Political Reasons

Finally, I have a moment to write about the reasons why my university is being taken apart.

Our university system has two campuses, the original, older one, called C. and the newer,  called E. I work at the newer, the E.

C used to be known as a party school and it was popular because of that. It’s located in the middle of absolute nowhere and students liked that they could go there and be wild away from prying eyes. But that was the 1980s or 1990s, I don’t know, a long time ago. Students changed, the economy changed. Now students want jobs and economic prospects. C started collapsing while E, which is located 20 minutes from a large metropolitan area, began to thrive. Within our university system, over 60% of funding goes to the collapsing C. Things got so dire that a few years ago the thriving E had to dip into its strategic reserves to the tune of crazy millions of dollars to bail out C.

The administration of E saw that there was a massive opportunity to become more than a commuter school. E hired dozens of young scholars from the best schools in the country to raise its research profile. It worked. We reached all the markers for higher research rankings. We introduced new, exciting programs, like, just to give an example close to home, the ASL program that I started and that will fill 15+ sections next semester.

Of course, E started trying to re-negotiate the financing split. We argued that E should get at least half of the funding because that’s fair. We have more students, we do more research, we have a lot of exciting stuff going on.

But here’s the rub. In the area where C is located, there are no big entities providing jobs. C is the only reason that the area is kind of scraping by economically. You lose a lot of voters if you stop feeding C that requires more and more.

The Board of Trustees removed the E Chancellor who believed in helping E grow. Incidentally, he was the guy who saved E from forced vaccinations and made it possible for those of us tho wanted to teach in person all through COVID. He was removed and a new, utterly inexperienced Chancellor with a PhD in “Educational Leadership” was installed. If you are not in academia, you might not know that it’s enough to say the words “Educational Leadership” to a group of academics to have them explode with laughter. It’s not a real degree, it’s an embarrassment.

The new Chancellor is like Obama without charm or the gift of gab. A bureaucratic drone who’s aggressively incompetent but has a sky-high opinion if himself. Smug, self-righteous, and rude.

The new Chancellor started to dismantle E. The libraries were emptied. I’m sure many of you remember the photos I posted when it was happening. Admissions office and student recruitment programs were sabotaged and no longer work. I’ve been giving examples for the past couple of years and don’t want to repeat myself. Just yesterday we had an embarrassingly mishandled recruitment activity that makes me blush at how disrespectful it was to prospective students.

As expected, our enrollments dropped. We stopped hiring and filling empty tenure lines. Stopped offering tutoring to students. Stopped subscribing to anything. Stopped buying new equipment. If a piece of equipment dies of old age in a chemistry lab, we are told there’s no money to buy a new one, so suck it up. Now we are firing professors. None of this will send any students to C because they are too far away and there are great schools nearby. But nobody is left at E to ask for reallocation of resources. Plus, every reason to raise our research ranking will be gone, so that problem is solved.

Three years ago, a close friend of mine who is a professor in a STEM field and very mega MAGA told me that this was a conscious plan to bring down E and save C. I thought it was a conspiracy theory, for which I am now embarrassed. Next time we meet, I will apologize to my friend for my hubris of suspecting her of being a loon when in reality I was the hopelessly naive one.

The part of Illinois where E is located defied the Governor’s orders on lockdowns. It’s highly probable that this is an additional factor in Pritzker’s efforts to dismantle E and impoverish the region that votes solid red.

I love capitalism and I respect the free market. But only when it’s really free. A successful business should thrive without the government putting its finger on the scale and punishing it for political reasons. What we are seeing in this story isn’t old-school capitalism. It’s neoliberalism where the government plays on the side of failure and punishes success.