Recently, at the end of a particularly bruising year, another professor and I found ourselves loitering together, draped in our bright and preposterous academic regalia, amid a long line of similarly be-gowned faculty who’d served one sort of semi-administrative role or other. She’s great, this colleague—a few years older than I, kind but also wry, patient of the inanities of institutional life, and possessed of a long-germinated talent for equability in the face of them. When I say we’re “colleagues” I mean it in the best senses: people who know each other from work and, in that odd little context, find a real and, I think, relieving, irony-rich enjoyment in each other’s company.
I’d just found out she was retiring, effective more or less immediately upon completion of the stately ceremony we were all about to walk through, and so I was busy congratulating and envying her. But then, thinking back on the accumulating wretchedness of the year, another question came to me. Less desperate?” She said something then I have thought about basically every day since, that’s come glowing back to me in the small hours, when the vision of my own stark failure to do the only things I ever really aspired to do in the gig—protect the labor of my great colleagues, protect the integrity of the mission that labor serves—sharpens into awful clarity.
You can’t unsee it.” Despite the fantastic, the almost zoological variety in which they appear out in the world, austerity bureaucrats are in fact an easyish sort of species to identify. Divergences of style and tone and disposition collapse quickly enough into a single shared imperative. At the end of the day, it’s just this: the vehement redescription of ruin as, in essence, rescue.
That’s the cohering grammar. That, basically, is the game. Not that it’s an imperative that speaks in one voice only.
Not that long ago, “innovation”—along with its sibling platitude, “disruption”—was the preferred idiom in which massive structural divestment took itself up as, contrarily, a techno-visionary lurching in the vague direction of some noble future, to be seen trembling mirage-like just over the horizon of the closures and lay-offs of the present. There’s still some of that, hanging in the stale air of various windowless conference rooms across the nation, where zombie-eyed consultants intone the word “resilience” back and forth to one another. Nowadays you’re more likely to encounter talk of “outcomes,” “rightsizing,” “strategic planning,” or—perhaps the crown-prince of the current grim hour—“metrics.” Dear god, the adoration of “metrics” among the managerial classes!
What will compare with it? Is it somehow the case that your little unit is attending to its mission even still, succeeding in all the hard unglamorous work of it despite years of unremitting retrenchment and increasingly fanatical labor discipline? Not according to these newly discovered metrics!
Extract — continue reading at the source.
