Editor’s note: The original stylization of the headline reads “West Virginia Chicago is happening to you. The fight for the modern university.” Having a strikethrough headline is not a design feature offered by SNO, but the headline should still be understood as having the strikethrough.
Last summer, the provost of the University of Chicago announced that, because “we are operating in a challenging fiscal environment,” her office would be imposing a variety of controls on spending in the current fiscal year (the email was sent on July 12, 2023; some of those controls were later withdrawn or revised). The announcement had an eerie familiarity. I have lived through financial crises at the University before. But I also understood that whatever I thought I knew, I did not have substantial and detailed knowledge of the nature or magnitude of the current crisis, or of its connection to earlier ones. This spurred me to investigate a set of intuitions I had long had, and that I have since learned was widely shared about the trajectory of the University as a whole and, indeed, many of its peers.
What I discovered, based on facts that the University itself provides, was that an institution that made itself look rich had also forced itself, in particular situations and for the purposes of specific policies, to act poor. The result of this imbricated set of choices, of overspending and underspending, has been the hollowing out of much of the arts and sciences at the University, with predictable consequences for the strength of its undergraduate College. But more is at issue than undergraduate instruction. At stake, I urge, is nothing less than the idea itself of the university.
What is needed in this moment, both locally and nationally, is clear-eyed analyses of the ideology driving these changes, of the culture of leadership and structures of governance that elevate these to institutional priorities, and of the mechanisms by which they are implemented and the costs they impose. In addition, we require a conversation about the gaps in oversight and public reporting that allow universities in particular to fail so often to live up to their own ideals.
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Some aspects of what is occurring may be described in terms that reveal the extent to which universities now participate in pathologies of leadership in contemporary politics and corporate governance. “Leadership” consists of “innovation”—meaning leveraged investments in new endeavors—and is measured by the willingness to take risks. Risk is most easily quantified in terms of debt. On July 1, 2006, the University of Chicago’s liabilities were $2.236 billion. By June 30, 2022, they amounted to $5.809 billion, meaning the University’s debt grew by 260 percent over this period and now amounts to a startling 68 percent of the University’s total assets. No, that’s not normal: no school in the Ivy League has a ratio of debt to assets higher than 30 percent. But it is “leadership”: in a recent letter to The Maroon, John Boyer, the former dean of the College, praised the “courage” of the University’s leadership in having “tak[en] formidable risks to achieve success.” It was presumably on the basis of a similar assessment that, over the course of this period, the base compensation of the University’s president grew by 285 percent. By comparison, a faculty member earning the standard merit raise each year would have seen an increase of around 60 percent in their salary.
To put the matter another way, in fiscal year (FY) 2006 the University reported cash paid for interest—the cost of servicing its debt—in the amount of $45.7 million. In 2021 and 2022, that number averaged $200 million. Neither is the totality of the University’s revenue available to pay these sums. Generally, it will have to come from tuition and assets without restrictions, not income from restricted gifts (which account for 86 percent of…
This article was originally published by a chicagomaroon.com . Read the Original article here. .