The reason why the university wants to get rid of full professors isn’t that they cost too much. It’s never really about money. People who have been with the university for many years are the keepers of institutional memory. Their knowledge stands in the way of change for the sake of change.
When the new Chancellor came in, he started saying, “Let’s introduce this new policy. It’s so obvious this is going to be a great change. I have no idea why this hasn’t been done yet.”
Older professors said, “It was done. These changes were introduced in 2010. They were catastrophic, and the current system was created to mend the damage.”
There were several things of this kind. Every time, older professors would say, “this was tried, it failed. If you start taking things apart, these will be the consequences, just like the last time this was tried.”
Get rid of the people with memory, and you can wreak any havoc you want, put it on your CV and move on, which is the whole play for this new Chancellor. He started interviewing for a new job a year after we hired him. Nobody else is stupid enough to take him but what his plan is has been clear from the start.
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