A Boring Dystopia

My university is looking at a 10 percent enrollment drop right now. We've been losing anywhere from 3-7 percent of our students every year since I started working here. They won't hire new faculty. They won't fill teaching lines when professors retire or move. They won't raise adjunct pay. They won't give their overworked staff a raise, even when they work just as many nights and weekends as we do. They cut programs. They close down entire schools. The money just disappears into a black hole.

If the university is looking at a 10 percent enrollment drop, how can they do any of those latter things? When your ability to stay open is decided by a combination of your competitors and hyper-capitalists who will take away your accreditation for not being predatory enough, how is any institution supposed to survive?

I can't speak to the author's institution, but what we've seen at our institution is that the black hole the money disappears to is corporate profits. Our Student Information System increased its prices 30% last year. To change would be years of retraining every single office on campus, and a multi-million dollar bill we can't afford. The food service company's prices are higher. The printer company's prices are higher. Fucking VMWare and Meraki are trying to fuck us over a barrel with some crazy price increases. When greed and capitalism run rampant, everyone suffers, inversely proportional to how cutthroat and predatory your institution is.

We know where the money goes:

The money goes to hire new directors of athletics. It goes toward new athletic facilities. It pays for the Starbucks our vice-chancellors love so much. It pays for the sushi bars they think will attract a "high caliber" of student. It pays the inflated salaries of the upper administration, who make healthy six figures even when they're terrible at their jobs.

Maybe their institution is doing things different, but we haven't been able to hire a new athletic director in two years. Our facilities are literally falling apart. They leak when it rains, and we can't control the heat in them. We got skipped over for hosting major tournaments in almost all of our sports this year as a result. At an athletics heavy school. We have no financial aid director. Most don't apply because they know the situation, the ones who do laugh at our offer. I think the only upper admin person who gets six figures is the president, who currently donates her entire paycheck back to the institution.

I don't know. Maybe things really are different between the author's institution and mine, but I feel like I hear these sorts of complaints from faculty here, too. Sometimes it feels like faculty live in a magic bubble where you can throw a book at a software vendor and get them to not charge you hundreds of thousands of dollars more than last year. Where "Well if the staff would stop eating avocado toast then everything would be fine". We're all in this together. Capitalist parasites will use any division to sow discord, and you'd think people working at an educational institution would be less likely to fall for it, not more. But man, the faculty-staff rivalry is wild.

The rest, though, the author and I definitely agree on.

Universities aren't institutions of knowledge anymore. They're assets. They're revenue streams. If they're not generating money for the top, then they only pose a threat, and they have to be weakened and destroyed.

...yeah. This...keeps me up at night. All I can do is keep trying to keep the systems running. Keep our 40 year old SIS running, as efficiently as we can. Tie our sad raft of cobbled-together software packages together. Upper admin has ideas for new programs, and they're even things that I feel like would make the world a better place, but...will it be enough? Or is it just delaying the inevitable? Because it's as the author says - Americans have never really supported public education, and it feels like that's worse now than ever. I don't know where we're going anymore.

I'm still on the train because I'd rather die in the crash than bail and watch helplessly, but some days I wonder.