Petition

TO: Robert J. Zimmer, President

We are dismayed to read the announcement — on an obscure Boston website — that an architect has been named to convert the landmark Chicago Theological Seminary building into a home for the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. We are further surprised to learn that MFI remains one of the University’s top fundraising priorities. In the past, faculty, students, and staff in many departments have strenuously opposed creation of the MFI and the abridgement of faculty governance that this initiative represents. But we have also come to understand these issues as symptomatic of deeper problems that afflict this University and others.

Regarding the Friedman Institute, we remain convinced that:

Milton Friedman was among the most partisan, most polarizing figures in the history of this University.
Despite his distinction as an economist, his name is everywhere indelibly associated with his relentless championing of a free-market fundamentalism now largely discredited by recent events in the markets he theorized as ideally self-regulating.
His reputation is further impugned by the services he rendered to brutally repressive regimes in Chile, China, and elsewhere.
It is thus ill advised and offensive for the University to name an Institute after Friedman. The motive for doing so is transparently grounded in the logic of business, not that of the academy, i.e. the desire to develop a brand name with strong appeal to a targeted market sector.

The faculty has voiced its opposition to the Friedman Institute on numerous occasions, including the Senate meeting of October 2008, when you refused to permit a vote, not daring to risk the outcome. Indeed, contrary to University statutes, no votes have been permitted in any representative body. We continue to view this as an infringement not only of faculty governance but of basic democratic principles.

Initially, we were inclined to take this offense as the mark of an imperial presidency. We have come to realize, however, that this 19th century metaphor is inappropriate. University administration is not imperial; rather, it is corporate. Its features include

Centralized management, where decisions affecting the academic quality of the University are handed down as faits accomplis;
Withdrawal of power from statutory organs of faculty governance, which have become theatres for staging an uninformed and meaningless consent;
Withholding of crucial information, particularly anything that — if known — could threaten the administration’s projects (with strategically-timed dumps of such information over the summer or at end of term, when the faculty cannot respond);
Initiatives whose prime appeal is their fund-raising potential, developed by an ever-growing cadre of administrators without significant academic experience or deep understanding of academic values;
A business mentality, in which academic units are understood — even designed — to function as product lines and profit centers;
A systematic reversal of ends and means, so that academic activity becomes a means to raise money, rather than money being the means to advance knowledge;
A habitual willingness to turn a blind eye when financial interests threaten to compromise, deform, and eclipse intellectual and moral concerns.

A consistent logic binds these tendencies together. What we see is the accelerating transformation of the University into a profit-seeking enterprise steered by savvy managers, locked in competition with its business rivals (aka peer institutions) for large investors (aka donors and grants), brands, markets, products, and outlets (aka new campuses, institutes, degree programs, online systems), skilled workers (aka faculty), and consumers (aka students). Such corporatization of the academy involves dramatic restructuring of the way the academy is organized and functions. Crucial decisions are ever more frequently made by administration, not faculty, and made on the basis of what will bring in the money.

The ultimate effect of this is to shift power to the donors whose favor the administrators court: a recipe for the corruption of intellectual life. The university becomes an instrument through which other kinds of actors — some well-intentioned, and some decidedly not — seek to advance their own pet projects and interests. As Robert Maynard Hutchins put it: “I do not mean, of course, that universities do not need money and that they should not try to get it. I mean only that they should have an educational policy and then try to finance it, instead of letting financial accidents determine their educational policy.”

Aggressive corporatization under the last Dean/CEO (a novel and revealing title) of the Biological Sciences Division produced such severe problems that the University risked censure by professional organizations and a federal investigation for “patient-dumping” under the highly touted Urban Health Initiative. This was but one of many problems produced by Friedmanesque decisions to pursue profitable enterprises while cutting back the money-losers (above all, the Emergency Room). Things were brought back from the brink by a faculty revolt, a timely departure, and the reassertion of faculty control via an ad hoc reform committee. Many — but not yet all — of the committee’s proposals have been adopted and the prognosis is guardedly hopeful, although serious problems remain.

The same kind of processes — administrative centralization, entrepreneurial pursuit of profit, evasion and effacement of faculty control — now threaten the University as a whole, as is seen at numerous flashpoints. All of the following deserve careful examination. Few, if any, have been presented to the Faculty Council or other governing bodies for deliberation or a vote.

Metastatic growth of administrative staff (especially at the Vice Presidential level);
Withholding of budget and other information from the faculty’s governing bodies;
Expansion of revenue-generating terminal MA programs at the expense of PhD programs;
Increasingly centralized control over levels of graduate admissions (as a side effect of the Graduate Aid Initiative) and over the creation and eventual redistribution of junior and senior faculty expansion positions;
Administrative interference with academic matters (curriculum, appointments) at University study abroad programs and Centers;
Without consent of the faculty Senate, who are statutorily charged with exclusive jurisdiction in such matters, University administration accepted the establishment of a Confucius Institute, an academically and politically ambiguous initiative sponsored by the government of the People’s Republic of China. Proceeding without due care to ensure the Institute’s academic integrity, it has risked having the University’s reputation legitimate the spread of such Confucius Institutes in this country and beyond;
The creation of new academic units outside the normal structures of academic appointment, promotion, review and tenure.

The University’s Articles of Incorporation and Governing Statutes are abundantly clear concerning the office of President, which is structurally situated between the Trustees and the faculty. The President is charged with three main areas of responsibility. Two of these — “management of the physical plant and the administration of all business activities” — are to be carried out “under the supervision of the Board.” In the third area, however, which includes all matters of academic policy, the President’s role is subordinate to others, as s/he is explicitly charged with “carrying out all measures officially agreed upon by the faculties.” (The relevant articles from the statutes are appended to this petition).

The drift toward a corporatized university violates not only the most basic principles of academic life, but the governing statutes of this institution, which call for representation of the faculty by the administration, rather than for the administration’s privileged leadership of the faculty. We call on you to reverse course. You can begin by halting development of the Friedman Institute and changing its name. This is but a first step, albeit extremely important. A full reorientation is necessary to extricate the University from a misguided and destructive corporate model, and to restore it to its rightful tradition and mission.

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