By Professor
Doom
Last time around I was looking at the
entire first year graduate class of a (soon to be formerly) top art school who resigned,
rather than continue to deal with administration, which contemptuously posted a
dean with no experience in visual fine arts to oversee the visual fine arts
program—extremely insulting considering the salary involved for the dean (but,
again, both high salary and lack of qualifications are very common in administration
of higher education).
The
despairing decision by the students was only taken after trying, very hard, to
negotiate with administration to keep their promises.
“…In a slew of unproductive,
confounding and contradictory meetings with the Dean and other assorted
members of the Roski administration in early 2015,…”
I have to laugh at this complaint; the students
don’t realize how much administrators love these sorts of meetings, not
realizing how often administrators embarrass themselves with their
chuckleheaded ignorance, an ignorance that would be forgivable (because they’re
totally unqualified for their positions) but for their massive egos and
personal sense of papal infallibility.
Administrators, of course, don’t care how
they look, they care that there were meetings. To justify their jobs, they need
to document that they are *doing* something. The poor MFA students didn’t even
realize that every pointless meeting actually made admin stronger, because, at
the end of the year, the deans here will show to the higher ups that “we went
to lots of meetings, so we need more support staff.” That the meetings
accomplished nothing, and would be unnecessary except for the deans’
incompetence, just isn’t a factor. It truly is fascinating how administration in higher education works:
administration doesn’t even want to
accomplish anything with a meeting, that would be counter-productive from their
point of view.
And the poor kids actually thought these
meetings were going to change anything:
“…Throughout this grueling process of
attempting to reason with the institution, …”
Ah, yes, trying to reason with admin, a
hopeless task. I still recall spending years trying to convince them that the
majority of votes of “5, 5, 5, 5, and 0” is “5,” but they insisted it was “4,”
and nothing I said, no dictionary I cited, could convince them.
You can’t reason with them. It’s that
simple.
“…the Roski School and
University administration used manipulative tactics of delaying decisions,
blaming others, contradicting each other’s stated policies, and attempting
to force a wedge of silence between faculty and students…”
Ah yes, the “seal of silence.” I’ve dealt
with this many a time. Administrators basically tell whatever lie they want to
whoever they want, and count on people not talking to each other, so nobody
realizes what lies are told. Underlings are threatened with termination if they
tell anyone what administration told them. These threats come so often that it
becomes pretty wise policy to just not talk, to anyone, ever. The ivory towers
are pretty quiet nowadays, although discussions still occur off campus, among
friends.
Admin can’t realize these tactics don’t
work if you have a trusted friend (and, gee, you’re in a department filled with
people who share the same obsessive interests as you…having at least one friend
there seems likely, though not to the reptilian administrative mind, which
can’t wrap itself around the concept of “friend.”). So, you and your friend do
talk, and figure out how and when the administration is lying, again…not that
faculty can do anything about it.
These students trusted each other more
than they did administration, and talked amongst themselves to figure out the
lies, doubtless a big factor in why admin couldn’t railroad them.
“…we have no idea what MFA faculty
we’d be working with for the coming year; we have no idea what the
curriculum would be, other than that it will be different from what it was
when we enrolled and is currently being implemented by administrators
outside of our field of study; and finally, we have no idea whether we’d
graduate with twice the
amount of debt we thought we would graduate with….”
Isn’t it neat that administrators with no
knowledge or understanding have now taken it upon themselves to set up
programs? Please understand that not only are such programs likely to be wildly
inadequate, but also the cheapest possible option will be taken every step of
the way. This is why, for example, at one school I taught, even though we
needed people in our IT department, we wouldn’t dare hire our computer science
graduates—we knew full well the program was far too bogus to qualify them for
even an entry level position working with computers.
Now, at the undergraduate level, you can
screw students like this—they’re undergraduates, and so just trust the
administration (oops!) that they’ll be treated fairly and are getting a legitimate
education. Graduate students aren’t necessarily so naïve, and after working
with administration, the MFA students knew these people were not to be trusted:
“…Perhaps the University imagined
that we would suffer any amount of lies, manipulations, and mistreatment
for those shiny degrees…”
That’s a reasonable conjecture by the MFA
students. Hey, these tactics worked for administration when dealing with
faculty and undergraduates, why not expect the same with grad students?
They were told they were entering a good
program, and wouldn’t have to graduate with much debt. After they were
accepted, the rules changed. Again, this is typical of administrators.
This kind of bait-and-switch fraud is not
tolerated in any other industry. If you buy a 3 bedroom, two bath, brick house,
and then find out you’re getting a sinkhole in the middle of a toxic dump,
you’d be entitled for not just a refund, but compensation for the fraud, right?
You’d have more recourse than just walk away from it….but that’s all the MFA
students can do.
For some reason, higher education gets a
pass for this sort of behavior, and so bait-and-switches all the time.
University of Phoenix and other for-profit institutions make billions telling
people about how their wonderful degrees were worth something in the jobs
marketplace, even though the for-profits know their degrees are laughable slips
of paper. Much like the MFA students that were defrauded, those students will
never get a refund of their tuition, even when it’s clearly taken under false
pretenses, even when the Federal government shuts down the
institution in the middle of the students’ degree program, much less get compensation for the
year or more of their life that was wasted due to the deceptions of the
administration. The very, very, highly paid administration.
These MFA students really do seem to
understand what’s going on:
“Let’s not forget about the larger
system of inequity that we paid into to try to get our degrees. USC
tuition has increased an astounding 92% since 2001¹, compensation for USC’s top 8 executives has more than tripled
since 2001², and Department of Education data shows that “administrative
positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993
and 2009”³. Adjunct faculty, the jobs that freshly-minted MFAs usually
get— if they’re lucky — are paid at a rate that often does not even
reach the federal minimum wage4, while
paying off tens of thousands of dollars of student-loan debt. USC follows
this trend of supporting a bloated administration with whom students have
minimal contact to the diminishment of everyone else…. Meanwhile, faculty
voices are silenced and adjunct faculty expands, affecting their overall
ability to advocate5, for students”
--I want to emphasize 75% of the
faculty at this institution are minimally paid adjuncts. There are not enough permanent
faculty there to assure students get a legitimate education, so students just
get, at best, isolated courses from adjuncts that pop on campus and then leave,
not coordinating their courses with others to make a coherent degree…and these
students know that. Hmm, wonder if there’s a way so that the undergraduate
students could learn that as well….
Again, having plundered all they can from
faculty, administration is now beginning to loot the graduate programs, and
students are walking out. How much longer will it be until an entire year’s
worth of students walks out of undergraduate programs? Not too much longer if
people start reading my blog, I suspect. When it happens, you can bet this
broad genus of schools will go extinct.
1 “Integrated Postsecondary
Education Data System”, Final Release Data,National Center for
Education Statistics, accessed January 2, 2015.
2 IRS 990 Forms FY 2001-2007,
Part 2, Item 25, and Schedule III and IRS 990 Forms FY 2008-2012,
Part IX, Line 5
3 “The Real Reason College Tuition
Costs So Much”, Campos, Paul F. The New York Times, April 4th 2015.
4 http://www.adjunct.chronicle.com
5 75% of USC faculty is contingent
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