Book review: Whatever It Is, I'm Against It

Working in academia can be a really frustrating experience. Don't get me wrong. It's a great job. But there are some seriously frustrating aspects to it. One of those is the academic bureaucracy and bullshit work. Another is that getting meaningful change is a little like turning a supertanker. You need to have an excessive amount of patience, because nothing changes quickly.

That is essentially the theme underlying Brian Rosenberg's book Whatever It Is, I'm Against It, which I just finished reading. Rosenberg is former president at Macalester College in the US, a position he held for 17 years, so is well placed to talk about intransigence and inertia in academia. These are serious problems, and they run deep throughout the industry. As Rosenberg notes early in the book:

The resistance to anything like serious change is profound. By "change" I don't mean the addition of yet another program or the alteration of a graduation requirement, but something that is truly transformational and affects the way we do our work on a deep level.

The book starts by making the case for change. The industry faces both demographic and pedagogical challenges, and the pandemic and technological change have simply doubled down on those challenges. Then, Rosenberg turns to outlining a number of factors that contribute to the resistance to change. None of these will surprise any reader with a passing familiarity with higher education. The culprits are a mixture of institutional complacency, resistance to change from presidents, faculty with loyalties split between their institution and their discipline, shared governance (with faculty having a large amount of decision-making power), strategic planning processes, and tenure. Not all of these are features of the higher education landscape in New Zealand (shared governance is limited, and tenure is non-existent), and yet the problems described in the book apply as much in New Zealand as they do in the US (which is where the vast majority of the examples that Rosenberg uses are drawn from).

Rosenberg resists the urge to try and rank the various contributing factors in any order of importance, which is just as well. It seems likely that the causes are over-determined, even with that small set of factors. Nevertheless, a larger fraction of the book is devoted to discussing tenure than is probably warranted. That chapter came across a more of a general complaint about tenure (not surprising, coming from a former university president), than a tightly argued explanation for the contribution of tenure to resistance to change in higher education. The remainder of the book was much better in that respect.

I especially liked the section on strategic planning, which highlighted that every university or college wants to argue that they are distinctive, and yet by arguing their distinctiveness they really demonstrate that they are so much the same. And this bit made me cringe:

Every institution in search of enrollment and revenue, it seems, is looking to move somehow into the world of online education, but in doing so they are stepping into the world of bigger, better-known, more well-funded providers or contracting with for-profit online program managers, who take up to 50 percent of online revenue and have a less than admirable history...

So many universities seem to think that they can be distinctive by moving more education into online modes. And yet, commoditising education in that way will simply lead to greater competition, lowering prices until only the lowest cost operator is left. Most universities will not be the last institution standing, and none of them seem to understand it. And that is in spite of the increasing number of university council or governing board members with business experience. Anyway, I digress.

I enjoyed this book, but not for the reasons that I expected before I read it. I was anticipating more micro-level stories of resistance at the level of individual faculty and within departments (which I have seen first-hand). Instead, the resistance that Rosenberg was most concerned with was resistance to change at the institutional level. That reflects Rosenberg's background and extensive industry experience, and for that reason alone this is an informative book to read, if you are interested in the challenges and impediments to change in higher education generally. Rosenberg has clearly had a lot of frustrating experiences as an academic administrator. I hope that he found the writing of this book cathartic. It certainly seems like it was.