University Power Structures

How to exploit them

Welcome to Science with Shrike! Today we continue the previous discussion on university power structures, and nuances to the power structures that are missed by many would-be reformers of higher ed. Skip to the end if you just want the action steps.

University Power Structures

Especially when fighting the culture war, many people look at the liberal bent of faculty and conclude they are the enemy, and must be fixed. The fundamental problem is that there are not enough conservative faculty to fill the vacancies that would be created by shipping even just the neo-Marxists to Mars. And ruling by legislative/executive fiat needs decades or more to consolidate power. This also assumes that people smart enough to outcompete the others to become professors are not smart enough to thwart legislative and executive actions.

But all the faculty do not need to be the enemy. The neo-Marxists can be isolated and their power broken first. That’s step 1. Increasing the number of right-wing faculty and or conservative faculty is a decades-long endeavor because you need to find and train enough qualified right-wing people who want to be faculty. Thankfully, it’s not required to fix the universities, especially if their natural fault lines are exploited.

The university power landscape is split into five large groups. The students (and their parents) wield a small bit of power. They can force some changes, but usually the students are pawns used by one of the other power structures that agrees with their proposed changes.

The bureaucrats (staff) wield a medium amount of power. Most of this is in implementing decisions and interpreting rules. Certain bureaucrats (Environmental Health & Safety, Animal Care and Use, Information Technology, Purchasing, Grants Officers) have a lot of power over individual faculty because they can interpret rules against them. Faculty who are too busy and/or don’t want to fight with them, often give them power by deferring to them. And the power goes to some of their heads.

The faculty wield a medium amount of power. Most of this power is soft power (like through faculty senates) because giving faculty soft power makes the university run smoother and cuts down on complaints from faculty. The faculty do have hard power because they are the revenue generators for the college and have tenure, but most faculty are allergic to using hard power. This is also why the university provides some soft power to faculty—faculty don’t want to lose it. The university further provides bureaucrats to whom the faculty can delegate power if they are too busy or don’t care. These (not tenure revocation) are the real tools that keep faculty in line.

The donors wield a reasonable amount of power. This was observed when they forced out Claudine Gay at Harvard over the plagiarism issues. But it has to be a newsworthy scandal before they get involved. A lot of this is behind the scenes and done by telling the administrators what to do.

The administrators wield the most power. These are the chairs, deans, provosts, presidents, chancellors, and their associate positions. They control the bureaucrats and buy the faculty off with soft power tools and promises of “shared governance” (aka admin makes the rules, faculty do the work to make the rules practical). The neo-Marxist capture of administrative positions is what accelerated their power over universities. This is the area where Trustees (and state legislators) are in the strongest position to make changes because removing administrators from their positions does not require tenure hearings. And at many institutions, the administrators are neo-Marxists unless proven otherwise.

It is also worth mentioning that like all large corporations, universities are risk-averse organizations that find the Longhouse model of power best suits their needs. In the Longhouse model, responsibility is distributed, risk is avoided, decisions require a lot of talking and “consensus”, and any kind of ambition, initiative or reform that threatens the status quo (even when it benefits the organization) is not tolerated. Hence why most university presidents and provosts lack a spine. Good or bad, the Longhouse model is effective, especially in a university setting whose ideals include “shared governance” or “faculty governance”, the love of talking, and an allergy to decisive actions.

Tensions in the power structures

These different power structures have distinct goals. What follows are generalizations of the power structures. Shrike estimates that this applies to 50-70% of the populations. So there are exceptions. But if you are working at scale, best to target the largest cohorts.

In general, students want standards lowered, education to be entertainment, student loans forgiven, no deportations/visa revocations, and the occasional cause celebre of the week. From the point of view of exploiting tensions in power structures, aligning one’s goals with “helping students” is a strong frame. If it advances something put forward by student government, or something cried about a lot in the student paper, bringing students into it (on your side) is a moral high ground maneuver.

All student protests are a smokescreen and tool for the real power players. So better to focus on the real power players and the conflict between the other groups that the protests reveal instead of worrying about any protests themselves. The protests are ineffective without help behind the scenes.

The donors are also on the outside. They typically want the university to share their values, so the media campaigns against universities are effective in mobilizing pressure from the donors as long as that media campaign reaches the donors and aligns with their values. We’ll lump state governance in here, since they have some control over the Trustees. The faculty will be quick to tell them to pound sand, but the administrators will listen and try to mollify. But keep in mind the administrators just want the problem to go away.

The bureaucrats are the enforcers of the Longhouse. They like their power. The True Believers in their ranks think they are enforcing the Holy State (or Federal) laws against the potentially unscrupulous faculty and students, and without them the university would Lose All Funding and Accreditation. They are overzealous at times in forcing others to comply with the rules, enjoy their own interpretation of the rules, and are risk-averse. The administrators are gods to them. The faculty, they resent.

The faculty are a disorganized mess who generally want to do their own thing and be left alone. They will be vocal about some ideas, but many of those just want to be heard, acknowledged and validated. Paperwork is the part they like the least. Threatening tenure and academic freedom are the two fastest ways to get action out of the faculty. Faculty are most often at odds with the administrators over anything and everything. Bureaucrats are a mixed bag. The ones that do things for them are great, the ones who impose extra burdens or want 10 forms signed out to justify to HR why you want to hire this student, or buy this piece of equipment are hated.

The administrators are the main gatekeepers and drivers of the university. All of the “faculty governance” and “shared governance” is a show. There is some faculty input, but the administrators get most of their way, most of the time. Faculty are a nuisance who must be placated. The bureaucrats are their helpers, as long as they do their jobs. Donors and students get managed similar to faculty, but with more “listening” and validation. On one hand, leadership and managing multiple stakeholders is a real challenge. On the other hand, the power goes to too many administrators’ heads. Capture of the administrative positions is what dictates the ethos of the university. For whatever reason, this is the part that is missed by the federal government and the right wing reformers. Top-down solutions last as long as the administrator, but the cultural changes can last much longer.

Challenges With Traditional Ways of Reforming Universities

The traditional view of “reforming the universities” is ‘pass laws to regulate what faculty can do and teach, and make it easier to fire them’.

This approach is retarded.

Attacking tenure and academic freedom because you mistake universities for a McDonald’s.

While this is the standard business approach, it fails to recognize the differences in power structures between academia and business. Worse, it unites the various power factions into a cohesive whole against the people making the changes.

Instead, approaches that exploit natural fault lines in the universities and align stake-holders with those wanting to make the changes is what works long-term.

Texas is a good case study. The bill against tenure (SB18 from the previous legislative session) motivates and drives even the laziest faculty member to activism, and blurs any distinctions between the factions. In contrast, the bill against DEI (SB17) split all of the stakeholders by changing the Holy Rules for the bureaucrats, and by making DEI the risk-on position. It is the latter part (that bureaucrats and administrators now have to be careful about DEI) that upended the risk calculus. Where before bureaucrats were scared of being called racist for denying a DEI thing, now it is their duty to deny them. Everyone who thought the DEI stuff was nonsense or taken to an extreme now have legal cover to back off from it. It also stopped the university from ramming DEI down everyone’s throats with a centralized approach. This was an effective law because it split factions against each other, instead of uniting them.

This is why attacking academic freedom and tenure are losing issues when it comes to academia. Sure, the common voter doesn’t care about these issues, and ‘let us fire the bad teachers’ sounds reasonable to them. No one tells them that universities are allergic to firing people, tenure or not. But when it comes to dealing with the university itself, going after tenure and academic freedom are non-starters. Tenure is table-stakes to recruit any successful faculty member because we could 2-3x our salaries if we wanted to work in industry without tenure, and the winners expect tenure. Also, the Longhouse is well set up to remove people without the violence of firing them, so fighting tenure wastes your time and energy.

All of the faculty unite against tenure attacks. Liberal, neo-Marxist, conservative, you give them all common ground. This builds a coalition, and the neo-Marxists will abuse this coalition to push their agenda when they have power. This is why short-term efforts, while a promising start, need long-term solutions—if the job isn’t done right, you accelerate the neo-Marxist timeline.

Academic freedom is another losing issue against academics. If we wanted to be told what to teach, we’d work for industry at 2-3x the salary. Worse, losing academic freedom helps the neo-Marxist goals. Once Trustees, or governors or whoever starts appointing the curriculum, adding DEI will go from ‘optional’ to ‘required’ the moment the neo-Marxists get power. Academic freedom is one reason why it was a long march through the institutions. And the lawmakers cannot write the laws clearly enough to eliminate DEI to keep this from happening in the future. They will get challenged in court, and some laws lose when they are too vague. But too specific, and small differences are enough to rebrand DEI to make it legal.

Making Lasting Changes to Universities

Instead of wasting time on these issues, the right is better served exploiting the natural tensions to isolate the neo-Marxists and to prevent them from wielding power against everyone else. This requires framing things in a way that a liberal professor can agree with, while highlighting the excesses of the neo-Marxists, and differentiating them from the neo-Marxists. Shrike cannot overemphasize that unless your goal is to burn it all down, you cannot run academia without the centrists and the liberal faculty. There are not enough conservative faculty.

There are key differences between the political groups. First, the neo-Marxists view everything as political action, and view the world through the lens of ‘oppressor/oppressed’. Victimhood is celebrated. They work as a group (more stigmergy than overt planning) to protect the others in their group, and promote their group regardless of competence or merit. The tenets become religious on a level that the classical liberals do not understand. Worse, vocal adherence to this religion is required of everyone. These are the parts the liberals dislike. But since liberals live in mortal fear of being accused of sexism or racism (Equal Opportunity Office and Title IX are two fast-tracks to being fired, tenure or not), they do not know how to push back without sounding discriminatory. In Texas, SB17 went a long ways towards making it acceptable to not adhere.

Larger than the political dimensions are the natural tensions between factions. Faculty and administrators are natural enemies, even if the administrators will never admit this. Trump’s EOs have united these two groups. This gives more power to the neo-Marxists because they’re the ones running the show in many places, they have the power structures capable of pushing back on it, and the normal faculty resistance to new things the neo-Marxists want gets washed away by working with administrators to navigate the EOs. The Trump administration has missed opportunities to increase the gulf between the faculty and administrators. Gaining defections to the Trump administration would help consolidate the cultural win, and lead to longer lasting change. By defections, Shrike does not mean ‘make them like the right-wing’, but ‘champion the same positions while disavowing the right-wing’.

The way to do this is to reward certain groups at the expense of others.

For example, the NIH indirect cost (IDC) rate cap was a botched attempt to limit money going to universities. NIH is not a total costs model, so faculty do not care what the IDC rate is. Everyone united behind ‘give the university more money’, especially as it seems that this money is leaving the biomedical science ecosystem. A better way forward would be to implement IDC rate caps on total cost awards (like DoD, and some NSF awards for example), and allow the faculty (PI) to spend the difference to advance the project. Now faculty are incentivized to support the rate caps because they get more money for their research out of it.

Even for NIH, the way to do this is to offer alternative, new awards, like perhaps an “R02” that allows more money in direct costs (maybe $350k/year as a modular budget), but has a capped F&A rate at 15%. If the funding pool is higher for these awards than the R01 (maybe payline is set to 8% for an R01, but increased to 16% for an R02), faculty will vote with their grant applications.

Instead of a second award, why not re-issue the R01 funding announcements with a 15% IDC cap? Because you want the faculty making the decision to apply for the lower IDC cap. Every time they choose an R02 over an R01, they are choosing against a higher IDC rate. Then when the universities and Democrats cry about reduced IDC returns, you can point out that the research faculty are making this choice, and give the numbers. Over time, the R02 funding pool increases and the R01 is decreased until it is phased out, and then you have one award with a 15% IDC cap.

One way to make some of the anti-DEI changes more lasting is to incentivize the faculty against the administrators. Instead of fighting tenure and academic freedom, stand by it. Ensure that violating DEI cannot be grounds for tenure revocation. In fact, give faculty senates more power at the administrators’ expense. The twist is that you give the faculty more explicit power to remove administrators (deans, provosts, presidents) from their administrative position if those administrators engage in DEI practices, or lower standards (eg grant too many grade appeals), etc.

Instead of demanding the Trustees control curriculum, just lean on them to appoint presidents and provosts who have a commitment to merit-based, colorblind education, and encourage them to purge the neo-Marxists from the ranks of the administration. This approach does not require tenure hearings or anything other than finding someone willing to serve as a dean AND not be a neo-Marxist. Every dean can say ‘no’ to a faculty search for a professor of biology whose research focus is ‘decolonizing biology education’. This will take time, but longer term approaches need to be pursued along with short term measures.

Building a stronger faculty/staff to media pipeline is another way to catch the more egregious abuses. Faculty and staff need an anonymous way to report violations of the law to parties outside of the university, who can either publicize the violations to a large audience or address it with governors and trustees. This should be more than just DEI infractions, but corruption in general. Then it can also be framed as an anti-corruption initiative instead of an anti-DEI initiative to faculty and staff. That frame is more palatable and people who hate the culture war may buy in to that. The media fixes problems in academia faster than individual faculty.

Along those lines, encouraging student journalism to expose university corruption would help. This could be funded by non-university groups, either as scholarships for reporting/investigating shady university activities, providing hidden cameras and legal training in their use and in FOIA requests, bylines on stories that used parts of their investigation, and promotion on social media. In Shrike’s experience, the media relies on email and FOIA, and misses most of the corruption because no one is on the ground talking to people in person. Student journalists solve that problem, and good investigative reporting should help their careers.

What do you think would be constructive ways of addressing concerns the Trump administration (and many voters) have with universities?