On Wednesday I was marching with about 300 other people through the Union to McFall Center, wondering (not for the first time) what BGSU is anyway.
We — faculty, students and friends of BGSU — were holding the march to deliver, in a certain noisy style, a petition to the administration. More than 5,000 people have signed the petition protesting the arbitrary cutting of 100 faculty positions for the next academic year. Now, members of the administration have the petition in front of them and can contemplate the whirlwind of bad publicity they unleashed with their relentless, anti-education policies.
That was what got me to wondering about BGSU. The administration could not possibly have anticipated this response to the decimation of the faculty. The BGSU-Faculty Association’s initial response to the firing upset the administration’s bargaining team so much that they cancelled the next week’s negotiating session, in my opinion, in panic or in pique. Thousands of formerly friendly eyes are now looking at BGSU with disapproval. No one goes out of their way to earn that kind of attention. So the administration couldn’t really have anticipated it.
But why not? Did they really expect to kill 11 percent of faculty positions (those faculty among the hardest working at BGSU) without drawing attention?
They may have actually expected the attention to be positive. It’s the kind of thing a big corporation does sometimes: slash payrolls to gain a reputation for profitability.
And that seems to be the current administration’s notion about BGSU: that it’s a corporation with a football team.
Last week’s Mazey@BG message was full of happy talk about the cheerleading team and the Florida Falcon getaway, but void of information about a financial crisis so severe that 11 percent of the faculty positions have to be cut.
I’m delighted that BGSU’s cheerleading team did so well, that the hockey team is having such a good season and I even hope people have a good time at the Florida Falcon getaway.
But none of those things are central to BGSU’s real mission: education. While the administration seeks to balance its budget on the back of the faculty and the faculty alone, the ranks of administrators at this university are not being cut and millions of dollars of student fees are dumped every year into programs that are perpetually in the red.
If BGSU is a corporation, in short, it’s not one with a really well-thought-out business plan.
There are many problems with the corporate model of the University, not least of which is this: it’s an authoritarian model. It assumes that one person, or one small group of people, have all the answers and that it’s everyone else’s job to shut up and obey orders. When that small group of leaders goes off course, there’s no one around to correct them.
Fortunately, that’s not the only model. The hundreds marching on Wednesday, and the thousands who signed the petition, have another notion.
This University is not a corporation. It’s a community for learning and teaching. Anything that promotes those ends is good policy; anything that degrades them is bad policy.
The firing of the BGSU 100 is just one in a long string of bad policy decisions by the current administration.
The authoritarians will tell you that there’s nothing you can do; the decision has been made; now shut up and do your job (or your homework, or both).
But they’re lying. This is Bowling Green State University, an entity created by the state to serve the community. If you’re part of the community you can have an effect by making your voice heard.
The next direct action by students and faculty will be an informational picket line on Presidents Day, Feb. 18th. You can check out the Facebook group “BGSU Students Supporting Faculty” for info about that and other upcoming events.
If we make enough noise, at enough times and in enough places, maybe we can apply the course correction that BGSU so badly needs. Perhaps the administration will come to see that a university needs to put academics first — not just as a slogan, but in fact.
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