Fair and transparent guidelines for faculty workloads is a worthy aim. Why did you not share your concerns first with the faculty and University Senate, and try to address them together? You have chosen to trust an expensive vendor (Bain & Company) instead of your own multitudes of cheap experts, your faculty, who are the true stewards of Miami University’s mission.
Shared governance is the vital space where such problems are supposed to be solved. By misplacing your trust and breaking with University Policy, your stated intention to create better workload guidelines has led you to embrace a crude, inept scheme of normalization. Many faculty are stunned, angered and certain (because they know best) that these changes will result in lower-quality education for Miami students. Meanwhile, students are becoming confused and apprehensive. They sense or hear from their instructors that things are not well.
No one else comes close to the faculty in understanding how we do all the important work we do; that is the essence of a university. We work hard at difficult tasks, and it takes years of built-up know-how not only to do them, but also to understand the nature of academic work as work. You can’t turn your back on that reality (even if you are truly upset about faculty and librarians having unionized) and still have a university that students will want to come to.
Faculty working conditions are student learning conditions. You need to understand that faculty morale, which was already at a historic low because of the university’s anti-union tactics and the slashing of academic programs, is now in free-fall, amid what must be called without exaggeration the intellectual implosion of this admirable institution.
I feel like Gulliver trapped in the flailing paw of a gigantic monkey. (Look it up, it’s a story with relevant metaphors.)
If we don’t correct course now, this place is going to be unrecognizable in a couple of years. Alumni may remain loyal for old time’s sake, but donors attracted to Miami’s already sinking public ivy brand will drift away, and the good students and their parents that Miami needs will stop adding it to their wish lists. Faculty will leave, and faculty recruitment will become more difficult.
And don’t tell us, “It’s happening all over the country, it’s happening all around the world, we need to adjust to new realities during hard times and the eclipse of democracy”— that kind of what-about-ism is morally toxic. If you heard the Bain consultants say something like that in their sales pitch, you have been had.
We are the faculty, we are the majority, we have the power, and you know that, because every time faculty and librarians exert even a little bit of our power, out on the streets, we make progress at the contract bargaining table.
And you know what is right. You must know it. The university has not just done poorly here, it has done something bad. It needs to acknowledge and take responsibility for that, throw out the costly charts from Bain (someday, somehow we’ll forget about the bad expense), join hands with faculty and librarians, engage in true shared governance, and together with us, turn this shameful and potentially terminal page in Miami’s history.
This message was not prompted, advised, encouraged, approved or funded by anyone, let alone our union or students.
At The Student, we are committed to engaging with our audience and listening to feedback. This includes publishing a diverse array of guest editorials. For more information on guidelines and processes, email Sam Norton, The Student's opinion editor at nortonsm@miamioh.edu.
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