Value(s) Deferred

AbstractThis article examines the Penn State scandal, highlighting what has been lost to contemporary universities in the rise of nonacademic administration, the managed university, and the accompanying discourse of “excellence.”KeywordsPenn State Scandal, College Football, Nonacademic Administration, The Managed University As Bill Readings (1997) argued so powerfully in The University in Ruins, the quest for academic “excellence” is the orienting disposition for contemporary university administrators. This “excellence” has replaced “culture” as the primary way universities justify themselves: “Excellence is clearly a purely internal unit of value that effectively brackets all questions of reference or function, thus creating an internal market” (p. 27). He continues, “The appeal to excellence marks the fact that there is no longer any idea of the University, or rather the idea has lost all content” (p. 39). According to Readings, university administrators today must “manage” various metrics—those that measure financial health, academic strength, student satisfaction, and so on. These metrics make up an “internal market” that refracts all external reference points through its logics. The result? Universities have abdicated their moral authority. Their claims are local, disjointed, and purely functional. While many universities today can claim different kinds of “excellence,” they cannot serve as ethical or moral anchors for a world that so desperately needs them.

This all came into sharp relief in the recent Penn State scandal. The case is well known by now. Former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly raped several young boys on the college campus between 1998 and 2002. Sandusky was head of the Second Mile Foundation—a program that offered a range of services to disadvantaged youth. This position gave him access to many vulnerable youth. In addition, Sandusky’s former role with Penn State’s storied football team gave him a wide range of access to the campus itself. The most widely reported incident involved a graduate assistant for the football team, 28-year-old Mike McQueary, walking in on Sandusky sodomizing a young boy in a shower stall. According to reports, McQueary did not stop the incident. Rather, he went home and asked his father how to respond. On his father’s advice, McQueary reported the incident to head coach Joe Paterno the next day. Paterno reportedly told then-athletic director Tim Curley about the incident one day after that. Curley has since been charged with perjury and failure to report the incident.

The case is still under review of course. But a recent comment by Joe Paterno to the Washington Post is revealing: “I didn’t know exactly how to handle it and I was afraid to do something that might jeopardize what the university procedure was. . . . So I backed away and turned it over to some other people, people I thought would have a little more expertise than I did. It didn’t work out that way” (Jenkins, 2012). Many details of the case remain murky. Much will presumably be revealed in the upcoming trials. What does seem clear at this point is that many of the key players involved invoked Penn State’s complex bureaucracy in dealing with Sandusky’s alleged crimes. Nearly all the reports involve someone reporting something to a superior within the institution. In many cases, this was perfectly legal. Like many, Paterno deferred to the institution, its procedures, and its “experts.”

Penn State is a formidable institution on many levels. As Michael Berube recently noted, “Penn State’s academic departments, from English to sociology to anthropology were ranked among the top 10 universities in a survey of academic reputation released by the National Research Council earlier this year—the first such report since 1995” (Berube, 2011). Much of Penn State’s academic growth went hand in hand with the dramatic success of Paterno and his team. The Washington Post article quoted above called Penn State’s football team “a kind of gross national product.” In tandem with Paterno’s more than 60-year tenure, the formerly rural campus “grew into a public research university with $4.6 billion in revenue and buildings as large as airplane hangers.” Paterno had the most wins of any college coach in history. The night he was fired students took to the streets in a full-blown riot.

The Penn State incident has much to teach us about the state of higher education today. Perhaps most important, it throws into starkest relief the limits of “excellence” as an orienting disposition. To return to Readings above, the rise of “excellence” has eclipsed the universities’ traditional concerns with culture and value. University administrators today do no more than manage various markets for excellence. These include those around academic quality, student satisfaction, and collegiate athletics. The quest for excellence means handing over individual value judgments to various markets that can be administered from a distance. Indeed, nonacademic administrators today—the fastest-growing labor segment at universities in the United States—are not capable of making such judgments. The “marketplace of ideas” has become a marketplace of shifting metrics. As Readings notes, there is simply no longer any “idea” of the university. It has lost all content.

That moral, ethical, and human judgments were eclipsed or suspended for a time here should prove none too surprising. Recall Joe Paterno’s comment about backing away and turning the case over to “some other people” who had more expertise and knew university policy. Recall the university students rioting over his dismissal—not Sandusky’s crimes. Such responses can only have meaning in an ethically bankrupt system—one where value judgments have systematically been marginalized. Universities today can claim to be “excellent” places. They cannot claim to be moral ones.

As Berube tells us, the university’s president has promised to appoint an ethic’s officer. Here, too, judgments seem outsourced to an administrative arm. Berube is quite right to comment, “It is entirely conceivable that when confronted by an issue with powerful repercussions for university business (whether with regard to athletics or to drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale), an ethics officer will over advice that tries to protect the university—and its leadership—from damaging public scrutiny. And again no one will know until its too late.” As Berube notes, the “top-down” nature of university life is evident here—the consolidation of administrative power and the slow erosion of faculty governance. While he is writing about Penn State, these tendencies are of course evident in higher education as a whole today.

In this short article, I have tried to highlight what has been lost in the rise of nonacademic administration, the managed university, and the accompanying discourse of “excellence.” The impulse to judge has been supplanted by the impulse to manage. Of course, the old-fashioned notion of universities as repositories of culture and value had serious problems—not the least of which, they were often systematically exclusionary. Yet the Penn State scandal reminds us what happens when the very idea of a university is gutted—when it doesn’t stand for anything other than its own “excellence.” Rethinking the very idea of university today seems paramount.