Mistaking a Victor’s Peace for a Cold War

There’s a category error being made here:

If you’ve ever worked in higher education, you know the stereotypes. College administrators are soulless careerists brimming with will to power who ram through clueless decisions, whether the rest of the institution likes it or not. College faculty members, meanwhile, are myopic, overeducated children who take forever to do anything and throw tantrums anytime their routines are disrupted.

These caricatures are unfair to the actual people who run and teach at colleges. But they’ve only gained purchase in recent years. Behind closed doors, presidents are more likely to grumble about obstreperous, obstructionist professors. In faculty-senate meetings and other public forums, those professors are directing distrust, even disdain, at administrative leaders.

It goes on like this for a while, describing the gripes that administrators have about faculty and contrasting them with the very real complaints that faculty have, before barely starting to get it:

The faculty’s say in shared governance has further weakened simply because there are fewer tenured faculty. In 1987, only about a third of faculty members were part-time adjuncts, according to a 2023 AAUP report. By 2021, nearly 50 percent of faculty members were part-time, and only 24 percent held tenure. The tenured appointments that exist are sometimes more fraught and tenuous, with struggling colleges increasing workloads or eliminating tenured positions to save money or reconfigure academic offerings. In the last few years, Wolfson says, “job condition and security has led to a much more contentious relationship between administrators and faculty….”

But the rise of the no-confidence vote, at one time the neutron bomb professors could deploy against leaders they distrusted, has sapped it of much of its power. Votes of no confidence can still unhorse a leader — Ronald D. Liebowitz stepped down as president of Brandeis University days after such a vote in the fall of 2024 — “but they definitely have become less impactful,” says Rosenberg, the former Macalester president. “Anytime something becomes common, it becomes less noteworthy,” he adds. “The faculty have overused the no-confidence vote to the extent now where it does, in many cases, not have much of an impact.”

In fact, a no-confidence vote can serve as a badge of honor in some cases. Parrot, the communications consultant, says she knows of public-university presidents who won praise from their institutions’ boards of trustees for inspiring a no-confidence vote. “It means you made the tough decision,” she says.

There is no war. Administrators have won. Across the country they are sweeping up and destroying faculty governance, sometimes at the behest of state legislatures and sometimes simply to obey in advance. Their numbers and compensation have metastasized as faculty compensation has frozen, as Paul has so generously chronicled. Administrators aren’t fighting faculty; they have their boot firmly on the neck of faculty, and yet still whine when faculty so much as squeal in pain. It would be terrific if the nation’s premier journal of higher education could understand that point.