Should Service Institutions Be Run as Businesses?
I can see the appeal of Trump, but is it a good idea to apply business principles to service institutions?
For 3.5 years, I worked at an educational institution that was run like a business. And that was a nightmarish 3.5 years. There I was, teaching EVERYDAY in an overcrowded classroom that often did not have heat or air. In the summer, I sweated until the sweat pooled in my sandals. In the winter, it was cold enough for my fingers to shrivel. I knew the institution had heat and air, but for some reason, it was not turned on in our building. When I DEMANDED it at 7 months pregnant, I was promptly ignored. When I began to cancel classes because my swollen fingers had actually start to shrink with coldness, it was finally turned on. By then, it was too late. I had already gotten a nasty case of bronchitis, and the bronchitis caused me to give birth to my daughter almost a month earlier than her due date. I coughed, and the force of the coughing broke my water. I know that some babies come early, but she was so early that I did not have any breast milk. I had to formula feed, and that caused her stomach problems, and we had to change milk at least twice. In addition to the health problems, I noticed that the colleagues who were schmoozy with the administration HATED me. I could not understand why. I pretty much taught my classes, went to lunch with my colleagues, and sent my students to graduate school. Hey, I stay in my lane and do me, and that applies to work, too. I can say that because of myself and maybe two more professors, the school was growing. And that drew the ire of the president towards me. Once it was known that he hated me, all of his flunkies and those wanting to be his flunkies came for me, too. During my last year there, I began to actually fear for my life! But I’m a nerd: I never said that I am a coward! I was going to stay and fight them my way, but I had two children to think about and my health was beginning to decline. Over a year later, my left foot has not healed still from a very bad case of plantar fasciitis.
It has taken me a long time to get over those experiences at a so-called institution of higher learning. I wracked my brain -over and over again- trying to figure out what I’d done wrong to those people. When a blank came up, I would start the process all over again. It was frustrating. I always thought that this institution ran like a degree factory, then I would dismiss that thought. A college run like a degree factory? Get out of here! Then, one day, I didn’t dismiss this. I let my creative mind take its course: the president was the “big boss,” the dean of academic affairs was the harassing supervisor, the professors were no more than the workers, the student numbers were the “products,” and the people in the administration building were secretaries and other front office personnel who learned to watch the workers and tell everything. When we let class out early, when we missed work, or even when we were late. Anything to help the boss crack the whip over us workers. With the faculty senate conveniently dissolved and with presidential loyalists in each department, the president’s iron-clad rule was free to reign. He governed through fear, kept his presidency through the loyalists who tattled and spied, and often threatened others with a loss of job for apparently no explanation. Oh, but I was a problem! Yes, I was. I’m from the hurricane zone. Don’t threaten me with the loss of everything, because I have literally lived through and seen others live through the loss of everything. And they bounced back. In short, don’t ever -in your long-legged life — try to control me with a paycheck. It’s not going to work. Period. And for this institution, though I did my job and kept clear of politics, I was a heretic who needed to be burned at some kind of stake.
As I reflected upon this, I started to think about all of the cuts the president made into the institution and its programs when he arrived in 1993: no math major, no driver’s education classes, no music major (No music at an HBCU?), no computer science major, no history major, and no whiteboards. We were still using chalk. No flowers on campus grounds, no updates to the classroom buildings, four people to a room in the dormitories, no on-campus summer school classes, and no direct deposit. The things we had were the module system for the ENTIRE SCHOOL. We had class every day. Students were admitted four times per year. We were not allowed to have adjuncts, so our classes were overcrowded. The average general education class was at least 30 students with only 25 chairs. Moreover, the President became superangry with me when I split up classes. I am an English professor — not a baby sitter of somebody else’s money — and with 45 students, I needed some time to grade papers. We only had 8 weeks. We were never paid overage pay for the student head count or the amount of classes taught. I once taught 6 classes in one semester PREGNANT with no overage pay. We taught day and night classes with no night-time differentials. In addition to being teaching robots who babysat the government money, we were expected to attend all monthly meetings, serve on committees, and attend Fall Convocation and spring graduation (always on a Sunday) in full regalia. Oh, he also pushed grant writing as a way to sustain the school economically.
In spite of all of this, I did a good job. When I took office as English Coordinator (for which I received no course release or extra pay), the department ran so smoothly that other colleagues began to accuse me of scheduling in a way to encourage students to graduate early and leave other majors. There were some colleagues who asked to work for me, because I personally told all of the professors in our department to take Fridays off, and since the president hated me anyway, they could blame it on me. It was the humane thing to do. In addition to blowing a gasket at that decision, the president was also angry at my early graduation numbers and the number of students who were getting two degrees. One of his flunkies said at a faculty meeting that our degree was just way too easy, and that’s the reason why our students were getting two degrees. Yeah, it had nothing to do with the hours I put in at home with a laptop in front of my face, the extra website that I constructed to help our students study on an 8-week schedule, or the hours I spent advising and mentoring our majors. None of that mattered, apparently. I was to blame. Just me.
With all of this foolishness on my brain for a year, I began to look around on the Internet. I typed in words like, “long-term profit accountancy;” “extreme cost-saving methods, accountancy, and long-term profit.” Now, while one of the most famous essays that we teaching in Composition is “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr, I can honestly say that it helped me to recover at last. Thanks to these Google searches, I finally understood why people hated me so much at that institution.
Not only did it help me heal, it also showed me how Donald Trump can be appealing to people who are so far below his economic bracket that he cannot even see them. The magic Google phrase— at least for me — was “long-run profit-maximizing decision.” With these kinds of difficult of phrases (for those of us outside of economics), and the seemingly tangible pay-offs to show for it, Trump and people like him seem smart linguistically and materially. Americans cannot make the distinction between good grammar and intelligence, yet. With no micro or macroeconomics classes to inform us, business people may as well be speaking Greek, but it “sounds” intelligent. Normally, when we do not understand something, we hate it. But since Trump has money, something that we all need in a capitalist economy, we tend to tolerate his racism/sexism/classism, that garish orange tan, and the ridiculous hair cut that would not withstand a blizzard or strong rain storm! Many of us may dislike Trump, but wouldn’t it be nice to have Trump’s money, we reason.
As a professor who BELIEVES in service, all of my Google searching and Cliff’s Note readings made me ask another question: should service institutions be run like companies? Service institutions include schools, hospitals, nursing homes, fire and police departments, etc. Service institutions are the things that help make life “go,” and they are not necessarily the highest-paying jobs or entities that make a ton of profit. What price tag can we put on a college freshman’s potential? The life that a fireman saves may go on to find a cure for AIDS. And while the police has drawn the ire of respective African American communities, I need them to protect the property that I and my husband work so very hard for (the fact that they do not protect Black lives or Black property to the same degree that they protect white lives and properties is part of the history behind the antagonism, but that’s another post).
Once I began learning about these things, I noticed something about the language: it was all about factories and medium-sized companies. As an English major, I take issue with that. People are not “healthcare consumers:” they are patients in need of care. To say that people are “healthcare consumers” implies that we have our choice of sicknesses. It’s like saying we wake up in the morning and say, “Hummm. Should I get the common cold or strep throat today?” We do not. Students are also not consumers. I know that many administrations pitch education that way in order to get numbers up, but they are not. Education is the boots that hold those proverbial bootstraps! And by God, professors are not mere factory workers. Many of us put more than a decade into our educations, not knowing what the payoff will be, but we go on anyway because we are passionate about our disciplines. I know that I’m a fat brown lady from the Piney Woods Mississippi, and my love of Shakespeare, Browning (Elizabeth and Robert), Tennyson, Woolf, and other British writers may seem out of place or just downright weird, but I LOVE British and Africana literature. And I don’t care who doesn’t like that I love those things. Can introducing HBCU students to William Blake and having them understand the yearning/hesitancy of Thel be quantified? I say, “No,” and that is one reason why English professors are horribly disrespected and even called “useless” on these campuses.
“Long term profit maximization,” “economies of scale,” “diseconomies of scale”…These are phrases that I have come to learn since I walked away from a tenure-track, full-time position. While Trump may be appealing to his followers, it does not feel good to live with or work for a leader who does not see humanity. All decisions are run through the accountant, and “workers” are just seen as so many numbers on a spreadsheet. In a service setting, this can become downright inhumane. Denying a pregnant woman heat and air while she teaches to students who desperately need the knowledge is inhumane. You wonder if the leader can see you. The truth is, they don’t. You are a salary, and your salary is just another expenditure. To lose your work means that such a leader will simply give your workload to somebody else or split it between two others, not hire anyone, and pat himself on the back for inching closer to a perfect “economies of scale.”
This elevation of the leader and his accountant to Godlike status is inhumane to the people who work there and inhumane to the people who come to those places for much-needed service or even respite. It becomes a place where the laws are not made to serve the people, but the people — all of them — are made to serve the law. “Economies of scale,” when taken too far, have no place at service institutions as THE way. Yes, service institutions bleed funds sometimes. Yes, service institutions need an occasional tourniquet. But if Americans have decided that service institutions are not factories or stores, if we have determined that they are not for profit, why are we satisfied when leaders of those institutions behave as if they are?
As always, if you like this article, clap back (don’t diss me! Clap the little hands on the bottom). This time, though, you can’t enroll in my class. This comes from my professor’s diary.
