I apologize for lying about blogging Adorno. It’s coming, I promise. In the meantime, it is fall again in Buffalo. This is my second fall here, and I have learned a lot since I arrived here. Many of the things I have learned came the hard way. One of these things was about how politics works in this city and in New York State.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that SUNY has suffered an enormous budget cut from the government, something to the tune of $280 million. What was kind of a surprise for me was that, in the state budget that finally passed last month, neither UB2020, nor its more expansive incarnation, the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, were included. And some people are unfairly taking the heat as being anti-Western New York for their resistance to the steamrolling force that is business.
I have friends who work for Senator Antoine Thompson, and I think he’s a pretty solid guy. One of the things he has come out against with regard to PHEEIA is its absolute disregard for labor. I’m glad that someone is taking a stand in WNY against this sellout of the SUNY system, but there are some smart, powerful, energetic people who should be standing up for more than just our jobs. Us.
As I extend a welcome to the new students here at UB this fall, I want to remind everyone — tenured professor, freshman, adjunct faculty, facilities staff, the community — that a university is more than an economic force. A university provides something singular and important. Or, I should say, it should provide something singular and important. We must not give into corporate interests, because the reason we are here is because we value inquisitiveness, innovation, and that ever-essential but increasingly-elusive benefit of working in the academy, academic freedom.
One of the critiques that the PHEEIA crowd levels against us is that we have no viable alternative plan. I want to unpack this for this fall, because it’s important we start thinking about it.
There’s some level on which we’re caught in a bit of a Catch-22 with the administration. I have my doubts about the receptiveness of the administration to collaborating on an alternate plan, considering how much time and energy (and social capital) President Simpson poured into UB2020. But I also have grave misgivings about how receptive the administration would actually be to a plan developed not by consultants and administrators, but by students and faculty.
Last night I watched Carl Malamud give a talk at the WWW2010 conference called “10 Rules for Radicals.” While the talk is focused on Malamud’s experiences working as a radical on the early Internet, opening standards and creating accessibility both to technology and public domain information, the ten rules scale up and down, and they apply to everything from technology and media to government and law.
Rule #1 is treat everything as an experiment. This fall is an experiment. We have the latitude to build something great here, something that runs alongside the current system. That experimental system can be tweaked and improved, and in the future, inform the mainstream. But we have to start doing something, and we have to start doing it now.
Start that reading group. Teach your class a different way. Commit to an activity on campus. Make a promise to yourself about how you’re going to live your life for the next four months, and then stick to it. But most importantly, don’t stop talking about these big issues. These next few years may be the last we have to make a substantive change to the way our institutions are managed, and they cannot be wasted. Join me in making the university what it can and should be, in spite of what it is and is becoming.
Welcome back to Buffalo, people. Let’s make this happen.