UND Budget

Academic Rituals: When to Haggle

Universities are ritual places. The academic year is punctuated by ritualized gatherings: convocations and commencements. We have ritualized titles such as “professor” and forms of address. At times we were funny, impractical outfits and arrange ourselves in largely arbitrary hierarchies meant to invoke historical order that communicates the mystery and traditions of learning.

Universities also like to create new rituals from time to time and are replete with invented traditions. These both lean into already existing ideas that academic traditions are ancient (if not almost timeless), but also that each generation finds meaning in them in new ways. In this way, universities use rituals not only to provide the sense of enduring significance, but also as a discourse through which to articulate certain values.

Many of the rituals at universities are outward facing and seek to represent the university as a community. There are, however, some that are inward facing: “reading and review day” for example is the last Friday of the semester and historically was a day for students to prepare for finals. The rhythm of the semester has changed in the last 15 years and this day is probably more about blowing off steam or working an extra shift than reading and reviewing.

This last month, faculty engaged in a ritual that had developed over the course of the last ten or so years: the contract negotiation. UND is not a union school and as a result, each faculty member has a separate contract. When I started at UND these contracts were standardized: 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. At some point over the last decade, the percentage of teaching changed. In my department we continued to teach 5 classes, but the value of the class shifted from 8% per class to 10% per class. Many contracts were then 50%, 40%, 10%. The work we did as faculty didn’t change, but how the contract represented it did.

In 2016, the university went through a series of dramatic budget cuts and saw the installation of a new budget model. These events were traumatic to the university community not only because we witnessed the termination of programs, cutting amenities, and most significantly people let go, but also because it contributed to the transformation the relationship between faculty and the administration. The change in the relationship between faculty and the administration also created new rituals.

When I first arrived at UND there was a faculty member who would negotiate his own contract each year. He would hold out, refuse to sign, and in the late summer, meet with the dean and ask for more money. Since he did this fairly regularly, my sense is that he this tactic was successful.

I have to admit participating in similar (although not identical) strategies. In my early days on campus, if I need support for my research, I could have a meeting with our Vice President of Research (or his assistant) and ask for resources directly. It sometimes worked and other times, it did not, but it was not a reach to do this. Indeed, it was possible for me to meet with the dean on a few days notice and colleagues had meetings with the provost and president regularly with a minimum of fanfare.

When faced with the horrors of laying off people who had worked at UND for generations and budget cuts that materially and personally impacted the university community, it is only natural that administrators wanted to put some distance between themselves, faculty, staff, and students. In the place of face-to-face meeting new more structured forms of ritual emerged to mediate between administrators and faculty. The contract negational counts among these.

Contract negotiations today are not about how much we get paid. That’s a separate process that is cloaked in its own mystery. Instead, we negotiate the percentages of the contract assigned to various part of our job. The stakes in these negotiations are so low that they can only be ritual. These negotiations are even lower than, say, the kinds of negotiations that take place when buy a car (where a dealer’s position serves mostly to affirm (and praise) the customer’s willingness “to playing hard ball” by performed an exaggerated “reluctance” to give in to the haggling) or when a new employee negotiate their salaries with both sides knowing the likely outcome of the performance. In both these cases the performance of ritual bargaining serves to give the customer or the new employee as sense of empowerment at a time of vulnerability.

The rituals surrounding contract negotiations at my institution serve slightly different functions. While buying a new car or negotiating a starting salary are situations with clear material significance, contract negotiations at my institution do not. These are effectively symbolic numbers that have no predictable correlation to substantive material gain. This ritual, then, has different goals:

First, they serve to reinforce a relatively new position in the administrative hierarchy: the associate dean. By encouraging faculty to negotiate with the Associate Dean — most often via the chair — the college (and the university) makes visible the presence of this position. This parallels court rituals which serve the mark out levels in the hierarchy, but make the hierarchy visible even, or, perhaps, especially, in relatively low stakes situation. 

The risk, here, as one of my colleagues pointed out, is that the ritual negotiation obligates both the faculty member and the associate dean to positions in the contract. Unlike, say, a procession where ritual presents hierarchy to a passive audience, contract negotiations creates mutual bonds. This means that the “winner” (the associate dean) must try to win and the “loser” must, eventually, accept their position of lower power and prestige. There is no moment where the loser is empowered —  for “driving a hard bargain” — but the winner must still assert their position effectively within the rules of the ritual. In other words, even a symbolic contract negotiation must justify the power difference rather than merely assert it as this important documentary shows.  

Finally, while most faculty view this ritual from the inside, there is a real possibility that the ritual also serves a broader audience outside the college. Some colleges on our campus have struggled more than others with the increasingly bureaucratization of university leadership. In many cases these are smaller colleges with fewer faculty and fewer intermediaries between dean and faculty members. As a result, the development of associate dean and the ritual contract negotiation becomes increasingly fraught as faculty seek to push back against the creep of bureaucratic control. In other words, the salary negotiation emerges a key symbolic battlefield. 

As the bureaucratization of the university is largely a top down process — faculty have little interest or need for the growing army of associate deans, associate provosts, vice presidents and so on — the need to demonstrate that bureaucratization is occurring across campus. These low-stakes rituals make this processes visible both to the upper tiers of the administration and across the various colleges. Indeed, there is reason to encourage a bit of drama in these negotiations to ensure that the upper administration sees faculty brought into line with the new hierarchy, but not so much drama that the ritual becomes an opportunity for resistance. Assessing the value of the harvest at the threshing floor is a practical and symbolical ritual provided that it doesn’t drive producers to thresh at night.

These kinds of analysis of university rituals are important for two reasons. First, it recognizes the role of ritual and mutual complicity in creating hierarchy on campus. In other words, if faculty participate in this ritual dance, they are participating in the creation of new administrative distinctions whether that’s their goal or not.

Of course, there are ways to opt out. For example, if faculty do not do the dance and haggle, this increases the chances that the ritual will fail. That said, it also breaks any form of mutual obligation that the ritual itself enacts. By refusing to participate, may cause the associate dean to resort to a display of “raw” authority (that is simply declaring what the contract percentages are) and this would undermine the mutuality that the ritual itself present. On the other hand, this risks ceding the expectation of mutuality however illusory.  

Whatever one’s strategy, it is nevertheless worth recognizing ritual moments at the university when they occur and trying to understand what the goals of seemingly pointless ritual exchanges might be. Because the ritual relies on both parties to work, this means that there are always opportunities to manipulate these ritual interactions in ways that benefit either side even if these manipulations will never completely bridge the real differential in power and authority on either side. 

More importantly, perhaps, is that by recognizing these exchanges as ritualized, we can see them for what they are. These rituals mark and create new layers of bureaucracy. Our contracts do not directly impact faculty labor or material benefits any more than being knighted in the 21st century grants one substantive political, military, or material privileges. It remains up to us as faculty to decide how best to use these ritual moments.

Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis

Completing a short article on “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” was at the top of my list of summer tasks. The paper will (hopefully) appear in a volume on campus crises. The paper is now officially done.

Last spring, I wrote a quick draft of the paper thinking for some reason that I had 6000-7000 words. You can read it here.

This summer, I cut my paper down to just over 3000 words. I think it is less interesting, but also more streamlined and direct.

Check it out here (if you want).

Two Things Writing Tuesday

I’m back from traveling and my summer research leave and while I’ll take a few days to recover from jet lag, I’m looking forward to getting back into my routine and starting the slow ramp up to the fall semester. There are two (and a half) things that are “closest to the sled” right now and I want to get sorted before the end of the month.

Thing the Half

I’m so close to being done the final report on my work with Richard Rothaus and Scott Moore at Isthmia. I previewed some of this last week, but I’m excited to share the entire report when it’s done. In other words, stay tuned!

Thing the First

In the spring, I wrote a draft of a chapter of a volume on campus crises. For whatever reason I misunderstood the directions and wrote it at twice the length that the editors wanted. This means that I need to cut this thing down in a pretty substantial way.

Before I do that, though, I want to make the full length paper available (and link to it in my more abbreviated and presumably published version). Here’s where it stands at present. Stay tuned for a shorter, more concise, and hopefully more on point paper.

Thing the Second

I’m very excited to work with David Pettegrew on paper titled “Mobilizing the Archaeological Report for the Future Interpretive Community: Linked Open Data, Analysis, and Publication.” This paper will involve a bit reading on publishing, on writing in archaeology, and on archaeology in the media.

I’m starting to think a bit about how this paper might connect with my interest in pseudoarchaeology. In part, I wonder whether the issues with pseudoarchaeology is less a scientific problem and more a media issue. In particular, it is interesting to think how the tactics used by pseudoarchaeologies both leverage existing communities and creating communities around their beliefs. In other words, archaeology isn’t just about “the science,” but also about “the media.”

A Load of Links Related to the UND Budget Crisis Class in 2018

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on a paper for a volume on campus crises. This week, the volume feels all the more relevant (if not, to use everyone’s favorite academic term “urgent”).

I’m putting the final touches on the first draft of my chapter which will focus on how the budget 2016-2018 budget crisis at UND shaped what I did in the classroom. Here’s the rough outline of my paper:

Introduction
Teaching as Activism (here, here)
The Anatomy of the UND Budget Crisis
Teaching a Class on the University Budget
The Wesley College Documentation Project
Conclusion

With any luck, the conclusion will be done by the end of the week!

I came to realize that my writing about the UND budget crisis drew upon on a pretty interesting group of documents that my classes both produced and used upon. I know that I’ve shared a few of them here in the past, but now seems to be an appropriate time to share all of them.

First, here is the syllabus for my class on the UND Budget. 

History of North Dakota: Women’s Hockey, Higher Ed & the UND Budget

That class and the gradate reading seminar that I ran in the Fall of 2017 produced a pair of short, free, downloadable books:

Defendinghistorycover 011.Defending History: The Graduates Manifesto

 

ImageHawks, Hockey, and the Budget at the University of North Dakota

The class relied upon a document reader that was the product of a small graduate seminar. Joe Kalka, who was a student in that seminar (and the course that produced produced it. It remains a useful archival record of the budget situation on UND’s campus. We tried to stabilize the hyperlinks using the Internet Archive, but a number of the links don’t work. It nevertheless provides a basic survey of the sources that students in the UND budget class could use to  

Higher Education and Budgets Course Document Reader

We shared the first chapter of Andrew Larson’s thesis with the class as a general survey of the recent history of higher education grounded in some of the classic works on the field, but with an  

Andrew F. Larson, “Not Your Advisor’s Doctorate: The Doctor Of Arts And The Modernization Of Higher Education 1945-1970.” Unpublished D.A. Thesis, University of North Dakota, 2020. 

We also benefited from a couple of other documents:

William Caraher, “History at the University of North Dakota 1885-1970,” Unpublished 2009.

Louis G. Geiger, University of the Northern Plains: a History of the University of North Dakota, 1883-1958. UND Press, 1958

Of course, there have been several publications, both formal and more casual, out of our broader work on the UND budget:

Letters of Edward Robertson President Emeritus, Wesley College, From 1935.

Wyatt Atchley, “Images of Austerity,” NDQ 85 (2018), 124-125.

Melissa Gjellstad and Ryan Zerr, “Faculty Navigating the Age of Austerity: Affirming Roles and Renewing Alliances,” NDQ 85 (2018), 162-180.

William Caraher, “Humanities in the Age of Austerity: A Case Study from the University of North Dakota,” NDQ 85 (2018), 208-221.

William Caraher , Michael Wittgraf , Wyatt Atchley, “Hearing Corwin Hall: The Archaeology of Anxiety on an American University Campus,” Epoiesen (2021).

Wyatt Atchley, “Wesley College: Progressive Era Education in North Dakota.” Unpublished MA Thesis, NDSU, 2023.

William Caraher, “Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teaching Encounter,” in Teaching and Learning the Archaeology of the Contemporary Era. Gabe Moshenska ed. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. (You can download a pre-print of this article here).

Still More on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

As readers of this blog know, I’ve been writing a bit on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited volume. This paper will focus on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. 

You can read more about it here or here or  here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).

The final section that I had to draft was a description of the actual crisis itself. I have to admit that time had dulled my memory of the budgetary causes of the crisis while preserving intact my memory of the anguish that the the budget cuts caused. This is my first effort to narrate, in a concise way, the confluence of events and individuals that caused such campus wide anxiety and inflicted such a deep wound on campus morale. 

As I tried to do this, I came back around to a sense that I had at the time. It wasn’t so much at our campus had a budget crisis, it was how various parts of campus responded to it. In particular, I was struck by how quickly and decisively the spirit of collaboration and shared governance dissipated. Perhaps administrators suppressed it by design and it reflects the idea that crisis management tends to be top down. Maybe it was 

In any event, my text here tried to capture some of the vectors which converged to cause the crisis:

The Anatomy of a Campus Crisis

The context for UND’s budget crisis was both unique and familiar. On the one hand, the university had largely avoided the financial crisis associated with the “Great Recession” owing to tax revenues generated by the opening phase of the Bakken oil boom. The earliest phase of the oil boom came on the heals of the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 and the larger economic downturn that it triggered. On the other hand, the University of North Dakota, like many mid-sized, public institutions, remains dependent on the state for a portion of its operating budget. When the state of North Dakota experienced a $1 billion budget shortfall in 2015, owing to the drop in oil prices, a particularly dry harvest, and an aggressive tax cut to companies and individuals, the state cut appropriations to UND as well as elsewhere on the basis of a budgetary formula. Another series of budget cuts occurred in 2018. UND like many state institutions had limited options when it came to increasing revenue as legislation limited the institution’s ability to raise tuition or increase fees. As a result, the only real solution to budget shortfalls on the state and institutional level was to reduce funding across campus largely through retrenching positions, but also through eliminating programs.

Like many institutions, the University of North Dakota is a tight knit community. Relative stability in leadership positions, a close relationship with the town and alumni—partly attributed to a successful and popular hockey program—and committed faculty and staff endowed the university with generally decent morale, a sense of purpose, and a collaborative spirit. In fact, the shared commitments of the extended UND community had helped it navigate a controversial change in nicknames that culminated in 2015 with the Fighting Hawks replacing the Fighting Sioux. The retirement of President Robert Kelley in 2016 and the naming of former governor Ed Shaffer as acting President of the institution came at the moment where the first round of budget cuts impacted campus. His brief term which saw a round of staff and faculty layoffs, ended with the naming of Mark Kennedy president. Unlike Shaffer who garnered respect across the region from his time as governor and his North Dakota roots, Kennedy was unpopular, inexperienced, and came across as aloof and unsympathetic. Shaffer and Kennedy relied on Provost Tom DiLorenzo to implement painful budget cuts and DiLorenzo’s sometimes awkward personal style further contributed to the unpopularity of the administration. Faculty had viewed DiLorenzo with suspicion after an abortive effort at “program prioritization” on campus in 2014 and his role in implementing a new MIRA (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation) budget model for the university at the same time. This model, which was complex and poorly understood by faculty and staff, seemed to harden barriers between colleges and foster competition for resources based on what appeared to be an impersonal and inflexible formula. Administrative, procedural, and leadership changes exacerbated the impact of the state level budget cuts by creating a sense of alienation from the institution.

Efforts by the administration to explain the challenging situation through a series of town hall style meetings led to emotional outbursts especially as staff who had worked at the university for decades were laid off in an effort to balance unit budgets. Administrators who had fostered innovation, program development, and collegiality, found themselves quickly transformed into hardened budget warriors tasked with cutting costs and tempering faculty ambitions. Across the entire institution, an aloof and unpopular president, the poorly understood MIRA budget model, and its chief advocate, the provost, became scapegoats for financial challenges that went far beyond MIRA’s scope or interpersonal conflicts. Deans and associate deans shared this burden as faculty sought to both understand and mitigate the budgetary changes taking place across campus. In many cases, the lack of familiarity with the mechanisms, processes, and procedures (as well as the details of the budget cuts themselves) impaired the community’s ability to present viable solutions.  

Since the 1970s, UND had followed national trends and developed its administrative bureaucracy to accommodate federal regulations, an increasingly competitive funding environment caused by the reduction in state funds, and the needs of its growing student body (for a general history of the early phase of these changes see Robinson 1971). These changes had accompanied a gradual increase in professionalization in the administrative ranks. New positions with narrower responsibilities served the specialized needs of funding agencies, new students, and programs with increasingly elaborate accreditation requirements. While some faculty and students recognized these slow changes, the budget crisis of 2016 brought their sense of alienation from the inner workings of the university to the fore. The sense of alienation among faculty and students came to the fore with cuts to two high profile and outwardly successful programs—Women’s Hockey and music therapy—which galvanized student and faculty frustration as the authors of these cuts appeared to both take responsibility for their decisions and explain them as part of necessary budgetary calculations. This both personalized animosities and further alienated faculty and students as the processes and decision making appeared opaque and misguided.

More Again on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

As readers of this blog almost certainly know, I’ve been working on a chapter for a volume on campus crises. My chapter is titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis,” and it is focusing on a class that I taught in 2018 at the height of UND’s budget crisis. Along side that class, I ran a one-credit, pop-up class on two buildings slated for destruction on campus. Many of the same students took this one-credit class as took the three-credit course on the budget. 

I’ve written about the one-credit class in a few other places recently, but I’ve only started to understand the class recently, and my little section in the chapter is my best effort so far. 

As I said yesterday, you can read more about here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).

The Wesley College Documentation Project

The other measure of the impact of the class on both its students and myself as an instructor came when we received word that the university administration had decided to demolish two of our campus’s historic buildings. These buildings were in poor repair, had suffered from years of deferred maintenance, and were empty at the start of the semester. One building had housed the university honors program and the other the large and thriving psychology program and as a result both buildings were broadly familiar to students in the budget class. The buildings originally housed a separate, but affiliated institution called Wesley College, which the University of North Dakota purchased in the early 1960s. Since being acquired by UND, these buildings served a range of functions from dormitories to laboratory spaces, classrooms, and faculty and staff offices. When news of the buildings’ destruction reached us, I proposed a one-credit “pop-up” class focusing on these two buildings and built around what I have called elsewhere “mildly anarchist” principles. While I have discussed this class in greater detail elsewhere (Caraher 2024; Caraher, Wittgraf, and Atchley 2021), this one-credit course was so closely bound to the budget class that it deserves some attention here. Nearly all the students in the budget class enrolled in it alongside some curious history students. The class met in an abandoned classroom in one of the buildings.

The planned demolition of these buildings added to the sense of crisis on campus. Not only was the rationale for the demolition of these buildings unclear to many students and faculty—even as students in the class came to understand the financialized logic of deferred maintenance on campus—but the actual state of the buildings and the former uses of the spaces inside their walls remained unevenly known. We were fortunate to find willing and eager collaborators in our campus’s facilities department who gave us virtually unlimited access to the buildings which had their power and water shut off and were in a state of pre-destruction abandonment. The facilities staff was also only too eager to talk to us about how the buildings worked and open traditionally off limits door to storage closets, offices, and pipe filled rooms. This meant that students (and, indeed, myself!) were able to roam the buildings freely.

The class itself centered on this unprecedented access to the space. Since the university had contracted with an architectural historian to prepare formal documentation of the buildings in keeping with standards established by the Historic American Building Survey, I encouraged the students to consider other ways to document and think about these abandoned and soon-to-be-demolished buildings. The students, with little experience in architectural history or archaeological methods, took to documenting rooms and offices with attention to signs of contemporary use and past reuse. Armed with notebooks, their phone cameras, and their own curiosity they explored formerly off limits lab spaces, faculty offices, and facilities areas. I moved from room to room with the students discussing what they were seeing, finding, and figuring out, and we also discussed ways to take our work further. One student, for example, took the initiative to photograph the buildings using film (and often expired film) as part of a personal photography project designed to capture the building’s abandonment as a manifestation of the campus’s budget. Other students became interested in archival and historical records for the previous functions these buildings served when they were the site of Wesley College. Finally, some students became especially eager to disclose the traces of the buildings’ former use hidden by drop ceilings, institutional carpeting, and drywall. In some cases, they pulled down drop ceilings to expose wall scars or, in one case, the remanent of a coffered ceiling that would have added to an elegant touch what would have been a formal sitting room when one of the buildings served as a dorm. With the help of facilities they also stripped back the commercial grade carpeting to reveal the remains of a terrazzo floor with inset mosaics in the same room. In a room above this well-appointed sitting room, the students discovered the names of four students etched in the glass of what was originally a dormitory window in 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914. While three of these former students went on to long and seemingly prosperous lives, one died in the Great War. While these students If the work in the budget class focused on producing a guide for students to understanding more clearly the inner workings of the increasingly professionalized university administration, the efforts in the two former Wesley College buildings were open-ended and experiential.

The students themselves gravitated to questions that involved the opening of spaces traditionally off limits to them. They spent time in abandoned faculty offices, laboratory spaces, and facilities areas. They were especially fascinated with caches of obsolete technology and the tangled masses of cables and interconnects that characterize forms of academic “boomsurfing” where faculty save technology acquired on research grants as a way to stretch the value of episodic resource booms (Purser 2017). They also sought to actively strip away contemporary accretions that obscure the older history of the building as if to reveal hidden processes. This extended from the buildings themselves to the archives where they dug through both the records of Wesley College and the later history of the programs and departments that these buildings housed. This work paralleled their interrogation of both the history of higher education and the contemporary financial mechanisms that support the allocations of funds across the university. 

If the results of the budget class were a small book, the results of what we called the “Wesley College Documentation Project” were more diverse. The photographs taken by Wyatt Atchley were published as part of a discussion of austerity in a volume of North Dakota Quarterly, the century old little magazine that found itself particularly embattled by the same campus-wide budget cuts (Caraher 2018). The students also helped coordinate a ceremony designed to recognize that one of the two buildings was a memorial to Harold H. Sayre who died in the Great War. His father who funded the construction of the building in 1908 requested the administration at Wesley College to honor his late son on their campus. They discovered this connection through archival research which also produced a poem written by Sayre’s pilot who had survived the crash in France that took Sayre’s life. We included this in the program of an event attended by the commander of the local Air Force base, the university president and other officials, and many interested members of the community. The presence of a bagpiper made the event even more poignant. Finally, Michael Wittgraf, a professor in the music department, recorded a piece of music that drew upon the acoustics of the buildings as one of the rooms was originally built as a recital hall. A video accompanying this piece spliced photos and videos of the building’s with the music to convey the sense of anxiety pervasive on campus. 

The connection between the class’s exploration of the Wesley College buildings, the various efforts to make the history of these buildings public, and the budgetary crisis on campus was not direct. Without a doubt, the spirit of the budget class, particularly its interest in revealing the administrative working obscured by decades of professionalization, paralleled student excitement to enter spaces typically closed off to students and to remove accretions designed to make the spaces of these buildings more useful on the contemporary campus. The sense of melancholy surrounding the demolition of a building intended to memorialize a fallen soldier and son seemed to reinforce the sense of sadness experienced by the students as they encountered the palpable tension between the intensely contemporary budget crisis and the longer history of the institution. The Wesley College buildings, despite decades of adaptation and neglected, became physical manifestations of their less tangible sense of loss and change on campus.

Even More on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working on a paper titled “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis” for an edited collection of papers on contemporary responses to campus crises. You can read more about here (and then follow the links to earlier postings).

Earlier this week, I worked on the section describing the actual class. I figure that I’ll have to revise this heavily, but I’m satisfied enough with it right now to keep writing and come back to it when I have the rest of the paper put together.

Teaching a Class on the University Budget

In describing my approach to teaching during the budget crisis at my institution, I am not proposing a template, a guide, or some kind of prescriptive solution. Instead, I am attempting to show how my teaching responded to the heightened experience of certain structural inequalities which came about as a result of the 2016-2018 budget crisis at UND. Consistent with the teach-in movement, the crisis inspired the series of classes that I offered and my interest in preparing students to become more informed participants in the campus community. These courses differed, however, from those offered in Vietnam era teach-ins which were very much a top down phenomena, at least as described by most of the scholars involved. Instead, the courses described below draws more fully on more contemporary approaches to student empowerment as articulated in Ira Shor’s and Paolo Friere’s work, which recognized in the classroom a space where structural inequality could be identified, questioned, and overcome. 

 

As with many crises, there was a whelming sense of institutional change. In the spring of 2017, for example, we received news that our department’s long-standing and successful graduate programs in history would lose funding. When this news came out, the last class of funded graduate students in history were enrolled in a graduate historiography and methods class typical to most graduate programs. They were understandably upset about the news and we pivoted as a class to discuss the conditions both locally and nationally that allowed this change to happen. As I tried to continue the class as a traditional history seminar, the events of the semester quickly overtook this possibility. The students were distressed, distracted, and angry even though the department assured them that their funding would continue. This assurance did little to elevate the mood of the class nor did my rather facile efforts to explain the calculus that led to the budget cuts which struck the students as ideological as practical. As our conversation continued during class and afterwards, the students’ frustration manifest itself not through the the surly unresponsiveness and disengagement of Shor’s first-year undergraduates, but in a growing desire to engage, to decry, and to lash out at perceived injustice. We decided that rather than traditional papers, which asked the students to consider how the readings of the class shaped (or would shape) their practice of history, to prepare a series of essays that loosely cohered as a manifesto of sorts. The class then critiqued, edited, and compiled their essays together in a little open access digital book titled, The Graduates Manifesto: Defending History. The book consisted of chapters that situated the study of history in the history of the university and considered the role that the university played in life of the community, the nation, and diverse “imagined communities.” The book was raw and immediate and carried traces of the frantic feeling the loss of funding imparted in the class. They circulated this book via email, social media, and my blog as a statement to anyone who might be interested. 

My experience in this class made clear to me that students not only saw themselves as deeply invested in the institution, but felt alienated from the bureaucratized administration and wanting to be heard. In response to this, I worked with a student in this graduate seminar, Joe Kalka, and another graduate student, Andrew Larson, to develop an undergraduate class focused on the university budget over the course of a independent study in the fall of 2017. We read classic works on the history of universities and colleges in the US and sampled recent scholarly and professional works that dealt with the growing sense of crisis across higher education. These readings both informed Andrew Larson’s DA project “Not Your Advisor’s Doctorate: The Doctor Of Arts And The Modernization Of Higher Education 1945-1970” and helped us prepare readings for the undergraduate class. The results were two documents: one was short history of American higher education written by Larson and the other was a “Document Reader” on higher education and budgets. A version of the former ultimately became part of the Larson’s DA project and the latter was a rough and ready document designed to give students access to sample of public documents related to budget cuts both at UND and across the US. We used the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” to create archival links to the various documents lest they succumb to the internet’s ephemeral character. Both Kalka and Larson continued to participate in the planning and development of the course, but they were also students navigating their own way through their degree programs and involved themselves selective. They injected the sense of urgent frustration manifested in the graduate seminar into the planning for the undergraduate course.  

For administrative reasons, the department assigned the undergraduate course on the budget with an existing course number — History 220: The History of North Dakota — and the university honors program afforded the class an honors designation. This would ensure that the class enrolled a sufficient number of students to make the minimum required to be taught. That said, despite the recycled course number and gratuitous “honors” designation, we were explicit about what the class would teach in the marketing material for the class. It was a result of this marketing that the class almost immediately filled with a combination of honors students, non-honors students, and history students. In fact, the honors program, whose academic rigor was significantly surpassed by student affection for and attachment to the experience of honors courses, was undergoing disruptive changes as well and this drove an interest in the budgetary situation across campus.

My work with students in the graduate historiography seminar and the subsequent reading course help develop the four goals for the undergraduate course on the budget. 

 1. To become more familiar with the complexities of the modern university and UND, in particular. 

 2. To encourage critical thinking about the institutional structure of higher education in the U.S. in a historical context and local context. 

 3. To understand the relationship between the institutional organization and the purpose of the university. 

 4. To produce a short guide to the UND budget for students that allows them to be more critical consumers and participants in university life. 

The course centered on three main sources: one was the two readers prepared by the students in the graduate reading class and described above. The second was a series of readings in Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017). Both texts seek to situate the changing nature of American higher education in its historic context. We complemented our discussion of these readings with visits from many of the key stakeholders in the budget crisis: a member of the state legislature (and the higher education committee), a vice chancellor of the statewide university system, the provost the university, the head of the university’s alumni foundation, our college dean, an assistant coach of an impacted sports team, and a panel of department chairs. Each offered perspectives on the institution from the mechanisms and formulae present at the state level for funding institutions to the way in which funding is incentivized and distributed within the university, the challenge of raising donor funds and the impact of budget cuts on instruction and coaching.

The students largely led these conversations especially as they become more comfortable in the class (and when the interlocutors were particularly engaging or forthcoming). At the same time, the students began to bring together the framework for a guide — of sorts — to the budget crisis. This guide took as a point of departure the feeling of confusion and anger surrounding the decision to cut the UND Women’s hockey team which at the time was led by Olympians and local stars Jocelyn and Monique Lamoureux and the successful music therapy program whose cause high profile musicians took up across social media. The resulting book titled: Hawks, Hockey, and the Budget at the University of North Dakota featured four chapters, an introduction, a preface, and a glossary of key terms. Each chapter included a case study relevant to the situation in North Dakota and a reflection on the broader situation in American higher education. This not only paralleled the organization of the class, but the students also reckoned that it would help readers connect the crisis at UND to larger national trends in higher education. Each chapter was reviewed by the class, edited by the class, and then I typeset them into a PDF digital book. The conversations among the students were vigorous, respectful, and ideologically diverse. The book embodies much of what occurred in the classroom.

Once the book was complete we circulated it to the various stakeholders and encouraged the students to circulate it in their social digital and analog networks. It remains unclear whether the book had an impact beyond the classroom, but as an object of student engagement, the experience of writing, reviewing, and editing helped the students to refine their understanding of local and national trends, articulate the various positions encountered in the class, and offer critique. In this way, the book represents evidence for the successful accomplishment of the course goals.  

More on Teaching as a Response to a Campus Crisis

On Tuesday, I posted some text from my new project “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis.” I explained in my post then that this project has a sense of urgency fueled in no small part by an August 1 deadline! 

Wednesday was a chaotic day punctuated by the dogs annual visit to the vet, an afternoon playing hooky on my gravel bike, a faculty meeting, and then a night class. This means that I didn’t get as much writing done as I would have liked. 

That said, I did get a bit done. To understand the context for this, you probably need to go back to Tuesday’s post, but some of it will make sense without it:

Of course, the special competence of faculty as teachers framed an approach to rallying social change that was anything but open ended. The original teach-in organizers had the kind of moral and political clarity and social authority that is often, but not always, absent in the complexity of contemporary college crises. Contemporary campuses encounter crises in a diversity of ways that reflect the plurality of “stakeholders” in the neoliberal university. Faculty over the last fifty years of have increasingly come to recognize the need for foreground the empowerment of students prompted in no small part by the rise of campus activism provoked by interventions such as the Vietnam era “Teach-In” and its predecessors in the Civil Rights movements. 

While each generation produces a new canon of literature on student empowerment, my efforts to empower students on our campus found inspiration in Ira Shor’s classic work Empowering Education (1992). He began his work with anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first-year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that they felt the test to be unfair. Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stopped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement during crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relied upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution. Thus activist teaching in and concerning the contemporary university often involves unpacking and understanding the complex institutional strategies designed to support the university’s functions. These strategies and the way in which they structure relationships (and power) on the university campus became the object of critique throughout our class on the 2018 budget cuts at the University of North Dakota. 

Even a mid-sized college campus represents a complex institution. Christopher Newport argued that the growing complexity of the contemporary public college campus is a symptom of the increasing privatization of public universities. For Newport, this involves the shift from collaborative to transactional modes of interaction across the institution. The financialization of interactions across the institution, for example, reconfigures curriculum from a collaborative responsibility to produce prepared and well-rounded students, to a competition for resources across campus. While advocates of this kind of competition imagine this as a way to produce efficiencies through a “marketplace of ideas,” instead it has intensified commitments to the professionalized standards of expertise and competence that often produce “silos” across institutions and hinder collaboration and cooperation. The logic of competition-born efficiency extends throughout our institutions not only fortifying claims to discreet professional competences, but also creating barriers to “shared governance.” For students and faculty, this can often mean that we are on the outside of a byzantine bureaucracy looking in even as the fate of programs, departments, and services crucial for both our own and our students expectations hang in the balance. It is unsurprising that during these times of the crisis that the bureaucracy itself becomes the object of vitriol as faculty and students from across the ideological spectrum attacked the lack of transparency, “administrative bloat,” and levels of compensation as the cause rather than the symptom of the changing financial environment facing 21st-century universities.  

Two Things Tuesday: Writing, Sausage, and Teaching a Campus Crisis

It’s a funky mid-April Tuesday where I’m starting to feel both excited about my summer research time and harried by the end of a hectic semester. These two, sometimes contradictory emotions, create quite a tumult in my rather simple world. I’m both eager to get on with the program and hoping to have more time to tend to matters at hand!

In any event, complicating this further is the topic for todays “Two Thing Tuesday”:

Thing the First

A few weeks ago, I complained that I was struggling to find time to write and this was causing me a certain amount of frustration. What I really should have said, in hindsight, was that I couldn’t quite find an excuse to write. 

Fortunately, just such an excuse materialized this past week. I was very excited to have received word that the editors of a book on campus crises have accepted my proposed contribution: “Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis.” Our chapters are due August 1 and since I will be up to my neck in workshops, Roman pottery, and Slavic ware for May and June, it feels like this means that I need to start writing this chapter now.

And so I have (see below).

Thing the Second 

When I started this blog, part of my goal was the expose how we make academic sausage. This means sharing book notes, outlines, drafts, crappy ideas, pre-prints, and whenever possible published work.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to turn my attention to this chapter and that means subjecting anyone who is interested in reading to drafts of my work. Keen eyed readers will note that it is cribbing a good bit from the proposal.

Enjoy (or don’t read it!):

Teaching as Activism during a Campus Crisis

Introduction

This chapter considers the potential of classroom based activism as a response to a campus crisis at the University of North Dakota, a mid-sized, public university. In 2018, the University of North Dakota labored under a painful series of budget cuts triggered by state financial shortfalls. These cuts extended across campus and made national headlines with the termination of the university’s prominent women’s hockey program and successful music therapy degree. These cuts and the largely negative publicity that they generated bewildered and angered students and faculty alike. It stoked a sense of outrage on campus which had been smoldering since the naming of an awkward and unpopular figure, Mark Kennedy, as university president. A failed effort at program prioritization, the implementation of a seemingly complex new MIRA-type budgeting process (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation), and the growing reach of an increasingly bureaucratized administration further exacerbated a sense of confusion surrounding university processes and decision-making. 

In response to the growing sense of crisis, I decided to offer a class on the University of North Dakota Budget. The class was offered as an honors section of our department’s venerable History of North Dakota class and taught at the intermediate level. It was open to both honors and non-honors students and quickly enrolled close to its 20-student cap. The class situated the contemporary budget crisis on the UND campus in both local and national contexts and took advantage of the timely appearance of a series of incisive books that sought to frame the national sense of crisis in higher education in historical, administrative, and ideological terms. Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017) served as our textbooks. 

This chapter attempts to contextualize this class in a way that was authentic to my decision to offer the course. This means recognizing that I am not an educational theorist versed in the latest articulations of activist teaching, nor am I an historian of higher education. I do not have any training as an activist or community organizer. Instead, I was trained as a historian and archaeologist and largely teach survey and “service” classes for my department. In other words, my experiences come from the ragged edges of the professionalization paradigm that this chapter seeks to critique and, in some limited way, subvert. 

This will account, in part, for my awkward efforts to weave together three threads. First, I will situate my efforts to use teaching as a form of activism within the 20th-century conversations surrounding “teach-ins” and student empowerment. Then, this paper will offer a concise narrative of the specific budget cuts and institutional changes at UND. The third thread will be a description and discussion of two classes that these 20th-century conversations and sense of contemporary crisis inspired at my institution. 

Teaching as Activism

It has become cliche to regard crises in higher education as both slow moving and immediate. The immediacy of the crises often produce great flurries of activity designed to forestall the imminent calamity. Slower moving crises, whether rooted in the glacial pace of institutional change, the constant crises of contemporary capitalism, or the geological (albeit accelerating) rate of the global climate, often create opportunities for campus activism that operate on different trajectories than those informed by the urgency of the moment. The scholarship related to teaching as activism is as broad and complex as the social problems that it seeks to resolve (Ozaki and Parson 2020, 2021). Rather than offering a rather necessarily desiccated review of this dynamic body of literature, this chapter will take as points of reference the “teach-in” movement of the 1960s and 1970s which emerged in response to the Vietnam war and as an important component of the first Earth Day and Ira Shor’s work on empowerment in the college classroom. While these landmarks are more than a bit dated, they still offer an important lens through which to appreciate the potential of teaching (and learning) as the foundation for social and institutional changes.

The oft-recited origins of the “teach-in” movement as a response to the US bombing of North Vietnam. Jack Rothman and Marshall Sahlins offer accounts of the origin of the “teach-in” movement at the University of Michigan in 1965 (Rothman 1972; Sahlins 2009). The term sought to invoke mid-century sit-in protests or in Sahlins’s mind the Hegelian concept of the “teach out” and forged a compromise between calls for a teaching strike and calls for a form of protest that would be more in keeping with the educational mission, resources, and ”special competency” available at the university. The first teach-in at Michigan, started at the end of the class day and then ran all night. Over 3000 students and dozens of faculty gathered in university lecture halls and classrooms. This offered a way for faculty and students to engage with “a clear factual and moral protest against the Vietnam War” (Rothman 1972). While the language of Rothman’s description of the first teach-in reflected prevailing pedagogical practices of the day, it recognized the key role of universities as places to educate as well as to organize and encourage students (and the university community more broadly) in response to crises. The subsequent adoption of the teach-in as a response both to short-term and to slower moving crises — from episodes of racist hate-crimes on campus to growing concerns about the environment — reveals the persistent potential of the teach-in as a tool to produce better educated activists and larger social change.  

Of course, the special competence of faculty as teachers framed an approach to rallying social change that was anything but open ended. The original teach-in organizers had the kind of moral and political clarity that is often, but not always, absent in the complexity of contemporary college crises.

Ira Shor begins his now classic work Empowering Education (1992) with an anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first-year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that they felt the test to be unfair. Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stopped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement with crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relies upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution.     

Writing Wednesday: The Crisis Classroom

I’m posting late today because I took some time this morning to prepare an article proposal to accompany a rather rambling abstract that I wrote last week. It is for a proposed  volume on “the campus crisis toolkit” and edited by Lisa Di Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon. Today’s post will make more sense if you go back and read my post from last week.

The paper doesn’t have a title yet, but I envision it being some combination of words like “empowered,” “crisis,” “classroom,” and “engaged.” I enjoy alliteration whenever possible and once proudly published a book without a subtitle.

Paper Argument and Organization 

The thesis for my contribution is that teaching classes focused on both the long term sense of structural crisis in higher education and immediate crises as they arise provides students with the technical knowledge to participate more fully in conversations with various stakeholders of their institution.

The article will have six sections and be approximately 6000 words (with citations).

I. Introduction (500 words)

This frames the current sense of crisis in higher education as part of a complex network of political, economic, ideological, demographic, and health trends amplified by a bewildering (and continuous) stream of scholarly, technocratic, and popular literature. Engaging critically with both the myriad of particularly crises and more pervasive sense of crisis could easily represent a full time job (or even a career). Faculty and students alike rarely have the luxury or even desire for this kind of sustained engagement even at their own institution and in many cases we remain satisfied with “shooting the wolf closest to the sled.” This chapter reflects on an effort to create a structured opportunity for informed conversations about one particular crisis and how it succeeded and failed at creating a greater sense of empowerment. My hope is that this case study offers an adaptable model for teaching about a campus crisis during a campus crisis and finds a fit within a robust campus toolkit for informed and engaged campus debate.     

II. Teaching as Activism (1000 words)

This chapter will situate the class in relation to the long tradition of activist approaches to teaching with particular attention to work that recognized teaching itself as a form of empowerment, as the basis for liberation, and as broadly counter hegemonic practice. These techniques are not foreign to university teaching and formed the basis for the “teach-in” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, community and public outreach programs, and innumerable quieter projects that leverage the massive university undercommons (sensu Moten and Harney 2013). 

Some related verbiage:

Ira Shor begins his now classic work Empowering Education (1992) with an anecdote about the first day of a new semester teaching “English One” at a New York public college. The students were surly and unresponsive until Shor asked them bluntly what was going on. At that point, the class became surly and responsive and explained that they were angry about the English writing test required for all first year students. The class went on to explain to Shor that the test was unfair, and Shor leveraged their frustration both to build an empathetic relationship with the students and to encourage them to channel their anger into the goals of the course. He admitted that despite the students’ ability to articulate their views, they stoped short of wanting to become activists themselves. 

What Shor recognized, however, is that giving students space and time to voice their anger and frustration started a process where they worked together to articulate their concerns. He was also giving students the critical tools to express their ideas in more compelling ways. As scholars have long argued, perhaps nowhere more compellingly as in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970 in English), teaching critical engagement with crises provides a basis for empowerment. While it goes without saying that largely middle-class honors students at a regional state university are a far cry from Freire’s Chilean peasants, the systems and structures that these students encountered on a daily basis, however, nevertheless relies upon the kind of hegemonic discourse that reproduces asymmetries of power across the institution.   

III. Background to the UND Budget Crisis (700 words)

This section provides a brief history of the institution and its 2018 budget crisis both to support the contention that there was indeed a sense of crisis at the University and to explain how this crisis took on a particular technocratic character. This technocratic character, in turn, reinforced the growing alienation of faculty and students from the workings of the university. 

IV. The UND Budget Class (1600 words)

This section will provide an overview of the class with an explanation of how we worked together both to close the technical gap between administrative (and at times faculty rhetoric) during the crisis and student concerns. It will also survey the final project produced by the class and explore where the class collectively succeeded and failed to gain a sufficient foundation for informed critique. 

V. The Wesley College Documentation Project (1400 words)

This section will consider the link between the class on the UND budget and its companion course that focused on the documentation of two recently abandoned historic buildings on campus slated for demolition. While a more detailed assessment of this class emphasizing its “mildly anarchic” character has already appeared, this project drew many students from the budget class and gave them another way to engage with and challenge the barriers between students, staff, and faculty. The final projects of this class, were more diverse than the focused work of the budget class, but continued the spirit of critical engagement in response to crisis.   

VI. Conclusion (500 words)

The conclusion will focus on the potential and pitfalls of using a class as a way to engage with a campus crisis. It will stress that this class didn’t solve the university’s budget problem nor did it set out to offer a “solutionalist” approach to the crisis. Instead, it showed how the crisis created opportunities for greater student engagement and empowerment in the spirit of Ira Shor’s formulation of empowered education.