Dave’s Plan to Save the Religion Program!

Cliff Edge did not have a religious affiliation and neither the faculty nor the administration had much sympathy for religion of any kind. That is, the faculty was dominated by a bunch of liberal-leaning types for whom religion was synonymous with superstition and hence an outright offense to all properly-educated persons. The administration had no commitment to anything, including education. They just wanted to keep their cushy high-paying jobs, which meant that they had to maintain some semblance of commitment to education, hence the humanities departments were allowed to stagger on, chronically underfunded. Nearly all the instruction was provided by contingent faculty, which were about half “instructors” who received benefits and, until the pandemic, multiple-year contracts, and half adjuncts, who were paid by the course. There were a few older tenured faculty, but almost no new tenure hires and the provost and president were constantly powwowing on how they might get away with eliminating all tenure-line positions and still maintain their accreditation.

Pretty much every institution of higher education needs an English department, so the English faculty tended to be pretty checked out in terms of institutional planning. Such was not the case, however, with the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Both disciplines knew their situation was extremely precarious, hence they were constantly plotting ways to promote themselves in order to keep the department from being axed.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the philosophers loathed and despised the religion faculty. They’d have liked nothing better than to have shed themselves of that portion of the department. Not only did the philosophy faculty labor under the same simplistic conflation of religion with superstition that is pervasive among self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectuals, they were absolutely convinced that graduate training in philosophy was the most rigorous of any discipline in the humanities and that graduate training in religion was the least rigorous.

The problem was that it was easier to get grants in religion than in philosophy and several of the religion faculty had actually secured small grants in recent years. Moreover, Cliff Edge was in the midwest. It wasn’t actually the Bible belt, but midwesterners tended to look more kindly on religion than people in many other parts of the country, and Cliff Edge was pathologically averse to negative PR. They feared that outright axing the religion program would inevitably generate some negative PR, so their less than subtle plan was simply to starve the program until it could no longer be justified. If the numbers of majors became sufficiently low, then it would be impossible to justify running any of the upper-level religion courses. Once those courses had been eliminated, they reasoned, then the religion major could be eliminated. It wouldn’t be long before they could get rid of the minor as well and once that was gone, it would be only a matter of time before the religion faculty would become superfluous. That is, the plan was the gradual elimination of religion as a discipline at Cliff Edge. No single step in this process, they reasoned, would be newsworthy, hence the program could eventually be eliminated with very little, if any, risk of negative PR.

What Cliff Edge’s administrators had not sufficiently appreciated was the ingenuity of scholars, that is, people with years of graduate training, who knew that if their discipline was eliminated, they’d be out on the street. That is, the faculty were keenly aware that higher education was in crisis, that no one was hiring and hence that any academic who lost his or her job would have to find another profession or be permanently unemployed. And if you are still paying off student loans, as many of the faculty were, then neither training for a new profession nor being permanently unemployed was viable option.

So faculty hit on all kinds of ways to make it appear their programs were doing better than they, in fact, were. Chief among the ways of bolstering enrollment numbers in religion classes, was simply to require no work of the students. The sciences, because they had objective measures of determining pedagogical effectiveness, tended to shy away from this tactic, but they weren’t threatened the way the humanities were. The religion faculty devised a plan they felt sure would protect their discipline from elimination.

The plan had developed more or less organically. Dave was the first to figure it out. He’d been the director of the religion program for something like fifteen years, despite that he was only an instructor.

(People outside academia think that it is very stratified, with the tenure-line faculty holding all the power and looking down contemptuously on the contingent faculty. There were certainly plenty of tenure-line faculty who looked down contemptuously on the contingent faculty, but they didn’t have any power over them. Instructors were generally hired by committees comprised exclusively of other instructors, and adjuncts were hired directly by program directors, most of whom were themselves only instructors. Moreover, department heads were increasingly finding instructors made much more compliant program directors and committee chairs, etc., than did tenure-line faculty, so nearly all those position were held by contingent faculty. In fact, to be blunt, instructors had a considerable amount of power over tenure-line faculty, whereas tenure-line faculty had no power whatever over instructors.)

Dave had originally been puzzled when he noticed a gradual increase both in the enrollments in religion classes and in religion majors and minors as the proportion of contingent to tenure-line faculty increased. He’d assumed at first that this was merely a coincidence. The correlation continued, however, and, in fact, actually got stronger over time. The higher the proportion of religion courses taught by contingent faculty, the higher were the enrollments in those courses and the greater were the numbers of new majors and minors.

Dave might never have figured it out had Constance not constantly been plagued by student complaints, complaints the students inevitably brought to Dave as he was the Religion program director. The complaints against Constance were myriad. She had a mandatory attendance requirement. Students were allowed to miss only three classes, more than that, and they automatically failed. She had regular writing assignments and tended to be fairly inflexible with the deadlines. She was also considered by students to be a pretty tough grader. Her classes, even her intro classes, always had lower enrollments than all the other religion classes, and students were constantly besieging Dave with complaints about her. One student vented his frustration to Dave with an outrage that suggested he believed himself to be the victim of a serious injustice. It seems the student had enrolled in REL 100: Introduction to Religion, on the assumption that he would never actually have to attend class or submit any work, at least not before the end of the term, and had been rudely surprised when he’d received an email from Constance informing him that he’d failed the course because he’d exceeded the maximum number of unexcused absences.

“The whole reason I signed up for the course” the student practically screamed, “was because I had a friend who took it last term and told me that it was an easy A, that I’d never even have to go to class.” (It is a sad statement on the quality of higher education today, that it did not even occur to this student that a program director might be disturbed to think there were courses in his program that required little if any work, no actual attendance, and were liberal in their distribution of As.)

A few questions to the student revealed that his friend had taken a section of Religion 100 that had been taught by an adjunct. Even then the situation wasn’t immediately clear to Dave. It was only after he began to read the student teaching evaluations with a more critical eye that he began to see what was going on. Contingent faculty, you see, had no requirement to publish scholarship. Instructors, because they did hold nearly all the lower-level administrative positions, were evaluated annually on both teaching and service, but adjuncts were hired and fired based on student teaching evaluations alone!

And how else would one evaluate the quality of adjunct instruction? Actually studying their syllabi and reviewing examples of graded assignments, etc., in their courses would have been far too labor intensive for administrators who busy attending meetings and jetting around the country to conferences with their peers at other institutions (unlike faculty, administrators had unlimited travel budgets because, in the words of Dean Debbie, what they did was “very important to the institution.”) When Dave began to study the teaching evaluations of adjuncts, he started to understand why adjuncts had the highest enrollments in their courses. Instructors were next, and tenure-line faculty dead last.

Dave, who was consumed by a hatred of tenure-line faculty so intense that he could not admit the depth of it to himself, had always assumed that the differences in the teaching evaluations of tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty was a result of the fact that tenure-line faculty were bad teachers, imperious and officious and unsympathetic to their young charges, so to speak. The student evaluations told the true story, though, to anyone who looked beyond the numerical scores to read the student comments. Students loved teachers who were “fun,” who understood how overburdened they were with coursework (because after all, the sciences did still require work of students) and hence didn’t assign much. They pilloried professors who they felt assigned too much work and who they perceived to be harsh graders.

This situation was exacerbated by the fact that contingent faculty typically had approximately twice the teaching load of tenure line faculty. Instructors at Cliff Edge taught four courses per term, for a total of eight courses per year. The intro courses could have as many as 40 students each, so instructors typically had between 150-160 students per term. Instructors simply didn’t have time to grade much work, unless they could develop multiple-choice assignments that could be computer graded.

The situation was even worse for adjuncts. Cliff Edge wouldn’t allow adjuncts to teach more than two courses per term, for a total of four in a single year, because more than that would have made them technically full time, and Cliff Edge would have had to give them benefits. The thing is, adjunct pay was so low that it was impossible to to live on it, so most adjuncts taught even more courses per term than did instructors—just at different institutions. Most adjuncts had over 200 students per term, so they clearly didn’t have much time to grade either.

Contingent faculty had this double incentive not to assign students much work and not to give much feedback on what little work they did assign, and yet despite this to give uniformly high grades. That is, there was the time constraint issue and the job security issue. They couldn’t give much work because they didn’t have time to grade it, but they were understandably afraid of low scores on their teaching evaluations because low scores would mean they might not have their contracts renewed.

It was unclear whether upper-level administrators, who were bent on getting rid of as many tenure-line faculty as possible, understood the implications of turning nearly all the instruction at Cliff Edge over to the overworked and underpaid contingent faculty. It’s unlikely they would have cared, though, even if they had understood how this was serving to undermine the quality of the “education” Cliff Edge was offering, because their chief concern was keeping enrollments up. They conceived of their students as customers and were determined to do anything and everything they reasonably could to do keep these customers happy. The issue of whether it is properly the students who should be conceived as customers or their eventual employers who were increasingly disappointed by the ill preparedness of Cliff Edge graduates, was one that received insufficient attention by Cliff Edge administrators who sat cheerfully sawing off the very branch they were sitting on,

So that was it. Contingent faculty, and especially adjuncts, were popular with students because their classes were easy. In fact, “easy” was more or less a euphemism. Many of those classes were complete shams. There was always some sort of assignment or other listed in the syllabi of adjuncts, but it was usually a term paper, which was pretty much a useless exercise, not simply because the average Cliff Edge student couldn’t write well enough to do a decent term paper, but because the overwhelming majority of them would never see the instructor in question again, so they almost never bothered to read the comments on these papers, if indeed there were any comments on them, which there generally weren’t because the adjuncts knew that their students were not going to actually look at their papers unless they got what they felt was an unjustly low grade. But that eventuality could be averted by simply giving nearly everyone really high grades!

So that was it. Adjuncts assigned little if any work, had no attendance requirements, and gave uniformly high grades. Students loved them and enrolled in their courses in droves! The situation was analogous, if not quite so extreme, with instructors.

This realization was initially unsettling to Dave, until he self-interestedly decided that this sort of “casual, fun” approach to “learning” was exactly what Cliff Edge’s stressed-out students needed! In the past, Dave, in keeping with official departmental policy, as well as long-established convention in academia, had given the tenure-line faculty priority in scheduling. That had meant, of course, that they taught all the upper-level seminars. Because their courses were less popular than those of the adjuncts and instructors, though, these seminars often had to be cancelled due to low enrollment and their repeated cancellation actually threatened the major because many of these courses were required for the major.

Dave figured out that if he could shift many of these upper-level seminars to adjuncts, that he could increase their enrollments. The problem was figuring out how to do this without violating department policy. He tried to encourage tenure-line faculty to teach more into courses by pointing out that these courses were gateway courses for potential majors and hence at least some of them needed to be taught by tenure-line faculty. That had had some mild success, but not enough to satisfy Dave. So he hit on the technique of scheduling too many upper-level seminars in a single term with the inevitable result that those assigned to tenure-line faculty would be cancelled at the last minute due to low enrollments. Tenure-line faculty were required to teach five courses a year, so if their seminar was cancelled, they’d be switched to teaching another course, usually an intro. After a few terms of having one’s seminar cancelled at the last minute and having to struggle to put together a syllabus for an intro course one probably hadn’t taught in years, and tenure-line faculty actually began to request to be assigned to intro courses. This then left Dave free to reduce the number of seminars he’d been offering and to assign the majority of them to contingent faculty.

It took the tenure-line faculty awhile to figure out what was going on. Constance was the first to figure it out, but Dave had a justification at the ready. He explained that the contingent faculty needed to teach upper-level seminars to make themselves attractive on the job market. No tenure-line professor dared to point out what in fact everyone knew, i.e., that anyone who didn’t land a tenure-line position right out of grade school, but who was forced to accept a position as an instructor or adjunct, was never going to get a tenure-line position. For a tenure-line professor to point out that the contingent faculty were effectively condemned to labor forever in the coal mines of their overworked, underpaid, insecure positions, would have seemed the height of arrogance. Word would get out and the professor in question would be mercilessly bullied and ridiculed the contingent faculty who, it is important to remember, were vastly in the majority at Cliff Edge.

No, Dave’s system was foolproof!

Sucker Law

The Sucker Law firm, was actually short for Sucker, Liar, Bungler, and Cheat. In the law world, though, they were generally referred to as “those assholes over at Sucker,” or just “Sucker.” Sucker was infamous in a world where infamy was pretty much the standard. Where other law firms would manipulate damning evidence to make it look less damning, or try to get it excluded on technical grounds, Sucker attorneys would literally manufacture exculpatory evidence for their clients. You may wonder how any lawyer could get away with something like that. In a world, though, where most cases settle out of court, there was little danger of Sucker’s contempt for the federal rules of evidence being exposed for what it was. This danger was diminished even further by the fact that Sucker specialized in representing colleges and universities. Mostly, they defended these institutions against discrimination lawsuits from students and faculty who rarely had enough money to see a case all the way to trial and frequently had to pull out even before a satisfactory settlement could be reached. That meant Sucker rarely had to face the possibility of exposure, and so far, had managed to avoid exposure even in those few instances where that possibility had loomed threateningly.

The culture at Sucker was, to put it mildly, pretty nasty. Law firms in general are not warm, fuzzy places to work, but Sucker set a new standard of misery for its attorneys. They used every trick in the book, padding hours, overstaffing, making sure that Sucker himself was assigned to every single case they took on so that the firm could bill his hourly rate, in addition to the lower rates of the other attorneys assigned to the cases. Sucker excelled in the creation of what was known within the firm as “fake motions,” or motions that had no chance of being granted, but which provided unparalleled opportunities for padding clients’ bills. Sucker held the record for firms in the tri-state area for number of documents filed in a case with over a thousand documents in what should have been a straightforward discrimination suit, you know, the kind of suit where you had maybe a hundred docs filed at the most.

Sucker did well for a long time. They made money hand over fist. Jock Sucker had discovered, you see, that while personal injury cases were where the big awards were to be had, they were also both costly and risky. Companies tended to spare no expense in defending themselves and going up against them, even for a stellar graduate from a top-tier law school, could involve years of hard work with no payout whatever at the end. Add to that the complication that Sucker wasn’t a stellar graduate of a top-tier law school, but had graduated near the bottom of his class at the now defunct for-profit Louisville Law Academy, and plaintiffs’ personal injury law was simply out of his league.

On the other hand, Sucker discovered quite by accident, that the one place where even the most feeble-minded attorney could clean up was in representing universities in discrimination suits. Like corporations, universities always had their own in-house counsel. Unlike corporations, though, universities seemed to have no standards whatever in terms of who they hired for these positions. They paid less than in-house counsel for corporations (which in turn paid less than any actual law firm) and so, in the world of law, where money is the standard for everything, in-house counsel for universities tended to be the real bottom of the legal barrel. Everyone knew this, of course, but few people worried about it because they figured that any case that the in-house counsel couldn’t handle themselves, would be farmed out to outside counsel, whom, it was assumed, would be more competent.

The only flaw in this system was that the in-house counsel were the people who secured the outside counsel, and being the legal-losers they tended to be, they were unusually subject to obsequious flattery and tended to hire outside counsel based on how effective such counsel was at flattering their egos rather than at winning cases. But again, this rarely mattered because most students and faculty simply couldn’t afford to see a case all the way to trial and so the legal ineptitude of both in-house and outside counsel rarely interfered with the system of law firms that represented colleges and universities bleeding these institutions of what little money they had.

And bleed they did. Most people are afraid of lawyers, even upper-level academic administrators and members of boards of trustees. These people tend to feel, a feeling reinforced by in-house counsel, that they don’t know anything about law. So, rather than keeping watch on what their in-house counsel were doing, they tended to give them an absolutely free rein, a situation exacerbated by the fact that most colleges and universities have legal insurance, so even if their annual legal bills were in the millions of dollars, they generally paid little attention to why. The fact that a law firm paid by the hour had no incentive ever actually to settle any lawsuit, seemed to escape the notice of academic administrators and legal insurance meant that they probably wouldn’t have cared much anyway at a time such as that in which our story is set, when enrollments were declining precipitously and filling seats was a far more urgent issue than reducing legal costs.

Everyone knows the saying that there is no honor among thieves. Few people realize, though, in our smash-and-grab society, that there isn’t much happiness either. Attorneys in general, and the attorneys at Sucker in particular, quickly learn, though few would admit it consciously to themselves, that happiness cannot be obtained by screwing over innocent people, (people who had already been screwed over pretty brutally by their employers), no matter how lavish a living one made doing it. So the attorneys at Sucker were mostly miserable, mostly in perpetual bad moods, and constantly sniping at one another.

They were making money, though. They were making money hand over fist and had been doing so for some time. The problem was that every time a Sucker attorney got away with some sort of fraud or other, the firm as a whole became cockier. That was its undoing. Like Icarus, Sucker ended up flying just a little higher than they should have understood they would be able to get away with. That is, everything was going along more or less fine, until the irresistible force of Jock Sukker’s love of money encountered the immoveable objects of Constance Alethea’s commitment to her vocation of teaching and the fact that she had unlimited free legal support in the form of her boyfriend, the obscure, but brilliantly talented plaintiff’s employment law attorney, James Justice.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When Whoretensia Lügnerin was assigned to defend Cliff Edge College against Constance’s charge of sex discrimination the firm was still doing well. True, they had lost a very high-profile academic freedom case, but they had not yet seen the mass exodus of clients they would later experience. In defense of the debacle Whoretensia made of Constance’s case, I am compelled to point out that she, Whoretensia was, like most attorneys, way overworked. She didn’t bother to do any research concerning whether Weasel’s depiction of Constance’s character and situation in the department was accurate. What attorney in Whoretensia’s position would have wanted to do that, anyway? Weasel’s depiction of Constance was a godsend. Here was an arrogant, bullying, uncollegial, piece of academic deadwood, the kind of “scholar” with which the academy was littered and whom humanity as a whole would be better off without. This was the image of Constance that Whoretensia, and the Sucker firm more generally, needed to promote to win the case, so why bother to do any actual research to determine whether this picture was accurate? There was little danger, after all, that it would ever be exposed as inaccurate, even if that were the case.

Or so it seemed, at the time, to Whoretensia.

Manny Wahrsagen

Mandelbrot, aka Manny, Wahrsagen was the Associate Dean for Academic Standards, and kind of the Greek chorus of everything that went on in the College of Arts and Sciences, or he would have been, if he’d ever commented on anything that went on in the College of Arts and Sciences. Mostly he just looked unhappy. He saw everything, though. Nothing escaped Manny. Sadly, he had almost no authority to actually do anything. He’d been chasing Vince Viscous ever since he’d learned that Vince basically taught only one course. Manny, you see, was the one assigned to ensure quality control of the curriculum. Manny was the one who had to make sure that everything was ship shape when the accreditation people did there periodic reviews of the college. The problem was that he had no authority to speak directly to Vince about the disturbing uniformity of his various syllabi.

Manny had to work through the College Curriculum Committee of which he was an ex officio member. He could come down hard on new course proposals that failed to adhere to the guidelines established by the provost’s office. Once a course was approved, however, it could basically be taught any old way the person assigned to teach it wanted. This made some people, such as Tanya, wonder what was the purpose of the course approval process. Syllabi were always subjected to merciless scrutiny to ensure that they conformed to the Provost’s Office guidelines, first by departmental curriculum committees and then by the college curriculum committee, and then, finally by the Senate Committee on Academic Matters. They were frequently returned to the instructor in question, at various stages of the approval process, with detailed instructions for elaborate revisions. But then once a course was approved, “academic freedom” dictated it could be taught any old way any old instructor wanted, which meant, or course, that the instructor in question could substitute an entirely new syllabus for the one that had been approved.

Manny’s authority extended only so far as his position on the College Curriculum Committee. He could make it known, of course, to program directors and to heads of departments that he was aware that many of the syllabi faculty actually used bore no relation whatever to the syllabi that were included with new course proposals as part of the course approval process and that he was not happy about this. That was all he could do, though. It was the job of program directors to ensure that faculty under their direction approached their courses in a responsible manner and the job of department chairs to make sure that program directors did this.

The problem was that program directors had no means of disciplining errant faculty and department chairs had few means of disciplining program directors. Everyone at every level of university administration enjoyed his or her post, more or less, at the behest of the faculty. Program directors had no control over raises, all they could do to discipline faculty was to assign them shitty courses at shitty times. If they actually did that, however, they risked faculty complaining to the chair about them. Department chairs don’t want to have to deal with faculty complaints, so program directors generally tried to make the faculty under their direction happy, and that meant, of course, that they were extremely reluctant to criticize them.

Department chairs were in a similarly powerless position. There was a steep learning curve for program directors because program directors handled the scheduling of what was sometimes upward of a hundred courses. They had to be familiar with the scheduling of courses in other departments so that they could avoid scheduling courses that conflicted with required courses in other disciplines. English majors, for example, were required to take History 101 their first year, along with MATH 100: Math for Humanities Majors, so it was incumbent upon the program directors that they be aware of when these course were offered so that they would not schedule ENG 101 on the same day and at the same time as either of those other two courses.

There were lots of these potential conflicts. When one figured in the situation of English minors as well as majors, scheduling became almost unmanageably complex (that Cliff Edge had not developed scheduling software that would automatically detect such conflicts was one of the enduring mysteries of the place, as was the fact that they paid millions of dollars for online learning platform software, human resources, and payroll and benefits software, etc., when one would have thought that faculty and graduate students over in the College of Information Sciences could have developed software for the university for which they would not have had to pay anything over and above faculty salaries and graduate-student stipends they already paid). It took so long for program directors to learn the ropes that once they did, department chairs were extremely reluctant to replace them.

Of course when we talk about disciplining faculty, we are referring to the proverbial stick and everyone knows that the carrot is a much better motivator than the stick. But alas, raises, when they came (because some years they didn’t) had hovered between 1%-2% for as long as anyone could remember. Worse, department chairs were not free to give anyone and everyone even these minuscule raises. Dean Debbie was so tight with the college purse strings that there was seldom enough money to give more than a couple of people the whopping 2% raise. Most people would have to be content with less, and some people would have to be content with no raise at all, independently of how hard they had worked. These were hard times in higher education, Dean Debbie always explained.

And yes, indeed they were hard times because department chairs, typically felt that they could not give glowing annual reviews to people to whom they knew they could not give raises, so they often strained to find something in everyone’s performance of which they could be critical. Sometimes they flat-out invented things, such as when Willard Weasel penalized Tanya for not giving finals when, in fact, she did give finals, just in the form of a final essay rather than a final exam. Of course these grasping at negative straws made the process of giving and receiving annual reviews incredibly unpleasant. Not only did chairs have to face disgruntled faculty one on one in their annual review meetings, they were hounded during those long fall months in which the reviews took place by the specter of open faculty revolt.

Manny was a firm believer in the carrot over the stick and felt that praise often worked as well as raises depending on the faculty member. In this respect, however, he was a voice crying in the wilderness. The thing that really galled him, though, was that the stick was so often wielded for the wrong reasons. Willard was the worst offender in that regard. Tanya, one of the most promising members to join Cliff Edge’s faculty in years, was routinely throttled by Willard, while Vince, whose skills at ingratiating himself with anyone and everyone with any authority obscured that his “scholarship” consisted of publishing what was essentially the same paper over and over again, was one of the few faculty whom Willard provided with a steady diet of carrot salad. Vince had been given every break in the book. While Tanya was routinely criticized for everything from her teaching to how she carried out the committee work that was piled upon her, Vince received course release after course release and was publicly lauded for everything he wrote, even letters to the editor of the local paper.

As I said, Manny had been chasing Vince for some time. It wasn’t just that he felt his position as the guarantor of academic quality in the College necessitated ferreting out fraudsters such as Vince. It was personal. That is, Manny felt that Vince was making a mockery of higher education more generally and hence lowering the public esteem which Manny’s mathematician parents had ensured him that he also would enjoy if he pursued a career in the ivory tower. Manny, being basically decent and kind hearted, found it difficult to admit to himself that his pursuit of Vince was based not merely on professional reasons, but also personal contempt and loathing. He was in one of those unusual situations where the right thing to do was also the selfish thing to do, hence it was relatively easy for him to avoid acknowledging the schadenfruede that now accompanied his conviction that he finally had Vince (and possibly also Willard) in his clutches.