All in the Game

Promises, Promises

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

In the latest installment of Jonathan Kellerman's popular mystery series, the hero, Alex Delaware, finds himself interviewing the chairwoman of the communications department at a small California college. She tells him that she came to the college six years earlier despite offers from more prestigious institutions because "promises were made to me." The major promise, she recalls, was that she would be given the resources to "create a first-rate department."

When Delaware guesses (correctly) that the college "broke its promise," she replies, in words many readers of this column will find chilling but accurate, "Broken Promises are a given in the academic world. The issue is the proportion of truth to nonsense." Later in the conversation Delaware asks, "Which promises were broken?" and she ticks them off:

I was pledged a five-person faculty and got three; my budget was cut by thirty percent because ... the recession was in full force .... My planned curriculum was severely attenuated because I now had a smaller faculty.

Ambitious plans to be financed by enhanced revenues; instead revenue cuts that not only derail your plans, but erode the conditions in place when you arrived. Sound familiar? It does to me. Delaware has one more question, "Which promises did they keep?" The reply: "I got a nice desk."

Aside from the rueful nod of recognition that this scene elicits from the academic reader, the very fact of it -- the fact that it is just a bit of casual byplay in the middle of a novel written to be read by millions, most of whom are presumed by the author to have very little knowledge of or concern for the academy -- is amazing and more than a little distressing.

Has it come to this? Is it now so generally understood as to be a piece of popular culture that colleges and universities are places where you cannot rely on anything you've been told?

Well, according to the communications-department chairwoman, it's not quite that simple, for, she says, it's a matter of the proportion of truth to nonsense. That is (and this is the generous reading of her statement), while there is always some promise-breaking going on in academic life, it's not so bad as long as most of the promises you were made, especially with respect to essential matters, are honored; as long as the percentage of observance is greater than the percentage of breach.

There are many today who feel that this balance has tipped in the wrong direction, and that the painstakingly negotiated appointment letter that spells out everything from your compensation to your working conditions to the hiring of additional faculty members in your field, to the location of your office, to the money for the new program you have come to develop might just as well have been written in disappearing ink.

"But it's in my letter!" is the cry of the recently dispossessed, a cry I often hear, for I myself have become a serial breaker of promises, telling department heads that not only will they not be given the new positions for which they bargained as a condition of taking the job, but that they will not be given replacements for the positions they lose through retirements and resignations; telling individual faculty members that the delivery of the research dollars they need to do the work that the university wants them to do will be "deferred" (along with the Second Coming); telling persons recruited to initiate new programs that I am closing those programs down.

Everyone knows why administrators, including myself, are doing these things: We don't have the money.

We don't have the new money we need in the face of higher enrollments and rising costs; and we don't have the money we used to have because a gradual reduction over the years in the support provided to public higher education has now been accelerated as state after state withdraws money from its university system in an effort to close its budget gap.

Those are facts too well known to dwell on at length. What may not be so well known, at least to those outside the academic world, is the effect all of this has on that most fragile of commodities, morale.

Morale is fragile because it rests not so much on present conditions -- although those are certainly important -- but on one's faith in the future. In academic life, as in the life of religion, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Many academics teaching in public universities have now concluded that there is not much to hope for (at least in the way of support) and that the only thing they are going to see in the future is a further deterioration of conditions of scarcity that are already appalling.

They are driven to this melancholy conclusion in part because the economics of their situation -- decreasing revenues, increasing demands, not enough private contributions to go around -- does not seem to provide a way forward to better days, and in part because the politics of their situation -- opportunistic politicians who beat up on them, academic leaders who seem unable to hold their own in confrontations with those same politicians -- leaves them without an obvious forum in which their concerns might be heard and (perhaps) addressed. Who can they talk to? Where can they go for redress? Who will enforce the broken promises?

One answer that has re-emerged on some campuses, including mine, is "the union." Unionization, always a problematic proposition in the precincts of higher education, is once again a topic in the halls and in the faculty lunchroom; and once again the familiar anti-union arguments are being made:

• That we are individual professionals, not assembly-line laborers. The work we do does not fit the union model which favors precise calibrations of specified tasks to enumerated rewards and therefore has no room for the distinctive nature of academic endeavors.

• That unionization means the standard of the lowest denominator, a floor of mediocrity that discourages, because it will not reward, the performance of excellence.

• That unionization means working "to rule," not to one's highest capacities.

Those who are pro-union are not without responses to these points, but their most effective response is a simple one: "Who else is doing anything for you?" a shorthand version of the words of the old union song, Solidarity Forever: "What force on earth is weaker/Than the feeble strength of one?/ But the union makes us strong."

It does this, or claims to do this, by collective bargaining. In the context of the crisis in higher education (a phrase that rings true, but not for the reasons given by those who use it to designate the supposed irresponsibility of academics), collective bargaining promises to fix the future, or at least significant parts of it, in ways that restore the faith and confidence so many have lost.

In one union contract I have seen, the chief officer of the union is informed in writing of the number of faculty positions that will be available in a given two-year period, and there is also a stipulation of a faculty-student ratio that is not to be exceeded, and, which, if exceeded, triggers additional searches. Also spelled out is what happens in the event of retirements, resignations, and deaths -- how the allocation of vacant faculty lines is to be determined and by what committees -- and on the other side, the side of enumerated responsibilities, how many office hours a faculty member shall be expected to hold each week, and on which days.

Even in that small sample you can see the attraction and the worry. The attraction is the ability to plan and to know that your plans rest on a set of assumptions underwritten by a contract. The worry is the concern that the more detailed the agreement -- and details are the vehicle of the confidence and stability a contract can provide -- the less remains of the independence academics so prize as a sign of their difference -- indeed, of their exceptionalism.

There is also the question, not answered in this particular document, of what happens in the event of a financial crisis like the one the states have been experiencing in the past three years. The general rule is that in the case of financial reversals, contractual obligations are met first; would this mean that the organized parts of the campus would be taken care of while other sectors were left unsupported or allowed to slip away?

Suppose management, in this case an agency of the state, simply cannot perform and is barred by law from going into debt? Does the state float a bond measure (who would vote for it?) or declare bankruptcy, as New York City once did? Is the contract renegotiated on the reasoning that holding to its present terms will sink the enterprise, the logic that got United Airlines' union employees to make concessions (which some of them now regret)? Does the union go to court? If it wins, can the state shut down its university system in the same way that the university can discontinue a department or college?

Those questions may or may not have good answers, but the fact that they are ones that might be posed on your campus or mine tells its own story, the story of an enterprise that is at once glorious and precarious, and of men and women dedicated to it and looking for a way -- any way -- to assure its survival. So committed are they to the cause of public higher education that they will be encouraged even by promises they don't believe in, which these days are the only promises they are likely to get.

My appointment letter of five years ago directs me to "lead the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to national distinction" and promises me the resources necessary to do it. I'm still ready and willing even if, in the light of all that has happened and not happened since 2001, I may no longer be able.