Read on Twitter
"The Laurentian administration should not get away with this outrage. Their attempt to shift responsibility for the shambles they created onto the staff who actually do the critical work of a university is dishonest."
It's more than dishonest. It's cruel, selfish, and entitled. https://twitter.com/basmith/status/1380899264914546690
It's more than dishonest. It's cruel, selfish, and entitled. https://twitter.com/basmith/status/1380899264914546690
There's an increasing culture at universities, and elsewhere, that allow administrators to float in without ties to or care for the institutions they manage or the communities they exist in. These highly paid administrators exist in larger and larger numbers while faculty and
staff are hired in smaller numbers in more precarious positions. Profit and prestige become more important than research, scholarship, teaching, learning, the public good, or the well-being of students, faculty, and staff.
Collegial governance takes the back seat to top-down
Collegial governance takes the back seat to top-down
orders from these administrators, hell-bent on imposing their visions and ideals, with their eyes locked on those profit and prestige targets. And if they happen to shit the bed, like the admin at Laurentian clearly have? Well, they aren't the ones who face the consequences.
No, they're able to move on, consequence-free, to the next $400k/year administrative position at some other university or organization. Meanwhile, staff, students, and faculty are left with the mess, decimated by the incompetent actions of the admin who have already or will
just move on unscathed. To be sure, the provincial government and its chronic underfunding of post-secondary education is at fault here too, but the administrators, who have clearly viewed Laurentian as a business, not a service, right up to how they're choosing to deal with
a financial crisis, are very much to blame here. And they're indicative of a much larger problem across post-secondary education right now.
Granted, I don't think most university administrators are as profoundly incompetent as the ones at Laurentian clearly are. I don't think
Granted, I don't think most university administrators are as profoundly incompetent as the ones at Laurentian clearly are. I don't think
most universities are in danger of financial collapse due to gross mismanagement of funds, but the growth and control of administrators across the university-system country-wide, the way that an administrative class, unmoored to institution or community, has developed and grown
in post-secondary settings is a huge problem, one that needs to be addressed before we see more of *gestures vaguely* this bullshit.
