COMMENTARY: Holloway's stakeholder address is problematically performative
Leave it to University President Jonathan Holloway to speak for 45 minutes and say virtually nothing important. Holloway's stakeholder address on Tuesday offered a checklist of successes targeted at donors: increased interest in Rutgers from high school students, growing donations from alumni and research successes.
His goal, he said to his audience, was to show that through the University, "we are doing the work to make New Jersey, the country and the world, a better place."
What he didn't say was that much of this is happening despite Holloway and the Board of Governors's austerity agenda and their use of a contrived budget crisis to impose cuts on faculty and students, which includes slashing classes to possibly force larger class sizes so that the administration can protect the University's financial reserves built up during the pandemic.
Holloway has spent much of his three years as the University's leader offering dueling narratives: One in which Rutgers is building on success after success and a second in which we are in perpetual crisis.
The success narrative is not untrue, but it is little more than a pap for donors. The crisis narrative, in which he paints a picture of budget shortfalls, is of more concern because it has allowed him to advocate publicly for cutbacks in spending, justify an increase in student tuition and fees and demonize adjunct and full-time faculty as greedy and posing a threat to Rutgers' fiscal health.
This austerity agenda prioritizes brand (through big-time sports) and investments at the expense of Rutgers' primary mission: educating students and allowing its world-class faculty to conduct research and create, not just in the sciences but also in the humanities and arts. The administration claims they are being fiscally responsible, but they are actually shifting responsibility for disputed budget shortfalls from upper administration and the University football program onto the people who make this University work.
In June, the University Board of Governors approved a 6 percent tuition and fee hike — on top of a 2.9 percent increase in 2022 — and increases in meal-plan costs and housing, meaning "the typical in-state arts and sciences undergraduate will pay an average of $387 more per semester for tuition, from $6,450 to $6,837. Mandatory fees will increase about $100 per semester for those students, according to the University."
More recently, there are reports from across the University that classes with historically lower enrollment rates are being preemptively canceled — a move that hurts students by restricting their choices and limiting access to classes that might be necessary for graduation.
These moves come in response to the historic gains we won during our five-day faculty strike. Still, they are also part of a larger corporate, neoliberal university model that is quickly taking over higher education. It prioritizes profit and investment and sacrifices areas of study that may not generate grants or attract smaller numbers of students.
At West Virginia University, 28 academic programs are being eliminated, including "all of its foreign language degree programs and its math graduate degree programs, among other offerings."
Other schools in other states — in Wisconsin, Florida and elsewhere — have either tried to or have done the same, targeting an array of programs that they say do not contribute to the bottom line that students need.
Marymount University also announced in February that it was cutting "majors in art, economics, English, history, mathematics, philosophy, secondary education, sociology, and theology and religious studies, and an M.A. in English and humanities. The majors have relatively few students enrolled, the university said."
While Rutgers has not gone down this route, we should be wary of the kind of austerity arguments that have been used by Holloway and the Board of Governors to justify tuition hikes and program cuts because these arguments are built on the same kind of internal logic that is doing so much damage elsewhere.
Rutgers has the money. It has a healthy endowment and multiple reserve accounts that have been growing in recent years. It is taking in more than it is spending, and yet it has opted to increase costs for students, find ways to cut staff and blame this on the contracts we won in the spring. Contracts that were historic but fair and that were paid for by more than $50 million in additional state funding as calculated by Union staff members.
The salary increases that we demanded, fought for and were agreed to by Rutgers management were needed to address stark imbalances in how adjuncts and graduate workers were paid and to allow wages for non-tenure-track and full-time faculty to exceed inflation. Even now, adjunct faculty (now called lecturers) might teach as many as six classes in a year and earn between approximately $45,000 to $60,000 — barely enough to survive in this region and far less than what our labor is worth.
This is typical of the neoliberal model, which for years has attempted to make workers feel ashamed about any gains they make, even as upper management and their governing boards have raked in profits and dividends. This has been awful for workers in all industries. Still, this ruthless commitment to the bottom line in higher ed contradicts the values Rutgers and other major research universities are supposed to hold.
Rutgers needs to do a U-turn on both the tuition hike and its scheduling cuts to make student learning and faculty research the centerpiece of its mission. Rutgers can lead a national movement that fights back against the corporate raiders who see higher education as just another revenue source. Its stakeholders — students, faculty, parents and alumni — deserve as much.
Forget what Holloway said. Pay attention to what he does.
Hank Kalet is a part-time lecturer in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies and the vice president of the Rutgers—New Brunswick Adjunct Faculty Union, PTLFC-AAUP-AFT.
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