You’ve read what Jay Blanton and the University of Kentucky’s angry/nervous board members got the Herald-Leader to write about Irina Voro. And you know that regardless of anybody’s issue with her that she’s raising questions that deserve answers.

But you probably aren’t completely sure why folks are nervous. Even though you know it’s just because they don’t like being held accountable.

Here’s an email Dr. Voro sent to her colleagues at UK last Friday:

Colleagues,

If you’re too busy to read this letter top to bottom (it’s four pages) scroll down to the bullet points. Then, hopefully, read the whole thing, because your work life is on the line.

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This fall, a student who was planning to write an article on administrative waste asked me an interesting question: What, if anything, can an administrator do to help a student’s educational experience that a professor cannot?

Great question. I still can’t think up a good answer. And it’s not that I’m clueless about what our administrators actually can do. But the question made me think in a certain direction after I read the provost’s message on improvements in faculty cash-producing…, er, ahem, “Individual Faculty Evaluation Policies.”

Since the days of Plato’s Academy, students and professors exist in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. Yes, even financially. The hordes of administrators and related “professionals,” on the other hand, are not necessarily part of this relationship. Hence, in tough economic times, thinking who really serves students and earns cash at a University like ours leads to rather illuminating results.

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By our administration’s own reports to all trustees (which I can’t help but question now), for every professor at UK (2,000 plus), we have a half-person of “skilled craft and maintenance personnel.” That’s a thousand maintenance people. Yes, perhaps unlike at Plato’s Academy, both students and professors at UK need halls cleaned and roofs repaired, although it’s hard to miss that our halls are not as clean, and roofs not as unleaky as in the administration’s buildings. In any case, it looks like the maintenance people earn their keep along with us.

Then, there are two other persons per faculty member – the “professional and paraprofessional” set. I don’t know what exactly they are doing for students and faculty, but I guess these numerous people (over 4,000) give us parking tickets and sneer at us from the legal office. Perhaps some of them earn their living along with us, but it is just as likely that many of them make their living off us.

And then there is a whole person per professor in the executive/administrative/office category. These are the “top talent” who push us around, draft Potemkin reports and no longer fill our travel vouchers – they’re too busy administrating (no, these 2,000 plus people don’t include the medical center bureaucracy; that one, incidentally, grew by 250% in 10 years). Thinking about this category of people, you just can’t help but think that these outstanding workers wholly and surely make their living off us: that is, off students and professors. Even half-dead (from the “productivity” point) professors for whom I profess no love produce something. The administrators, on the other hand…

The growth of administrative salaries and the sheer proliferation of their ranks (and titles) seem to explain why the tuition has much more than doubled in the last decade, why the “tax on grants” goes as high as 49 percent, and why even the endowment funds — which donors and the state have provided for teaching and research purposes — are assigned a “management fee”: at UK, you actually have to pay someone to lose money on the bond market.

Later today, we’ll publishing a ton of faculty opinions about administrative accountability at the University of Kentucky that have been pulled from recent surveys. You’ll find the feedback interesting. Five pages of opinions.

You’ll want to read the rest of this email after the jump…

In any case, welcome to the all-administrative University of Kentucky, where we, faculty, are but a small and docile cash-producing minority.

No, this kind of university didn’t start yesterday, but its growth and repeated failures will continue to depend on our docility.

Allow me to explain: from my Soviet experience, I know that a career apparatchik in a state-funded entity can’t exist without his “apparat” (bureaucracy). Given the choice between squeezing productive people harder or cutting his vast pyramid of vice-presidents and vice-somethings, the apparatchik normally will choose the “vices” every time: they make him important. When pressed, he will even claim that those layers of bureaucrats are “entrepreneurs” who whip up the hapless personnel into higher levels of productivity. He’ll even call this horse-whipping “accountability.”

Guess what: that sort of “accountability” is coming to a room near you. To your room, actually – read the Provost’s letter attached. While denying us info which could let us raise the question of bureaucratic costs at the recent board retreat, the administration has initiated the “accountability” program in which you – the core of everything that UK does to earn its money – will likely be pitted against each other and some distant benchmarks to prove your cash-earning value. Please, don’t be fooled by the glib language of “evaluation”: it’s all about cash. And guess who will be deciding whether you’ve accomplished your cash-earning quota? Yes, the opaque and unaccountable administration.

Don’t get me wrong: I am very much for accountability, and I don’t like deadbeats. Even before earning my tenure in 2005, at my school of music I was peddling the high but clearly defined evaluation measures that the faculty at the University of Minnesota used for their assessments. Our administrators (including the current Provost) weren’t interested at all.

But suddenly, starting this spring, all our administrators became “academic entrepreneurs.” Suddenly, they want us to help them to impose cash-earning measures (pick your own euphemism) on every faculty member. I guess the administration needs cash fast – they waste and consume so much of it.

The new mode our bureaucrats are pushing to measure individual faculty output is quite sneaky, but it is hard to escape the impression that it is we, the faculty, who are being made into scapegoats for the massive failure of the recently euphanized Top 20 “business” delusion. No skin off the administrative nose, though: having failed to make real improvements in the last decade (and having rewarded themselves so handsomely for that) they don’t want you or your students to expect that any accountability project must start with a transparent review of the administration, top to bottom. (No, there was no such review during the recent Board retreat. The retreat theme was “Continuing Our Ascent.” I kid you not: that’s how they plan to un-dig us from the bottom of the still excavated pit.)

Since no one knows how an administrator can teach a student or do a research project better than a rank-and-file professor/researcher, anyone can see that the faculty, especially in the cash-strapped Death Valley, can survive without hordes of paper-pushers clutching at our backs. Can the hordes survive without us? I doubt it. We can govern ourselves and still have students taught, research done and the Commonwealth served. We are pretty much doing it all already. And methinks that the students and taxpayers will only be pleased if we assume more self-governance and waste less on overhead.

If we continue to quietly feed our unaccountable bureaucrats, we’ll get more of them, not fewer. Besides, they’re already cracking their whips. Some UK researchers are already required to clock in and clock out of their workplaces. Yep, this stop-watch Taylorism is the way our “academic entrepreneurs” are going to “motivate” researchers in the 21st century… Just watch how they will sneak it onto you. (In case you missed: The latest bureau-craze is in compiling faculty service accomplishments on a weekly basis, not by month or year. That’s despite the fact that even the clueless on the board don’t burst into tears of joy at the beauty of those Potemkin reports that our bureaucracy is churning out so well.)

Again, accountability is a good thing, but being the silent cow on the receiving end of a horse whip is not.

What should we, the faculty, do? My advisors propose: let’s start an accountability campaign of our own. Let’s start paying attention and document real waste, bloat and imitation of useful activity by the administration. To begin, we might as well produce a really good report that exposes the inconvenient truth of what’s going on here.

We are taxpayers. And we are the primary earners of this University’s revenue. Let’s act like it. You — yes, you personally — need to document waste, bloat and abuse. Neither the bodies overseen by the president, nor the trustees, nor the press will do this for us: they sang “Top 20” up until just a few months ago despite knowing full well that Top 20 wasn’t coming. Stand up for yourself. I can publicize your findings without fear: our friends in high places are trying to trash my reputation anyway. So, check what is going on around you – document, photograph, check out the phony assumptions. Do something about it. Researchers have inquiring minds. Please, write your own open records requests, or, if you’re scared, at least word them for me – I had a “B” in English in Russia, and my doctorate is from the francophone Université de Montréal.

Start an Accountability Campaign of your own.

• Collect information on administrative inefficiency and excess at your department and/or college;
• Document waste;
• Document administrative burden on the faculty and students;
• Collect photographs of maintenance problems – leaks, overcrowding, etc. We need to highlight where the specific needs are;
• Find out how, to whom and by what process your administrators are accountable (or likely not). How they are hired? Are they the best in their field?
• File Open Record Requests.

Based on this collectively gathered and processed information, we will be able to make our University more efficient and to set up a University-wide system for fair review and evaluation of administrators. They must be accountable to us, the earners of the revenue. Radical? The abolitionists were called radicals, too. And keep in mind: in the bad cop/good cop situation it is the “bad cop” that makes all the difference, while the good cop can claim to produce all the results. But we have to have “the goods” on the administration to make it want to dance with us.

A note of caution: if you personally believe that you are so above average that the horse-whipping of the professor next to you will serve you in some way, think again. First, 80% of all people, even in academia, believe themselves to be in the top quartile – an obvious impossibility. Recall Lake Woebegone fantasy. Second, even if you’re really-really in the top quartile (or your dean’s pet) – don’t hope that you’ll have more money or honors or whatever else in exchange for your outstanding output: if the administration is not held accountable for the failures they brought us in the last decade, they will continue to eat every penny they squeeze out of us and our students. After all, what else can they do that we can’t?

If you personally won’t do this light investigative work, no one else will move a finger. Don’t blame faculty reps or politicians when the “accountability” whips cut into your flesh. You are responsible.

Again, please, check and re-check your own facts, ask staff people to help you – they claim that they, too, are suffocated by fake work. Only then send me your findings for compilation into the report. (Trust me, I am as busy as you are.)

And the really sad part: we could have made it to the Top 40 by now, if we had only started doing this work a decade earlier. See the University of Vermont as a fair example.

However, we can follow in their steps.

Yours,

Irina

P.S. Turns out that few faculty read my op-ed which the university brass tried to prevent from being published (in response to my emails to them, neither the President nor the Chair of the Board deny knowing about Jay Blanton’s email to that effect). A link to the op-ed is here: http://www.kentucky.com/2011/10/24/1932770/stonewalling-data-request-bad.html. Actually, it read much better in the actual paper form (October 24), and the headline was “No Governance by Ignorance”. Many people liked that.

P.P.S. The Provost’s letter mentioned above and several of your letters on the need for administrative accountability are attached in two separate files.