Ten steps to ruining a university
1. Have a president who avoids direct dialogue with the faculty by surrounding himself with special assistants.
2. Have administrators who lack the foresight to anticipate long-term personnel problems until those problems explode into lawsuits and grievances, by which time the university can only respond with short-term solutions.
3. Pursue affirmative action policies that encourage a superficial version of diversity based on gender and skin color, rather than a meaningful version of diversity based on ideas and perspectives.
4. Abandon rigorous academic standards as outdated systems of hierarchy and create an artificial system of equality by giving all students superior grades, as long as they successfully parrot the instructor's values by semester's end.
5. Increase class sizes and keep the bulk of professors' teaching focused on freshman courses, leaving little time for faculty research or upper-level electives, thereby undermining academic integrity and education of majors.
6. Hire lots of adjuncts and professors on one-year contracts to prevent continuity and stability. This will also:
6a. create a more sedate labor force of teachers hesitant to speak out against university policies from fear that their temporary appointments will not be renewed,
6b. keep the permanent faculty too busy serving on annual search committees to do more serious types of work,
6c. maintain general low morale and lack of commitment to reform.
7. Enforce the criteria for faculty hiring, retention, promotion, and tenure arbitrarily and inconsistently.
8. Keep telling students that they are racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-semites until they believe it and start acting like racists, sexists, homophobes and anti-semites.
9. Keep telling the surrounding community that it is racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-semitic until it becomes hostile and apathetic to the university and its problems.
10. Realize that only you and the people who agree with you know how to fix the first nine steps. The rest just don't get it, so don't listen to or tolerate their ignorant opinions.
Any of these sound familiar?
Jim Leiker
Assistant Professor
Department of History
