Or, the committee to review the committee to review has reviewed the review and issued its review review.
My union’s University Budget and Priorities Committee, which I am part of, just put out a new report on Rutgers’s Responsibility Center Management budgeting system: Reviewing the RCM Review: What Five Years Taught Rutgers About a Broken Budget System. Some time last year I imagined that committee doing a full-scale independent investigation of this baleful budgetary scheme, which has abetted privatization and austerity at countless universities. But the work was slow getting going, and in the meantime something weird happened: management did it for us, sort of. A high-level committee of deans and vice presidents produced an RCM Review Report, issued in June, whose findings are as damning as the most radical university budget-critic could desire. It baldly concludes that the budget model is bad for “Ph.D. education, arts and humanities, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and those [initiatives] that support students or further the university’s public mission.” In other words, almost every worthwhile goal of the university; elsewhere the report notes that the sciences are ill-served too.
Of course, that was not how management treated the results of its own proceedings: the report has been left to sit quietly, with no apparent change in the RCM machinery. So our union committee has produced a Review of the Review to highlight for the wider university public just how dire the effects of this machinery have been.
Though some of the dysfunction is particular to Rutgers, I hope our work might be more widely useful to faculty and other activists at universities, whether or not their institutions use RCM. RCM matters because it formalizes a now-familiar template for higher education: academic units must supposedly pay their own way, competing with one another for revenue—especially tuition revenue—and enduring constant pressure to generate “entrepreneurial” initiatives to make up for deficits or fund growth. At the same time central management appropriates a hefty slice of revenues for itself, ostensibly to pay for shared infrastructure but in fact largely to spend on management priorities. An elaborate performance of budget accountability for academics masks management’s own unaccountability.
The assumptions behind this system are the assumptions used to justify privatization everywhere: public funding is fixed or diminishing; ever-rising tuition and private funding can make up the difference; market “discipline” is the best way to force complacent academics to shape up. These are all part of what Chris Newfield calls the “Great Mistake” in his excellent book on the movement that, by redefining public education as a private good, has sent public colleges and universities on a “doom cycle” of ever-diminishing quality and legitimacy. The lesson of our RCM Review Review is that the budgetary logic used to produce and justify this privatization cycle is plainly a failure, even on its own terms, and almost nobody—even in management’s ranks—likes it or believes that it works. Yet this failure hides in plain sight so long as nobody actually compares its promised benefits to its results.
And there is a great deal of hiding. The myth of the entrepreneurial “responsibility center” is created through a series of black-box decisions about how to divide up tuition dollars, state funds, and even federal grants (via the redistribution of indirect cost recovery funds). The harsh reality of the bottom line for individual academic units—never more harsh than in the last two years, when these unit-level budgets were the justification for terminating academic staff and freezing hiring—is an illusion. This illusion keeps faculty busy and desperate, while hundreds of millions of dollars are diverted away from the core academic mission and used instead to pay for executive salaries ($71 million total management salary outlay in 2020, according to IPEDS reports), debt service ($184 million budgeted for FY2022), athletics deficits ($73 million in 2020, according to the best reports), and who knows what else.
I am the last person to believe that shining a light on malfeasance will magically make it go away. But at the very least, faculty can stop deferring to the pretended financial expertise of management and learn to regard their department and university budgets not as hard numerical fact but as rhetorical instruments in a struggle over how to use the university’s resources.