Teaching Thursday: The Crisis Classroom

A colleague sent along a call for papers for a volume on “the campus crisis toolkit” and edited by Lisa Di Bartolomeo and Kevin Gannon. I tried to ignore it, but after a bit of treadmill time (metaphorically and literally), I started to think about maybe submitting an abstract to the book that deals with the class that I taught on the UND Budget in 2018. I feel like I still have things to say about that class and my contribution could fit into the the editors’ goal of a publication that contributions “should map out the essay’s topic, context, arguments, and how it could assist faculty, staff, and/or students at institutions where similar issues/crises are in play.”

My argument would be as follows (I think):

Over the past century, higher education in the United States has become increasingly professionalized. On the one hand, this trend has undoubtedly improved the quality of instruction, the efficiency of campus operations, and opportunities for historically underrepresented groups. On the other hand, the professionalization of the college campus has contributed to faculty and students harboring a growing sense of alienation from the internal working of the university administration. During ordinary operations, the benefits of professionalization appear to outweigh the drawbacks, but crises tends to increase the sense of alienation on campus and the needs of the moment can lead to a hardening of boundaries between faculty, students, and administrators. When the crisis is financial, budgets and budgeting become uneven terrain for various stakeholders who often have unequal access to the complex language and processes essential for modern institutional budgeting. It is hardly surprising that the growing sense of permanent crisis at universities and colleges has corresponded with an increase in formula based budgeting models which further obscure financial decisions beneath layer of math, technical terminology, and seemingly automatic allocations. 

In 2018, the University of North Dakota labored under a painful series of budget cuts triggered by state financial shortfalls. These cuts extended across campus and made national headlines with the termination of the university’s high visibility women’s hockey program and successful music therapy degree. These cuts and the largely negative publicity that they generated bewildered and angered students and faculty alike. It stoked a sense of outrage which had been smoldering since the 2016 presidential elections, the nearby protests around the Dakota Access Pipeline, the naming of an awkward and unpopular figure, Mark Kennedy, as university president, and the implementation of a new MIRA-type budgeting process (Model for Incentive-based Resource Allocation). In the Department of History (now the Department of History and American Indian Studies) cuts and changes to budget across campus rubbed salt in the wound of losing our small, but successful graduate program. Elsewhere in the humanities, faculty struggled to preserve the century-old little magazine North Dakota Quarterly and its small, but dedicated staff.

In response to the sense of crisis, I decided to offer a class on the University of North Dakota Budget. The class was offered as a honor’s section of our department’s venerable History of North Dakota class and at the intermediate level. It was open to both honors and non-honors students and quickly enrolled close to 20 students. The class situated the contemporary budget crisis on the UND campus in both a national and historical context and took advantage of the timely appearance of a series of incisive books that sought to frame the national sense of crisis in higher education in historical, administrative, and ideological terms. Christopher Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) and David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendency of American Higher Education (2017) served as our textbooks. 

The class itself sought to bridge the technical gap between increasingly alienated faculty and students and administrative control over the budget. As part of this effort, the campus budget manager, a panel of department chairs, the university provost, a college dean, the vice president of research, a university system vice chancellor, and a state legislator visited the class and discussed the various levels of budgeting from the state and system wide allocations to the campus, college, and department. The students listened critically, asked challenging questions, and worked to situate the rhetoric, strategies, and trajectories presented by these speakers in a historical and ideological context. They also learned how and where to request data and information  These efforts informed the production of a small book titled Hawks, Hockey, and the Budget which they circulated to their friends, parents, and to the university administrators who contributed to the class. The book is a series of broad essays informed by local case studies. 

The goal of the class and the book was to develop a foundation for informed activism that transgressed the increasingly formal boundaries between the administration, students, and faculty. Indeed, some of the folks who learned of this course considered it risky challenge to existing realms of expertise on campus. The steepest curve in preparing the course was becoming familiar with the technical language associated with the budgeting process and the “byzantine” network of committees, offices, and formula that dictated the distribution of resources across campus. Students proved agile, however, and as their confidence with the terms and processes grew, so did their capacity for critique. 

Midway through the semester, we offered an additional one-credit course that focused on two venerable campus buildings slated for demolition at the end of the academic year. These buildings had suffered from “deferred maintenance” for many years, and preserved the scars of nearly a century of adaptive reuse. While this course embraced an anarchist praxis (as is documented elsewhere), it remained very much connected to the course on the UND budget. If the course on the UND Budget served a transgressive function by giving students access to administrators, processes and terminology used to manage the complexities of the university budget, this course gave students to a range of spaces that policy and practices usually restricted to faculty and staff. Thus students could explore (former) faculty offices, laboratory spaces, and maintenance and infrastructure areas in the two empty and abandoned buildings. Ultimately the destruction of these two campus buildings, whatever the financial and practical realities that guided their demise, offered a material analogy for the transformation of the institution. 

Providing a handful of students with the tools, language, and experience necessary to critique an on-campus crisis did not change the outcome of events. It did, however, demonstrate the viability of teaching about (and with) the university as a critical practice. Indeed, administrators who read the book that the students produced expressed some discomfort at the assertiveness of the student-authors, suggesting that content of the book caught them off-guard and defied their efforts to retain control of the narrative during their classroom visits. The book and their response alone suggests that this method of contextualizing on-campus crises had the potential to bridge the professional barriers that exist on campus and perhaps encourage (or at least support) a more expansive view of university governance.