RST: I’m worried about you, friend. How’s your back?
EGG: It’s fine. Getting old is hell, but for me manageable because I still have all my marbles.
RST: You have a lot of marbles, so here’s something I’m struggling with and want you to help me understand.
EGG: I will try to help, but no dog grooming questions.
RST: No, wise guy. It’s the problem of other minds. Even though most of us know about all the challenges facing higher ed now, the group who seems least aware of the broader national picture is, I think, the majority of faculty. I know the two main trade publications in our industry are not widely read by faculty, so I wonder how much attention they are paying to what’s going on outside their campus walls.
EGG: I would venture that the vast majority of faculty have limited reading and viewing habits: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, CNN and MSNBC.
RST: Have you been snooping around on my coffee table? You forgot The New Yorker. And NPR.
EGG: Until our colleagues start also reading The Wall Street Journal, The N.Y. Post and Forbes and watching Fox News, they will not get a view of the world that is tired of being told what to read and how to think by the cultural and coastal elites—many of whom are housed inside our universities.
RST: Yes. That’s what took us by surprise in 2016. They heard an “elite” call them a basket of deplorables, something many of my well-educated friends still stand by. I worry that too many faculty aren’t clocking the real and pressing problems facing us. Right now, higher ed rates lower than the insurance industry in terms of public confidence.
EGG: Now that is an indictment. When we fall below Congress, which we are approaching, then Katie, bar the door.
RST: “Katie, bar the door”? Gordon, your face card never declines!
EGG: Remember, I grew up in rural America and still have some good land-grant roots!
RST: The presidents I talk to know we’re living in a change-or-die time, and yet when they explain to faculty that there’s no money coming in, no one believes them. I mean, if Harvard and Amherst are cutting programs and staff, what kind of world do the rest of us think we’re living in? Every day in the higher ed media and the national press, the messages are out there for all to see.
And yet, whenever a president needs to respond to the blizzard of financial threats, faculty say, Whoa there, bucko! You can’t cut any academic programs. Now, it makes sense for each of us to believe that what we teach and study are the most important fields in any curriculum. And it makes sense that we defend that against the philistines in the administration building. And none of us want to lose our jobs or see our colleagues get fired.
EGG: I keep asking when you are going to give up tenure.
RST: Dude, I’m hunkering greatly (in Robert Kelchen’s terms). But here’s where I’m stuck: Is this a leadership issue? I mean, are presidents—and provosts, who have to do the dirty work of carrying out plans—failing at communicating to faculty what’s at stake?
EGG: Of course we philistines are failing at that. The reason is we almost always communicate in cloudy and deferential academic-speak. Soft tones and wishful phrases no longer are the right megaphones.
RST: Arthur Levine, a youngster compared to you, said the way he got people on board at Brandeis was “Scare the shit out of the faculty by telling them the truth, then ask them to help you plan the future.” Doug wrote about that in his “Tough Love” column, where he argued that institutions would do well by having interim presidents who don’t need the job. Which was the case for Arthur, before he got sucked back into it.
EGG: That to me is an unfortunate statement about the state of higher education—we need to get hired guns to come in, make the changes and leave before they are run out of town. That is an indictment of both the administration and faculty, an administration that will not or cannot do its job and a faculty that are so against any change that they would rather blow up the institution than allow their comfort zone to be challenged. What the hell!
RST: When faculty push back, I’ve heard suggestions like, We just need to demand that the state give us more money! Or: You should spend more money on marketing to get us more (and better) students. Or: The reason enrollment tanked is because the new website was hard to navigate.
EGG: Or cut the number of administrators or get rid of the staff.
RST: Or ditch athletics. Though, really, Gordon, athletics is wackadoodle these days.
EGG: Athletics is a mess!
RST: So I keep getting stuck when thinking about faculty. These ideas are laughable to anyone who’s been paying attention. I mean, learning is our business; we are smart people.
EGG: Very bright people, but often politically naïve. So many of our colleagues are gaining their views from faculty meetings and not from wider and often uncomfortable conversations.
RST: I think that’s true. But drawing on my experience, Gordon, I want to make a point that should not go without saying. And following your example, I’m going to scream it in all caps:
TEACHING TODAY IS REALLY FUCKING HARD.
I come home after nearly every class feeling like a failure. It’s small comfort to hear that everyone else is having a similar experience. I don’t blame the students, who are a mess. They’re scared, depressed, lonely, exhausted, working jobs they hate, and now are having to choose between buying gas and food. I don’t know how to help them and prepare them for what comes next.
I used to think I had the best job in the world. And now, well, I don’t know how to do the thing I used to feel (somewhat) competent at. These days, I’m a mess: scared, depressed, lonely, exhausted, working a job I used to love (and paying nearly $6 a gallon for gas). So it’s no wonder faculty, nearly all of whom are in it for the students, are miserable and don’t want to spend time watching Fox News. I need you to have some empathy here for the faculty who are doing hard, heavy lifting and are not the few who have gotten under your skin.
EGG: You just hit the target (and with the F bomb). For both the majority of faculty and students, this project of education is a heavy lift. And I know and saw that as I spent time with faculty and students, particularly at our regional campuses and with students and families from the coalfields of West Virginia or the rural areas of Ohio. So empathy is due. And that is one of the reasons that there is such a disconnect between the public and the universities—the public do not hear of the stress, they only hear the noise from the elitist statements coming out of so many of our universities.
RST: And the media loves controversy, so stories of “woke” professors saying dumb things and protests on campus—which are not representative of most of us—get way more attention than they should.
EGG: The loud voices have drowned out or bullied many into complying with the catechism. Presidents know that we are at a tipping point in higher education unlike any time in the modern era. It is easy for me to say get a spine, take the heat and make the right decisions. They will build a statue of you in 100 years.
RST: Gordon, there’s already a bobblehead of you. You don’t also need a statue.
EGG: But, as I have told you before, unfortunately, so many of our presidents are selected through these damnable search committees, resulting many times in people who are afraid to make the hard decisions.
RST: Stop right there, pal. That may be true, but it’s also true that boards say they want to hire “change agents,” but when their golf buddies start bitching about changes at their alma maters, they don’t support the presidents. That’s part of why we’re seeing so much churn. Presidents are caught between paralyzed faculty and clueless boards. I put a lot of blame on boards; you and I are going to have to have a talk about them.
EGG: That is a topic for us to tackle. Good boards are good. Bad boards are terrible. I have had both.
RST: Look, as a faculty member, I want leadership that is empathetic, forward-thinking, creative, collaborative and transparent. And yet, a president you recently met (you’re welcome) who is all those things and more is getting beaten up by his faculty—or at least by some angry members from predictable departments—because they can’t see the world outside their campus walls and don’t want to change a thing. If higher ed keeps losing great presidents, we’re going to be in the soup.
EGG: We need empathetic leaders, but we also need empathetic listeners. You are going to throw a tantrum when I remind you that we need shared responsibility in the academy if we are going to truly be able to reach better solutions to our mounting problems.
RST: And I have to remind you that most faculty are overwhelmed with responsibility, are stressed, burned out and hunkering down. Because, if you didn’t get the message the first time, teaching today is really fucking hard.
But I know on each campus there are some who get it and want to help. That’s where Arthur’s formulation is so smart. It’s the Ben Franklin effect: The best way to get people on your side is to ask them for help. And in this case, the request is genuine.
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