The Emperor's Newest Clothes

It's sad and, in a bizarre sense, amusing to see someone unmasked, especially someone in a highly paid, administrative position. At my school, the president has offered ersatz faculty consultation, and then when the inevitable crisis hit--and all decisions are made by the administrtation without any meaningful input from the "employees"--he affects a hurt sensibility: why didn't you participate in these phony sessions where I would pretend to listen to you and then ignore everything you have to say? Of course, no one is expecting that they will simply do what we want, but after a while, even the most obtuse person will realize when the fix is in. They assume that meaningful faculty consultation equals some kind of anarchistic collective. We--with our degrees and experience--would like to be heard. But as administrators now mostly come from graduate programs in college administration, they no longer have any knowledge of teaching or scholarship--just managing the "crises." So colleges have drifted into a kind of unspoken agreement: you pretend to administer the school, we'll deal with the classroom. But sooner or later, they have to intervene into the classroom (layoffs, phony accredidation processes, pointless student surveys), although somehow administrative personnel almost never seem to disappear. So a lot of faculty showed up at a meeting--and the president threw a temper tantrum. This "meeting," like most of our meetings, was really an opportunity to hand out new rules for a specific program--no discussion, no questions, no give-and-take. That's how dictatorships are run. When the mask of affability comes off, then you see the reality. We pretend that somehow we don't live under dictatorships--but we do. The corporate rules rule.