When I say "trickle-down" politics, I mean
way down, down to everyday interactions between faculty, administration, and students. This is about politics on a micro level. About one way that abuse of power reverberates throughout an organization and hurts people who don't deserve to be hurt. I warn you, I am grieving.
I'm a college prof, and a faculty sponsor of our university chapter of the national honor society for our particular academic discipline. Let's call it Rho Rho Rho. Rho3 was instrumental in my getting into graduate school; when I was an undergrad, the R3 chapter on my own campus put on seminars about how to select, apply for, and gain admission to graduate school in my very competitive chosen field. Without those seminars 20 years ago, I would have been literally clueless. Without them, I would, I am absolutely certain, still be living in a hovel in L.A., unemployed, getting stoned and drinking beer with my increasingly-bitter friends.
We've had some problems with our chapter. For one thing, although service--actually helping other people in some way--is part of the reason for being of R3, in recent semesters members have not done any. This problem could perhaps have been solved over time, as a number of students had come to me wanting to get involved in service. And students are always busy, so creativity might have been necessary to achieve the service goal. I was willing to work with R3 members on this.
Then a few weeks ago a number of student members came to me with complaints. The complaints went along two general lines; first, that the officers ran the organization more like a clique than an honor society, having meetings without notifying the members, failing to invite prospective members into the group, and doing little other than having parties. (Wow--insular politics in which the people in power ignore and disregard the needs of the group as a whole in favor of their own interests? Sound familiar?)
The second complaint was that students were unhappy about an election that was held at one of these parties--they claimed that the officers had quickly passed a motion to have their own terms extended in a way that squashed membership debate. In other words, they claimed that there had been a coup by a faction of the group intent on keeping power for their own purposes. (Wow--sound familiar?)
I talked with my colleagues in the department about it, and together we decided that faculty needed to meet with the R3 student president to investigate. I had already spoken with her alone about some of these issues and that had not seemed to do any good. (Perhaps I wasn't communicating clearly, perhaps she was just ignoring me.) Rather than wanting to discuss the matter, the student went to the dean and threatened to get a lawyer involved. Even the provost thought that was silly, but the dean said we could not meet with the student, and, upon our protest, he played a trump card--he said that authority over student organizations lay with student services staff, not with faculty, and thus the matter could not be investigated. Insubordination is grounds for dismissal even for tenured faculty, so there was little I could do.
When I called the R3 national office, they told me that we could no longer have a chapter of this honor society, because the rules state that faculty advisor (me) must have investigative authority. So today I wrote a letter to our membership telling them our chapter of the honor society must close.
Who wins here? Not faculty, who continue to be under assault by out-of-control students as well as power-grasping administration. Not our students, who will now have no real way of understanding the intricacies of how to get into graduate school in this field. Not the particular student who went to the dean, who, with the dean's help, has now alienated the faculty in her chosen field, and who needs glowing letters of recommendation from those very faculty to get into graduate school. So who does win when overreaching administration take every opportunity to limit faculty authority? Who wins when a top-down business model is applied to academia? Who wins when academia takes this authoritarian turn to the right?
The next time someone complains to me about liberal faculty, I am going to vomit on them. The reality is that the power structure at most universities is entrenched in a right-wing, power-snatching mode. They have no problem using students to enhance these efforts, and as a result, students lose. Ultimately, we all do.
