The Massachusetts Medievalist has no updates on the elimination of her job due to low enrollment, noted in this space in early October. It seems that getting rid of the majority of a university’s expertise in the liberal arts and sciences is actually somewhat time-consuming and complicated, especially when that expertise is unionized.
(Image from NEA Today, accessed 1 November 2023)
Meanwhile, I’ve been stewing about the general unfairness of the whole situation, not just for me and my 29 “eliminated” colleagues but also for the students who are going to have to cobble together academic programs with fewer options and fewer core faculty mentors. Resentment is bubbling up as I think that I’ve done my job well – high student evaluations of my classes, substantive contributions to committees and curriculum initiatives over the years, solid publication record. In contrast, the admissions and “enrollment management” staff who have NOT been doing their jobs well did not have their jobs eliminated.
Rather than stamp my feet like a four year old, as attractive an option as that seems, I decided to do some research. The Lesley online directory is notoriously unreliable, so I used data from the new “WorkDay” system, which requires a login. Differences in data from the two systems noted throughout.
On 1 November 2023, the WorkDay system shows a total of 44 people working in “enrollment management.” This number includes the Vice President of Enrollment management, one associate vice president and four assistant vice presidents who report to him, and various directors and associate directors and other staff. It does not include the athletics department staff, although the Athletics Director does report to the VP of enrollment management. (A similar search of the Lesley directory turned up 58 non-athletics employees, so presumably 14 of them no longer work for the university).
I hadn’t ever considered the point that vice presidents have ranks just like faculty. Lesley’s 2022 IRS form 990 lists an assistant vice president’s salary at $153,156, more than 150% of my full professor salary.
So of course I did a “vice president” search, which yielded 17 hits in both WorkDay and the online directory (5 assistant, 9 associate, 3 full vice presidents).
Nationally, one area of bipartisan agreement seems to be that there are too many administrators in American colleges and universities. Googling “higher education administrative bloat” yields conservative excoriations of excess administrators promoting a “woke agenda” and more liberal denunciations of dollars devoted to management instead of teaching and learning (click here and here for exempla). Lesley is right on trend!
Right now, Lesley has more vice presidents than core humanities faculty (17 vs. 13). After a planned retirement and the job eliminations in my department, the university will have more than twice as many vice presidents as humanities professors (17 vs. 7). Lesley will have more than six times as many employees recruiting potential students than teaching humanities to actually enrolled students (44 vs. 7).
It’s a truism throughout higher ed and all nonprofits: your values are most clear in your budget, not in your mission statement. Lesley makes grandiose statements about the value of teaching and learning; the university spends its actual dollars on vice presidents and upper administration.
As I'm retired from Lesley, I'm not affected personally by the bizarre machinations of the administration to ignore the failures of their policies and put the financial crisis on the backs of the working people (faculty and staff).
We are all aware of the shift from a well educated population to preparing young people to be competent workers in corporate America. However, pulling the curtain back, that this has been the goal of. higher education institutions for many years. It has been exposed recently in the promotional materials at Lesley and a number of other institutions that job training is the primary purpose of a college education.
This country no longer wants a population engaged in the thoughtful and important work of improving society but rather to work for the wealth and status of the few corporations that actually control government. And Lesley has not only accepted this role but proudly promotes this goal. The emphasis on STEM education (training) is a clear indicator of that goal.
As a former faculty member in the visual arts and knowing that a number of my former colleagues are facing termination, I'm completely aghast at this shift. Even in the arts college the focus is on those areas that can best serve corporate America where as the fine arts is being slowly but purposefully disassembled as is true for poetry, music, and all the other like disciplines. A very sad indicator of the future of our society.