginsberg: The Fall of the Faculty. The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why it Matters.

2. Harry R. Lewis: Excellence without Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education.

thread

nonrandomstringMay 2022

> Would you or your friend still need to fear reprisals if you're naming names now? If not, given that normal channels have failed that all sounds sufficiently bad that at least naming the university and department might be worth considering.

Not really. It is bad. But I've grown thick skinned to it now. It's water under the bridge, and in the scheme of things, small fry. But if I was feeling vindictive I'd get lawyered up with a great libel advisor and write a book about some of the nonsense I've seen, or personally been party to in "academia"; including extraordinary sexism and constructive dismissal of women lecturers, a university that conned people out of their property, lots of crooked real-estate deals (many UK universities are foremost property developers who happen to do some teaching and research on the side), obvious bribes from industry on ICT contracts, blatant fraud on QAA audits, students who were deliberately led to catch Covid during the pandemic to save a few quid on housing allocation... I could go on all day, that's just a few things off the top of my head.

And I can speak freely about stuff that is already public. Just take a look at London Middlesex University and their record for shutting down whole departments on ideological grounds and turfing students who are still midway through studies out the door. It's cheaper to pay the compensation to the students who are brave enough to go through the months and years of formal complaints procedure. Academia is a well protected business.

> > there are ways of being cocooned and cloistered in academia which isolate one from consequences found in the world of real business

> Given your experience, I'd be very curious to hear what the main mechanisms your witnessed for side-stepping consequences for psychopathic behaviour actually were.

This isn't the forum for deep discussion, or too much acidic denouncing, but I do suggest reading Ginsberg's "Fall of the Faculty" and some of Henry Giroux's work. Both would be labelled "shrill leftists", in a domain that ironically is already considered "too left liberal". However, that consideration of orthodox political spectrum strikes me as irrelevant in this age. What is the problem is the terrifying rate at which good people are being ousted, or taking early retirement, or jumping ship from quite senior academic posts to modest industry roles just to get away from the bullshit. Also terrifying is the rate at which real teaching and research is being set aside for cookie-cutter subsidised training for Big-Tech entry - a general decline in the intellectual quality of everything we teach. Even in traditional strong holdouts like Cambridge and Oxford I hear the same. I think we're in real crisis in the universities now.

thread

dalkeJan 2016

"is there any such thing as a more productive adjunct professor"

The text starting with the example of "Mary Grabar, who worked as an adjunct for many years" gives several examples of how an adjunct professor can be more productive: 1) having a lockable desk rather than having to lug a cart each time to a hot-desking bullpen, 2) remove the need to work additional jobs outside of teaching, which can lead to 'stress and exhaustion', and keep the teacher from mentoring students, writing letters of recommendation, or answering students who simply had questions, and 3) reduce isolation between teachers, because it:

> allows us to improve ourselves academically as well as our working environment,” she says, and it “facilitates better teaching to have others who are in the same circumstances to talk through problems, share experiences, and strategize how to solve them.”

The essay also suggests that a reason for the "ratcheting up costs" is that administration has been taking over most universities and the money has been going to "ensure higher pay for a burgeoning legion of bureaucrats." The article mentions Benjamin Ginsberg, who goes into more depth on this topic in "Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters".

thread