The administration's Strategic Planning Task Force has just issued summaries of the strategic directions subcommittees' reports, and it is clear that, this time around, the administration is being much more subtle (more platitudes and meaningless jargon) than it was with the ill-fated UNM 2000.
That mission statement from the 1990s was so blatantly hostile to staff and especially faculty that the administration produced a second, streamlined version, which also quickly disappeared from view.
Why do we need to continually invest time and resources in these pointless "missions" and "plans," none of which ever have any impact on the real world? Well, presumably so that people such as Nancy Middlebrook, assistant to the provost, have something to do with their expensive (to the University) time and so that the administration has something impressive to throw in the faces of legislators and potential donors.
We could of course just say, "The mission of the University is to provide the best possible environment for learning and research at all levels," but what politician would be impressed by that? Anyway, it wouldn't be true; a more accurate statement might be: "The mission of the University is to present the best possible image of a successful University, while providing a winning basketball team."
The task force is made up mostly of administrators and of the few faculty on the committee, virtually all hold administrative posts. The nature of the strategic directions subcommittees betray the administrative point of view and suggest mightily that a number of important assumptions about the nature of the University have already been made.
So much for engaging "the entire campus and its many constituencies in a genuine conversation." I asked to be put on the task force as someone representing "the diverse viewpoints" the committee wanted, but, of course, I got no response, some viewpoints apparently being too diverse.
One of the subcommittee's viewpoints is "New Mexico Service":
"Serving New Mexico is central to the University's mission."
Who decided this? There are very many academics who feel that service to New Mexico or any other entity outside the University is entirely peripheral to the University's central mission of producing educated individuals, who might then serve the state. The task force is assuming a priori, and in contradiction to every traditional understanding of the University, that serving the economic and social interests of the state is somehow basic to our mission.
Finding ways to involve faculty, students and staff in community service and incorporating "service learning" in degree programs - I should reward my students for helping old Greeks? - and faculty evaluation are major steps on the road to the University as nothing more than a social service agency.
Ah, the diversity strategic direction. Ten years ago this would not even have been in the report, but it is now the accepted euphemism for dealing with issues of affirmative action and racial quotas, as the report itself reveals, linking a "campus-wide commitment to diversity" with "racism, harassment and discrimination." And who determined that "The University should promote multiculturalism rather than assimilation"?
There are certainly millions of Americans who believe that assimilation into a pluralistic culture, not an ethnic balkanization of the University and nation, should be our goal. And the following statement is certainly ominous: "we will need to begin a diversity consciousness raising process." I hope I'm assigned to a camp with good food.
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Of course, all of this diversity/ethnicity crap conflicts directly with our alleged commitment to academic excellence. How does one recruit and retain only the best students while simultaneously guaranteeing "diversity" (the correct quotas of minorities), not to mention winning football and basketball teams?
Is the University really prepared to turn away all those unprepared and disinterested lottery students and the funding their bodies represent? And get this: "Performance-based activities such as athletics . must not be allowed to devolve into a separate culture and community." Yeah, right.
The preeminence strategic direction: "The core mission of the University drives us to seek preeminence and impact." Well, a little honesty emerges, as the administration reveals why it focuses almost entirely on high-profile research and graduate programs to the detriment of undergraduate teaching.
I might have thought our core mission drives us to educate students, but how much preeminence and impact would that bring us?
The strategic direction on resources recognizes there is trouble on the campus, if somewhat backhandedly: "The University's successes have outstripped its resource base in many ways ." What a clever way to say that compensation for faculty and staff and attention to infrastructure have been a complete failure at UNM!
The situation is so bad that the report actually admits "a shortage of faculty and staff (often related to level of compensation)." Yet nowhere is the excellent and frequently above-national-average compensation of the central administration mentioned, the numbers of which have been growing for decades at a rate half as fast as that of faculty and staff.
But don't expect the University to start eliminating any of those dozens of useless vice presidents and associate provosts. The strategic direction on management and administration goes on and on about the necessity of improving our "management systems," which is barely disguised code for "hire more administrators."
But then, none of this means anything anyway, and nothing will change, regardless of how many reports are issued. The administration's, and thus the University's, priorities will remain the same: 1 Maintain the image of UNM as a preeminent research institution; 2 Increase the size and compensation of the administration; and 3 Try to get a basketball team into the Final Four.
Actually, there is in the report a goal - the only one - that the entire campus community would support: "Get serious about the availability and cost of campus parking."
