Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower

# · 🔥 466 · 💬 321 · one year ago · www.jamesgmartin.center · jseliger · 📷
If there is a constituency still living the ivory tower dream, it is not professors but their bosses: university administrators. The American university thrived historically on the marrying of teaching and research-the idea that faculty should be not only competent in the classroom but accomplished practitioners of their field. University administrators are academia's answer to the "Professional managerial class." In many respects, university administrators are academia's answer to what has become known as the "Professional managerial class," or PMC. As Catherine Liu argues in a recent book, the PMC is comprised of educated professionals who embrace a moralizing progressive ideology while believing that it can be realized only in a top-down, hierarchical manner. Consistent with Liu's description of the PMC, university administrators "Labor in a world of floating signifiers, statistics, analytics, projections, predictions and identity performativity, virtue signaling, and affectual production." Because they see universities as stages on which they are destined to display their own professional and moral superiority, they hold in low esteem the matters that preoccupy professors-sound pedagogy, academic rigor, publishing in one's discipline, even reading books. These goals have little to do with the research function of the university or with its central task of facilitating the educational exchange between students and faculty. University administrators will undoubtedly work diligently to please North Carolina politicians and to tell North Carolina citizens what they think they wish to hear.
Administrators Have Seized the Ivory Tower



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