Reprinted from the Education Workers Organizing Bulletin (Industrial Workers of the World), PO Box 762, Cortland NY 13045. Sample copy $1; 1-year subscription $4 A Marxist Analysis of Participatory Management "I don't know what you have to say, "It doesn't matter anyway. "Whatever it is, I'm against it. "No matter what it is "or who commenced it, "I'm against it!" Groucho Marx, playing the college president in "Horsefeathers," greeted the faculty committee with those stirring words at the famous meeting when he announced that the institution's resources were to be yanked from academic programs in order to build up the college's failing football team. Administrators today are generally more sophisticated, and have built up so extensive an array of committee structures to incorporate faculty (and sometimes staff and students) into participatory management schemes that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that faculty are not workers, but rather part of management (and hence not entitled to union representation--the "justices" apparently did not trouble themselves to wonder why, if this was so, Yeshiva University's teachers felt they needed a union to protect themselves against the administration). Yet while these participatory management structures may have the appearance of democratic institutions, they rarely wield any genuine power. When I was an undergraduate, my program was theoretically governed by an assembly of students, faculty and staff that met to discuss curriculum, faculty needs, etc. (this was unique to our department, but several departments did have token student representation to faculty meetings). But year after year our decisions were routinely overturned and our faculty denied tenure. At the same school, student and student-faculty committees made recommendations on the allocation of student activity fees, only to have these decisions overturned when administrators took exception to our priorities; students were made to vote over and over again on fee hikes, the form of our "student government," etc., until we got it right (i.e., they wore us down); and administrative operatives were sent from department to department as acting chair to bring recalcitrant departments in line. Ultimately the faculty senate voted no confidence in the chancellor and he was eased out--but not before doing enormous damage to the campus (nor has his successor been much better, to judge from reports from friends still in the area). More recently, my present department voted unanimously to renew two faculty contracts (including mine) and to deny tenure to someone who had been repeatedly warned that his work was not up to departmental standards. The college dean and president, however, overturned two of the three decisions--firing me and giving tenure to the fellow the department had unanimously found unqualified. (I seem to rub the bosses the wrong way--at my last job my department and a college-wide committee unanimously recommended me for promotion; instead the administration gave me the sack. The college's Academic Freedom Committee reviewed the case, including a memo in which the dean explained that I should be fired because I was trying to change University policies and criticizing administrators, and unanimously found that my rights had been violated and that I should be kept on. I was fired anyway.) Teachers and other educational workers devote a great deal of our time to the myriad of departmental and college-wide committees established to provide the illusion of participatory governance. We have personnel committees, ad-hoc committees, Faculty Senates, elections, advisory committees, Committees on Committees. But ultimately, all decisions are made by the administrators who are in no way accountable to these governance structures. Sure, faculty serve on the search committees which review prospective administrators' credentials and make recommendations for new ones and Faculty Senates have the right to ask administrators questions. But once the administrators are in place, they are accountable only to themselves and to higher administrators. Faculty committees may get a vote on who the new boss should be, but we don't have the power to remove administrators who turn out to be tyrants or simply incompetent. (Even where a no-confidence vote is taken, and this is no easy task, the administration often ignores it.) Colleges originally functioned without administrators, later we elected colleagues to handle routine bureaucratic functions in our behalf and to deal with unpleasantries such as wheedling money out of the government. It appears these early administrators served on a short-term basis, returning to the ranks of the faculty much like departmental chairs often do (in institutions where these are still accountable to the faculty) to this day. But power attracts the power-mad, and administrators long ago set themselves up as a caste apart, gathering enormous power over all aspects of the institution. Today, colleges across the country are facing budget cuts. But the numbers of administrators (and the enormous salaries they give themselves) continue to grow, even as faculty and staff ranks are being slashed. If we question the wisdom of their decisions, they establish another committee to keep us busy. Its time to ask ourselves whether we can afford administrators. They eat up resources that are desperately needed for education, they eat up our time with their endless paperwork, and they get in our way as we try to educate our students. It couldn't take much more time to run our institutions ourselves (staff, faculty and students together). As for the administrators, let them try teaching, sweeping the halls or some other useful job. X331117