The many things that should concern us about Feldman's experience in Alabama are all things happening in schools at every level across the country:
+ Administrator pro-business bias
+ Consolidation of administrator power
+ Declining faculty power and declining faculty solidarity+ Abuse of credentialing (UAB has demanded that full-professor Feldman go back to school and earn a year's worth of credits to retain his tenure)
+ Ever-closer ties between corporations, politics, and the campus
+ Business influence on curriculum
+ The culture-struggle practice of administration, designed to produce compliant subjectivities and expel dissenters
+ A growing legal web that muzzles faculty governance speech at public institutions
+ The abuse of standards of civility and collegiality to paint an understandably upset victim as unreasonable, a tendency in which I have to say that Peter Schmidt's reporting unfortunately participates (though to be fair to Schmidt I haven't seen the documents he characterizes).
Bousquet closes by siding with a commenter who goes by the handle "mchag12":
"The relationship with the faculty at public universities is just becoming untenable as faculty are treated as line items to be dispensed with at will by high paid administrators. What would you do, azprof, if your department was slated for demolition and your university actually asked the state legislature to defund it? Back out of the room shuffling and bowing and repeating thank you, thank you? If you think you are safe, you're not."
That last line by mchag says it all.
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