Trickle, trickle, dribble, drip. One day in October, I was talking with a student after class when we heard the unmistakeable sounds of water. A few steps down the hall, we heard the gush that could only be a broken pipe. Our admin argued successfully with the facilities folks who wanted to put in a work order (!!) but even with their prompt response, the torrent took out a bunch of ceiling tiles while my student and I watched in horrified fascination. It took a month for those tiles to be replaced. The whole ceiling still looks stained and provisional.
Meanwhile, administrators prioritize student retention and recruitment over all other goals. The result? Money is found for lavish student activity centers and gyms while faculty are laid off and classroom facilities turn into scenes from Brazil (the movie, not the country).
The corporatization of the university is so far advanced that it’s probably unstoppable, but that doesn’t mean I have to shut up about it. Two little examples from beyond my campus:
Exhibit 1: I just went to check the links in my winter syllabus. I always include a couple of links to guides on nonsexist language usage. When I clicked on the one from the University of Minnesota, the old link redirected me – to a page on how to present a unified brand image for the university! It looks like this:
Lovely, but where are the women? Previously, there were university-wide guidelines for avoiding sexist expressions. Now, the university merely refers us to the Chicago Manual for guidance in all matters of style unrelated to its brand. Nowhere could I find the old guidelines (though a few individual departments offer brief tips on nonsexist usage in student papers). It’s all about the brand. None of this has any bearing on the university’s Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies, which is outstanding; I’m betting no one consulted them.
At least Keene State College still maintains an excellent guide to nonsexist language.
Exhibit 2: Clarissa’s Blog reports that upper-level administrators at Clarissa’s public university in Illinois are drafting a dress code for its employees. Here’s the proposed language:
32.7 DRESS AND PERSONAL APPEARANCE. All University employees are expected to portray a professional image to students, parents, and the community at large. An employee’s dress and appearance shall be neat and clean. At a minimum, the standard office dress code shall be defined as business casual. Apparel needs to be free of slogans or advertisements. In addition, apparel shall not be of an indecent, suggestive, provocative, obscene, or defamatory nature. If applicable, employees are encouraged to wear their university logo shirts. The University may direct an employee to leave work and/or change clothes if he/she is are found in violation of this provision.
Clarissa dishes out the snark that this proposal so richly deserves:
Will I be required to bring dry-cleaning receipts to prove that I clean my clothes on a regular basis? Do I need witnesses to testify that I do my laundry often enough to satisfy these losers? And who will teach my classes if I’m ordered to leave for “violating the provision”? The administrators? That, surely, be fun to observe. Maybe now, whenever I’m too lazy to prepare a class, I should just show up dressed “obscenely” and be sent home to rest.
Oh, and she says it reminds her of the bad old days back in the USSR.
The very idea of a dress code is to turn professors from idiosyncratic, original – if slightly frumpy – people into corporate drones. Clothes may not make the man (or the woman), but I sure think more clearly in comfortable shoes. It’s an interesting contradiction too, to say “apparel needs to be free of slogans or advertisements” but also “employees are encouraged to wear their university logo shirts.” University branding, anyone? If my uni comes up with a dunderheaded policy like this, I think I’ll need to buy some of those sweatpants with the university’s initials appliqued onto each butt cheek, just to test whether “indecency” or “suggestiveness” trumps the tomcat-like urge to mark everything with the university’s branding.
I have to wonder if the broader intent of such silly proposals is to be a diversionary tactic: Keep the professoriate busy with idiotic dress-code proposals and perhaps they won’t notice that their compensation is being slashed while their workloads balloon. Certainly my institution’s top honchos are very adept at forming unwieldly committees that either 1) lack meaningful faculty representation (if its task is important), or 2) keep scores of instructors tied up in busy work, often for a year or two, only to discard or disregard the committee’s product or recommendations.
These diversionary tactics are one way to suppress dissent against the advancing corporatization of higher ed, in which students are seen as customers and instructors are inconvenient expenses, useful only in generating “weighted student credit hours,” which is a measure of tuition income. It’s also a means of distracting professors from the way in which the casualization of academic labor – its delegation to people like me with no possibility of tenure, significantly lower wages, and a high chance of being unemployed next year – is undermining the ability of the entire professoriate to do its best work. Instructors who are busy fighting silly battles over basic dignity in working conditions have less time to refine their teaching and pursue their research. And those who are squeezed for time are more likely to seek individual, dog-eat-dog solutions to their own precarious situation, rather than investing in solidarity with other instructors and staff.
I’m off to a meeting now, myself, but this one is for union rabble-rousing. Professors do not have collective bargaining at my school. Now that incoming Governor Kasich is threatening to run over us with his “bus,” we’re going to need it.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
instructors are inconvenient expenses
that pretty much sums it up.
Yeah – I know you’ve experienced this from the inside, too!
Before this summer, I was an admin to an art department at a university. I was never given a dress code. No one told me what to wear at all. When I realized the chair and most of the faculty tended to wear paint-covered jeans and shirts, the chair throwing on a corduroy blazer over the paint-y clothes if he had to say, meet the dean, I decided I could dress pretty casually. My only concerns were a) not looking like a work study student because I’m so young and b) being prepared to get paint on me during my many forays into the studios.
*RIGHT* after I spent $500 to get our department website redesigned (it looked like something from the 1990s), the University did the whole branding thing and told us we had to re-do it according to their template. They made cash-strapped departments throw away boxes of perfectly good letterhead and other forms because they didn’t fit in with the new branding. We were given brand manuals and told we even had to conform to the brand in our email signatures. It was insane. Here I was, cutting our budget every single term, and they’re making me spend more and more money on cohesive branding.
Exactly! If the universities were really flush, they might be able to spend money on frippery. But they’re *not.* I understand that the university has to have some kind of PR presence in order to recruit students. I just can’t understand putting style over substance and the outright waste that you describe, which is far from an isolated instance.
Wow, Sungold, do you live inside my head?!
I have several friends who are teachers, in public school, private school, and at the university level — two of them direct research labs of post-docs. They’re all, in one way or another, encouraged to think of their students as consumers, not scholars. Alas, that horse is long out of the barn. But you’re right — that doesn’t mean we have to shut up about it.
I don’t think either you or I are going to go mute anytime soon.
I am somewhat surprised, though, to hear that the students=consumers mentality has trickled all the way down to the public schools. Yuck.
Yes, yes, and yes. If my university could get rid of faculty altogether, they would do it in a moment.
Expensive posh Wellness Center – check
Expensive posh Student Union – check
Expensive posh President’s house – check
Office space for faculty whose offices FELL INTO A PIT during remodeling construction – not so much
Priorities anyone?
I’d love to see the art department’s reaction to this. I regularly end the day covered in clay (both powder and mud form), glaze, ash, paint, and sawdust, and my teachers are seldom less hands-on.
Is being asked to dress like a professional really such an imposition? Particularly if you want to be treated like a professional? The dress code above isn’t bad. The offices where I’ve worked require men to wear coat and tie, women to wear hose and forbid open toed shoes. I find that level of specificity in dress codes counter-productive because it’s possible for a woman to look very professional in a suit with peep toed shoes, and impossible for a man to look professional in a tie printed to look like a fish.
A dress code that says look like a professional and dress appropriately for your work (which for the art department may be different than for the English department)? I truly can’t see a problem with that, except to wonder why it’s needed. If an individual can’t be bothered to act like a professional, which includes conformity with certain standards of conduct including dress, why should anyone be bothered to explain to him or her why that matters or to keep him or her on the payroll? I’d take consistent failure to dress appropriately for work as a sign that the person really might prefer to be cut loose to pursue other opportunities and wish him or her well.
No work environment is right for everyone after all.
Dress code for those working in Engineering or the Physical Sciences????? How many pairs of pants/jeans and shirts have I gone through, plus shoes that have the look of being permanently peed on (HCl splashes and Rockports don’t mix)? Lost count long ago. Anyone working labs or doing the sort of research I’m involved with would be foolish to wear clothes/footwear that they didn’t expect to get trashed. Sure I’ll dress up for when we have visitors, but every day would be simply nuts.