March-April 2004

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From the General Secretary: Outsourcing

By Mary A. Burgan

Some of the managerial experiments conducted in the last two decades of the late, sometimes lamented, twentieth century gave rise to a number of managerial certitudes in the twenty-first century. One of these was that corporations should define their "core" operation and then move everything else out of the way. Thus, for example, even though a very successful general once observed that "an army marches on its stomach," modern managers have observed that the core mission of an army is to fight and that providing food for soldiers is not a part of that mission. And so our own present army, run according to the latest managerial wisdom, no longer needs cooks or the legendary KP duty that sent errant soldiers out behind the mess hall to peel potatoes. Pentagon managers explain that the provisioning of most of our troops in Iraq has been outsourced to the Halliburton Company because Halliburton can do the job more efficiently and cheaply.

Despite evidence of flaws in its assumptions and its logic, outsourcing maintains its hold on a lot of managerial thinking—and especially the managerial thinking about higher education that goes on these days. Thus the reliance on part-time faculty has been given a veneer of legitimacy by the managerial emphasis on "just-in-time" inventory and the profit calculus involved in cutting staff. It is easy to engage in satire about this kind of outsourcing in higher education. The assumption underlying it imagines complex social and cultural operations in simple-minded ways, its ultimate bottom-line rationales are extremely transparent, and its victims among the faculty and undergraduate student body are pitiable.

But many faculty hesitate to embrace solutions that would require "rebundling" some of the fragments of professorial work by wider sharing of teaching in introductory courses, or refiguring hiring and tenure standards to reward such work. Such hesitation raises questions about how far the faculty itself has gone in absorbing the assumptions of outsourcing.

I believe that faculty outrage and satire about managerial emphases on defining "core missions" and "offshoring peripherals" mask the possibility that under more benign rationalizations, outsourcing actually threatens to become a habit of faculty conduct. I am concerned that the pressures of specialization may have encouraged faculty to absorb the notion that their own work can be "unbundled" to permit seemingly extraneous parts to be hived off to lesser workers.

The pattern is especially clear in governance: overburdened faculty complain that the governance work of their institutions demands too much time and distraction from their "real work" to be worth doing. Everywhere, the general lament is that the faculty will not stand for election to the faculty senate, or the AAUP chapter, or the local union. Very few professors will agree to chair their departments or take on deanships or even consider college presidencies. Perhaps that is why we have recently seen a number of academic presidencies filled by leaders from business, politics, or law.

Recognizing how little credit comes from peers for working in the governance of their institutions, many faculty have opted to assign academe's governance to middle management-enrollment development officers, public relations experts, lobbyists, efficiency experts, and professional labor negotiators. The old structures of governance, so passionately fought for, may now seem hollow. Too often, they are excuses for desultory meetings on nerveless agendas run by a handful of faithful volunteers who long for someone to take their places. It is no wonder, then, that the corporatized academic world depends so heavily on academic attorneys to litigate where faculty committees once made balanced and workable decisions for the good of the whole.

One of the common cures prescribed for outsourcing is training for new jobs. I want to suggest a variation of this remedy—but for essential old jobs, the tasks of faculty governance. I imagine a required course for all new faculty called "Governance 101" (remedial sections available for "old" faculty). The syllabus would begin with a segment on the history of higher education that emphasizes the rise of the ideal of a self-governing faculty as essential to academic freedom. Then there would be a nuts-and-bolts segment on how to run a meeting: a review of Robert's Rules, accompanied by exercises in setting agendas, taking minutes, and adjourning on time. The final segment would involve a year's field work in the faculty senate. The final exam would be a take-home on the topic of why governance cannot be unbundled. Successful completion would carry credit toward tenure and promotion, of course.