University of Illinois administration recently paid the Arthur Andersen consulting firm a half million dollars in return for a report that criticizes what it calls the university's "soft" stance against unions and "burdensome termination processes" for academic professional employees.
The report--called "Support Services Strategy," or "S3"--recommends ways of streamlining and modernizing administrative systems and procedures at all three campuses. Released in October 1998, the report is now available for review on the web at s3.ua.uillinois.edu. Academic professionals should read and respond to the report because it will eventually have a big effect on our working lives. UI President James Stukel has hired Tony Graziano, a former associate dean in engineering, as special assistant in charge of handling responses to the plan outlined in the report and coordinating the revision and implementation of the plan.
Academic professionals will welcome some of the specific points made in S3. For example, the report acknowledges our inequitable salary scales, poor evaluation procedures, and lack of career paths, and it recommends support programs such as flex time, telecommuting, and child care. (All of these ideas have been aired at brown-bag lunch gatherings sponsored by the Association of Academic Professionals, and many have circulated in Association literature. Look for the university to make short-term improvements in some of these areas in an effort, at least in part, to take issues away from the union movement. See AAP Brief #2 on the AAP web site: www.prairienet.org/aap/.)
However, the major thrust of S3 is hostile to the vital interests of academic professionals and to the educational mission of the university. The emphasis throughout is on making the university more corporate in its business functions. Traditional collegiality and solidarity among academic workers have no place in the brave new world of S3; rather, we are all slaves to the plan's radical "customer service" model for relations between units. Two inescapable features of the report belie its rhetoric of bottom-up empowerment and decentralization. One is a proposed new senior administrator, a "Chief Information Officer" for the university, who would confuse lines of reporting on the campuses and possibly bring the world-class academic computing at UIUC under the control of central administration. The other is a spooky chapter about "change management" that drips with contempt for the rank and file, who must be converted to the new ideology through a top-down propaganda campaign.