Catherine is currently touring to support her upcoming book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, out September 29. Pre-order the book here, and check back next week for a full list of Catherine’s live events in NYC
The metastasization of administration and bureaucracy in the contemporary university system has spread to every corner of these institutions, so ubiquitous and seemingly benign as to be invisible to those who cannot—or will not—recognize its corrupting creep. Every university now has marketing, communications and public relations departments, each filled with professionals trained in advertising and journalism. They promote a positive image of the university while also doing damage control around stories that might mar its reputation.
We can imagine an Executive Vice Chancellor of Such-and-Such University being completely out of touch with what happens in classrooms. Think of a group of people dressed in corporate, unisex-casual outfits, choosing stock photo images in a corporate drawing room or writing copy for internal PR emails with subject lines like: Such-and-Such University in the News, or The Latest from the Desk of the Vice President of Compliance, Diversity, and AI. These are the emails that everyone deletes without reading, written by those who have never taught a course, planned a syllabus, written a research paper, struggled with peer review, run a complex experiment, trained teaching assistants, graded papers, or (God forbid) sat on a Ph.D. Committee.
These people are grooming the public image of the university that employs them. Under them a phalanx of photographers, web developers, and social media managers produce a stream of “news” designed to please their higher ups and the donors that their higher ups must cultivate. Fundraising for universities has become an inescapable priority, but the serpent eats its tail as fundraising functions gnaw away at the core of every university’s academic, teaching, and research missions. The communication/marketing department’s interest in academic research is entirely instrumental. For them, achieving diversity in the arts or humanities or social sciences creates a newsworthy item for a department that is not currently curing cancer, or discovering quantum materials that can reshape chip circuitry.