Nobody has ever accused me of being pollyannish. In fact, one former colleague once told me “there’s no silver lining you can’t find a cloud around.”
That may mean that in addition to being a faculty member at a Christian university, I’m also perhaps the target audience for a book that the Guardian describes as “sparklingly sardonic and hilariously angry” on the back cover. I read Peter Fleming’s 2021 Dark Academia: How Universities Die while at the lake this summer.
While I don’t think that Fleming’s account is fully accurate, there is much in it that resonates deeply with me after 20 years of teaching at three different universities: top-down hierarchies that can overshadow academic expertise, the conversion of institutions of formation into production-lines, the multiplicative nature of “sludge work,” perverse incentives, and the over-focus on quantitative measures of efficiency.
Fleming rightly asks us to consider “efficiency in what sense?” Answers to this question may reflect a university’s values much better than its mission statement.
If Fleming’s take is even only mostly accurate and this is what contemporary universities are truly like, why have so many of us committed our lives to higher education in such institutions?
There’s no single answer, but for many of us a significant subset of the reasons is related to a deep conviction that the work we do here is meaningful. Many of us experience it as “vocational calling.” And because of this view of our work, we’re tempted to think “we are what we do. We live our careers to the point of exhaustion” (90).
While we’re fortunate to love what we do, such love comes with a risk. Fleming elaborates, “Loving what you do is great but unrequited love is depressing” (19). And Fleming gives evidence that when fiscal realities come into conflict with caring for an institution’s employees, time after time the former easily outweigh the latter. Our love is reciprocated — until budget cuts are needed.
This issue doesn’t only affect faculty. Staff are obviously affected as well. Earlier today I had coffee with a now-former Calvin University staff. One of the reasons they cited for their decision to depart was precisely how the university’s mission is leveraged to extract even more out of employees. They were told that their pay was going to be cut, but that they’d need to do the same work as before—just for less money. They simply were not going to let the university’s mission be used to justify mistreatment as an employee
Staff are committed to the mission of the university and the importance of the work we do here. In many ways, staff are even more vulnerable given that they are at-will employees. They don’t have the protections of tenure, and are already paid comparatively less than faculty, not to mention the university does far less for staff development than it does for faculty.
As problematic as this dynamic is in general, I think it’s worse at Christian universities. By “worse” I mean two things. First, such a dynamic is especially likely to arise at a Christian university. After all, we don’t just love our jobs; many of us also see them as an expression of our Christian commitments.
Are we willing to take on another responsibility beyond what our contract specifies, often for no pay or a small stipend? Yes, much of the time, because we see it as a way of contributing to the good that the university does, as a way of supporting our students. But American Association of University Professors’ data shows that smaller, private university faculty already tend to be paid approximately ten percent less than their colleagues of the same rank at public universities, and often have less benefits. For many of us, the financial hit is something we’re willing to take because of our commitment to the university’s mission.
But, and here is the second sense of “worse,” Christian universities often leverage this commitment when it serves their need. We’re told “we’re all rowing in the same direction” or “the university’s mission is more than just a job; it’s a family.” That is, of course, until there are budgets that need to be balanced. Then suddenly the mission language disappears. The family metaphor evaporates. We’re treated as expendable employees.
Another book I recently finished, given to me by my colleague Matt Lundberg as part of a de Vries Institute faculty development initiative, is Lauren Winner’s The Dangers of Christian Practice. Winner’s central point is that even our most treasured Christian practices can go wrong when we fail to notice what they encourage. Sometimes practices are deformed in ways that are intrinsic to the practices themselves. Winner focuses on “deformations of Christian practices that are characteristic of the practices themselves; deformations that are somehow about the practices” (14).
I’ve come to wonder if a commitment to a Christian institution’s mission can be deformed in precisely this way when the relationships that the mission encourages are asymmetric and our love and commitment are unrequited.
Often what is best about working at Christian institutions is the very same thing that encourages us to accept such treatment. This is what is especially tragic for the faculty whose positions have been cut and the staff who have left in this past year.
This is in no way unique to my current university. I saw the same thing at my previous institution. It’s present in many institutions that are trying to stay open despite the challenges of the current environment of higher education.
It is, however something that Christian institutions should think more carefully about, because such deformation is antithetical to our calling — even if the calling and mission are what makes the deformation so seductive.
One Response
Thanks for these sobering reflections. Like Kevin I served on the faculty of three higher ed institutions — one a fine Lutheran liberal arts college, one a state university, then as Kevin’s colleague at Calvin– but half my working years were in academic administration, half in teaching. It seemed to me from both perspectives that a religious affiliation, even a relatively loose one, made life better for all. EG: stronger sense of common purpose, closer collaboration on teaching and research across disciplines, better alignment between academics and student life. In other ways not so much. EG: openness to everyone (much progress in this but still more work to do), vigilance against abuse of power (state universities have led the way, in policy if not always in practice), and yes, faculty compensation. But I was fortunate to be able to retire while financial issues were a major hindrance but not yet a terminal illness.