(Original publication date October 14, 2009)

Changes in the academic workplace come about as a consequence of clearly understood and clearly intended managerial, corporate, and political initiatives with the explicit intention of inducing the faculty to relinquish certain values and practices. Individually and collectively, faculty members make choices when they adopt new organizational cultures. -Marc Bosquet, How the University Works (10).

At a conference I attended this past spring I was chatting with a young Canadian sociologist  whose scholarship focuses on labor organization in North America and Europe’s technology industries. The conversation turned to our own academic workplaces, and I described to him the situation at FAU–how top university administrators have hired an outside consultant with expertise in “enterprise resource planning.” He looked at me with moderate alarm. “So, you’re going to be re-engineered?” “It certainly looks like that’s where we’re headed,” I replied.

No information I’ve encountered since then has convinced me otherwise, and the evidence available is worthy of our consideration. Susan Clemmons’ credentials suggest how she has spent most of her professional life advising companies such as Burger King on how they can do more with less, while squeezing existing workers to produce more without putting in too much of a kick.  Granted, conducting research in the lab or crafting an article or lecture isn’t quite like serving up a burger and fries, but this has not prevented FAU administrators and trustees from being swept away with Clemmons’ promises of “visioning” and “change.”

Clemmons’ dissertation, The Impact of Information Technology on Organizations: A Study of Enterprise Resource Planning System Influences on Job Design and Organizational Culture, suggests her expertise in the relationship between employee sentiment, “re-engineering,” and “Enterprise Resource Planning”–or ERP. Reengineering and ERP are the information age successors to the time and motion studies termed “scientific management” that Frederick Taylor imposed on factory workers a century ago. “Engineering” here refers not to the creation or manipulation of mechanical or electronic elements but rather of work processes and organizational structures. This orientation toward the workplace has since become ingrained in management thinking and practice. Indeed, Taylor’s notion of managerial surveillance and control toward increased worker productivity at the expense of worker skill and autonomy endures in ERP. Such practices have grave implications for academicians, who, like their artisan forebears, have become accustomed to a significant degree of autonomy over their work and work practices.

The deployment of ERP across service industries in the late 1980s and early 1990s resulted in waves of layoffs, yet its promise of increasing productivity remained unfulfilled. Further, as workers were shed management typically enlarged its ranks and power. As Century Foundation fellow and Financial Times correspondent Simon Head argues in his 2003 book, The New Ruthless Economy: Work and Power in the Digital Age, technology itself is a way of life–or, more specifically, a  way of work spanning from the “Fordist” (mass production) era to the present information age.

For the tens of millions of Americans who work in offices and factories, this is the definition of technology that counts. From the early 1990s onward, the twin phenomena of “reengineering” and “enterprise resource planning” have been prime examples of workplace practices built around new information technologies. Relying on computers and their attendant software, reengineering and ERP automate, simplify, join together, and speed up business processes. Reengineering and ERP do this by imposing upon those processes the standardization, measurement, and control of the old industrial assembly line. (4-5)

ERP has since become commonplace in most service industries. Since the early 1990s

reengineers have steadily widened the scope and ambition of their activities to include sales, marketing, customer relations, accounting, personnel management, and even medicine — “managed care” being essentially the reengineering of health care. For the 80 percent of Americans now employed in these service occupations, reengineering in its various forms has become a dominant force in their working lives. (5)

The sociologist Stanley Aronowitz remarked several years ago that a faculty position was “the last good job in America,” and reflecting on the surface value of that observation this perhaps all seems rather far-fetched. But the historical record is rife with examples of craft guilds and entire occupations overcome by industrialization and automation, and as the ranks of administrators grow while faculty decline those of us in higher education would be remiss to consider ourselves wholly immune from such practices, as the five colleagues laid off from FAU’s College of Engineering will attest.

Administrators have repeatedly proclaimed how with the help of Susan Clemmons, “change” will be ushered in, and soon Florida Atlantic will look like a vastly different institution. “Your current situation has presented an opportunity to use a systemic approach to change,” Clemmons gushed to FAU Provost John Pritchett and Vice President for Finance Ken Jessell via email in early March as her lucrative consulting deal was coming to fruition. “I applaud your insight in recognizing the daunting task of successful and sustainable change.”

The operative word here, “change,” is the preferred term used by ERP consultants in lieu of “restructuring,” or “downsizing,” which rightly sets off alarm bells among the rank and file, thereby greatly hampering such efforts. Similarly, the “vision” buzzword suggests a degree of shared governance and worker empowerment, but in management’s view these are acceptable only if such energy is properly channeled into a plan with largely predetermined ends.

Particularly appealing for Frank Brogan and his successor is how ERP provides upper-level administration (presidents, vice presidents, provosts) with an increasingly powerful top-down hierarchical form of surveillance, measurement, and control of middle management and workers, in this case administrators further down the totem pole (deans, assistant deans, department heads), and their subordinate faculty and staff. ERP’s privileging of efficiency and productivity over all else (e.g. producing credit hours, pulling in grant money) also provides a basis and rationale for the severances which those lesser university administrators will eventually be called on to carry out. Project Vision’s intent and design should also be of enduring interest to faculty throughout Florida since one of its early proponents is now overseeing Florida’s entire State University System.

The FAU administration is well aware that it cannot simply terminate tenured faculty because the Collective Bargaining Agreement, however flawed, stands in the way. It must therefore reorganize the Colleges and Departments in some fashion whereby the targeted faculty members–perhaps those who may be deemed “too strident” or are otherwise simply superfluous under reorganization–are sequestered for intimidation and possible elimination. (Assistant professors and instructors have another disciplinary cudgel hanging over their heads, termed “non-reappointment.”)

There have at times been instances of a renewed sense of empowerment and a broad revulsion among faculty against the administration’s actions–such as what took place in the College of Engineering’s Faculty Meeting on October 2 and the Faculty Senate on June 5–but faculty governance at FAU (or any other university, for that matter) will work to uphold the interests of faculty members only to the extent we are actively involved, and the presence and influence of administrators often makes forthright democratic exchange difficult.

UFF is the only body capable of organizing and exercising a genuinely independent voice for faculty rights at the workplace in this and many other situations, which is exactly why on many occasions the administration dispatches its bevy of attorneys to deal with us. Yet it is a voluntary organization that cannot act successfully on your behalf without your support, and as FAU administrators moves forward with their plans that will likely alter the very nature of our working conditions and livelihoods, that support is needed now more so than ever. Please consider joining and becoming involved in your UFF-FAU chapter today.

In solidarity,

James Tracy
UFF-FAU President