University Post-Tenure Review
The state legislature having required post-tenure review at Indiana University, the Trustees recently approved a Post-Tenure Review Policy. The idea is to review tenure faculty every five year andpunish or reward them based on the review. Since tenured faculty can’t be fired except for cause, cause being things like criminal convictions, gross immorality, not showing up for classes, or going senile, the hope is that the reviews will get them to work harder.
Of course, universities have known about the problem of lazy tenure faculty from when tenure first began, and they already have ways to deal with it. Some faculty have not gotten a raise for twenty years. Others have extra teaching assigned to them because they’ve stopped doing scholarship or administrative work. Some are pressured to retire by things like having to teach 8 a.m. classes. Others are shamed into retiring. But it is true that universities are reluctant to do this. In that, they are just like for-profit businesses, which for some reason tolerate a lot of deadwood and often have 20% of the employees doing 80% of the work. They are better than unionized businesses or government civil service agencies, where zero raises or shifting work assignments aren’t allowed. Still, it would be pretty easy to motivate lazy tenured faculty better.1
The legislature passed two new laws, IC 21-39.5-2-2 and IC 21-38-3.4. Some of the law is good (e.g., forbidding the University to punish professors for criticizing the University), but most of it was wrong-headed, increasing paperwork tremendously, showing lack of understanding of how universities work, and defeating its own purposes by making it easier for the University to commit abuses rather than harder. I wasn’t too bothered when they passed, though, because I knew legislators and their staff don’t understand universities and don’t get much help from professors in understanding them. Much of the public testimony by faculty was downright falsehood, and the legislators didn’t take it seriously. The faculty, all Democrats, made no attempt to help the legislators, the majority of whom are Republican, to amend the text of the bill to maintain the same legislative objectives but cause less unintended harm. Instead, they just testified as to how bad they thought the bill was and how much they disagreed with its objectives. So having a poorly written bill was to be expected.
What I expected to happen next was that the University would write regulations to implement the bills that would make them harmless. Indeed, I expected the regulations to completely nullify the bill, since unless the drafters of a bill understand the implementing agency well, the bureaucrats in control of the regulations are going to outwit them. That’s why The Deep State is such a problem, why Congress and the President can’t control the federal agencies like the Department of Justice and the EPA. I expected the faculty and the Indiana University Administration would together craft regulations that would leave tenure pretty much where it was before the new laws.
Instead, the Administration cut the faculty out of the rulemaking process, and, lacking the extra eyes to spot stupidities in drafting, came up with rules that made things even worse than what the Statehouse was thinking.2
As one professor on an email list I read suggested a one paragraph replacement for the new policy, saying,
It seems that a simple policy such as that could cover everything in both SEA 202 and HB1001 and keep any administrative action within the pathway of current academic misconduct policy. Instead, as Debbie’s letter so forcefully points out, the BOT and its helpers have invented a whole new disciplinary pathway, with dubious new criteria, and extensive new compliance and paper work. They’ve specifically said it supersedes pathways set out in existing policy. Moreover, they’ve created a cumbersome paperwork burden that involves sharing information up and down the hierarchy and shifting authority away from department peers to the dean and provost.
His suggested one-paragraph policy, which he came up with in less than an hour, I expect, was:
“Every 5 years from the date a faculty member has been initially granted tenure, the faculty member shall be reviewed under their relevant academic unit's existing annual review process with consideration of whether there are credible grounds to bring a BOT-15 complaint of personal misconduct against a faculty member specifically on the basis of 1) the faculty member’s teaching workload, 2) the total number of students they teach at graduate and undergraduate levels, 3) the time they have spent teaching or overseeing them, and 4) their research and creative scholarship productivity as determined by departmental productivity criteria. In addition, the 5-year review shall consider if there are any other grounds to bring a misconduct complaint against the faulty member under BOT-15. If not, then no such process will be initiated at the time of the 5-year review. A five-year review letter from the unit head to the dean will indicate compliance with IC 21-38-3.5 and IC 21-30.5-2; or, in case a BOT-15 process (beyond efforts at informal resolution) has been fully resolved (including all appeals) against a faculty member, the letter to the dean will indicate that such is the case.”
That’s pretty good. It’s the kind of thing I expected, and I think the legislators would have been content with it. But what I’ll do in the rest of this Substack is go over the actual new policy paragraph by paragraph, first stating it in boldface, then critiquing it in roman, then rewriting it in italics.
Text, critique, and reconstruction of the June 2025 policy
Scope
A post-tenure review process for tenured faculty members is required at Indiana University in compliance with IC 21-39.5-2-2 and IC 21-38-3.5.
“Faculty member” means an employee of the university to whom one (1) or both of the following apply:
The employee’s employment duties include teaching students of the university.
The employee conducts research at the university.
Incredibly, the university lawyers got the section of the Indiana Code wrong. IC 21-38-3.5 applies to Indiana State University. What they meant was IC 21-38-3.4, which applies to Indiana University.3 List laws in order, with IC 21-28 before IC 21-39. They should have linked to the laws and the writing is pedantic and verbose. Here’s my improved version:
Scope
A post-tenure review process for tenured faculty members is required at Indiana University in compliance with IC 21-38-3.4 and IC 21-39.5-2-2.
“Faculty member” means an employee of the university whose duties include either teaching or research.
Policy Statement
Review Cycle
Each tenured faculty member will complete a post-tenure review within five years after tenure is granted and every five years thereafter in compliance with Indiana law. The first post-tenure review shall assess the tenured faculty member’s performance since the award of tenure, and subsequent post-tenure reviews shall assess the performance since the most recent post-tenure review.
That’s verbose and it doesn’t reference the “Indiana law”. Here’s my improved version:
Policy Statement
Each tenured faculty member will complete a post-tenure review five years after tenure is granted and every five years thereafter, in compliance with Indiana Code IC 21-38-3.4 and IC 21-39.5-2-2. The review will assess performance over the 5-year period, not the entire career.
Tenured faculty members holding administrative roles (chairs, directors or higher with faculty supervisory role or 0.5 or greater administrative full-time equivalent, FTE) shall be reviewed annually by their supervisors. These tenured faculty members shall undergo post-tenure review in the fifth year after their administrative appointment drops below 0.5 FTE.
What if someone becomes chair in the year before his 5-year review? And why exempt these faculty at all, when the statute doesn’t exempt them? They should be reviewed at the ordinary time, just with recognition that during the period they are chairs they will be productive in a different way.
[Delete entirely. But later it will be specified that these people will be reviewed by whoever their supervisor is, not by the department chair.]
Annual Reviews
An annual report is required for each faculty member to assist in annual merit and salary reviews (see BOT-13, Faculty and Librarian Annual Reviews). Each faculty member will complete the annual report form to report professional activities and accomplishments during the preceding year in the areas of instructional activity, scholarship and creative work, and university and public service. These annual reports and the annual review letter will be used as part of the post-tenure productivity review process.
Verbose and jargonish. It isn’t just “university service” that should count, a term of art for service at the university level, but campus service, school service, and departmental service. If we just say “service”, that covers them all. There is no need for an annual report form; the professor should be allowed to use any format he likes. The last sentence is unnecessary.
Annual Reviews
An annual report is required for each faculty member to assist in annual merit and salary reviews (see BOT-13, Faculty and Librarian Annual Reviews). Each faculty member will report on his year’s teaching, scholarship, and service.
The review of the annual report will be conducted using the established discipline-specific criteria and the department chair/unit head will issue a standardized annual review letter for each faculty member that will include the following:
Verbose. And why should the review letter be standardized? Indeed, why require the chairman to write a letter at all? This is unnecessary extra paperwork. It gives off vibes of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert, the one who thinks the Etch-a-Sketch the engineers give him is his new personal computer.
[delete the entire paragraph]
standard introductory paragraph indicating the review is required by policy, a statement that the evaluation will be used for potential merit increases, and identification of the evaluation period;
What micromanaging! Why does a Trustee policy have to specify each of three sentences of an annual review?
[delete]
reference to the individual faculty member’s approved allocation of effort in teaching, research and service;
What is this “approved allocation of effort”? Chairs don’t tell professors how they must spend their time. Good faculty are going to leave any university that tries to do that. How would you know such allocation at the start of a year? A professor should be judged on his effort and achievements, not on whether they met some pre-approved allocation of effort.
[delete]
summary of university level standard performance rating categories for annual review to be used in rating the individual assigned area of responsibility and overall performance rating:
Exceeds productivity expectations
Meets productivity expectations
Does not meet productivity expectations
Unsatisfactory productivity
More micromanaging and boilerplate. People can look this stuff up in an employee manual if they want. Such minutiae should not be in a Trustee Policy. Verbose, too. And the Policy hasn’t yet defined these terms. It does that further down. So this is out of order.
[delete]
written summary and performance rating in each assigned area of responsibility;
an overall performance rating; and
documentation of concerns.
These are fine, but they don’t need to be specified. It wouldn’t be an annual review unless these were in it. The chairman doesn’t have to be told these things.
[delete]
On each campus, each school, college and/or department shall have discipline-specific criteria that clearly describes productivity expectations for tenured faculty members that is commensurate with the academic standards of peer institutions. These specific criteria shall: (1) take into consideration the productivity requirements of the discipline; (2) be adaptable to approved differential allocation of effort in the productivity areas of teaching, scholarship and service; and (3) be clearly written such that a reasonable faculty member should not be uncertain or confused about what level of productivity or performance is expected to earn each performance rating. Each campus, school, college and/or department shall review and revise its criteria no fewer than every three years.
It looks like these phrasings are from the mediocrities who run human relations departments in stodgy, third-rate corporations. Such people love rules and official-sounding jargon, latinate language and verbosity.
Post-Tenure Review Requirements
All tenured faculty members must meet academic productivity responsibilities in the areas of teaching, scholarship and service. Unless otherwise specified by the job description or an approved differential allocation of effort, the default allocation of productivity areas for the IU R1 campuses (Bloomington and Indianapolis) is 40% teaching, 40% scholarship, and 20% service, and for the regional campuses is 60% teaching, 20% scholarship and 20% service for all tenured faculty members. The default allocation of productivity for tenured librarians is 80% library services, 10% scholarship, and 10% service.
Here’s another example of something out of order— the effort allocations referenced earlier in the policy. What is the Chairman supposed to do with this? What does it mean? In law firms, attorney keep track of billable hours in 15-minute increments, and I guess auto mechanics are similar, but that method doesn’t look at quality of work, and for that reason most salaried workers don’t keep a time clock. Professors certainly do not, and if they did, keeping track of their hours would be a waste of time, a productivity loser.
[delete]
In compliance with IC 21-38-3.5 and in addition to the review described in IC 21-39.5-2, the post-tenure review process for tenured faculty members will measure productivity and include, at a minimum, the following:
The faculty member's teaching workload.
The total number of students who the faculty member teaches at the graduate and undergraduate level.
The time spent on instructional assignments and the time spent on overseeing graduate students.
The research and creative scholarship productivity of the faculty member.
Verbose. The law sections were already mentioned, so they’re redundant here.
Again we have the notion of professor as lawyer, clocking his work in 15-minute increments. The bullet points are from the Indiana code, but they can be written in a sentence and more succinctly. Substantively, it should not just look at productivity. In research of any kind, commercial or academic, periods of utter failure are common and expected. A chemist may spend a year trying to develop a new drug, and fail despite working 60-hour weeks on what everyone agrees was a promising idea. The review should look at both input (hours and effort) and output (student learning and journal articles).
The five-year review will include the faculty member’s teaching workload (including the number of students), the time spent overseeing individual students, and his scholarship.
A productivity performance rating will be given to each tenured faculty member at Indiana University. The rating categories for post-tenure review will include the following university level categories and definitions:
Verbose.
The five-year review will summarize performance as Excellent, Satisfactory, Borderline, or Unsatisfactory
Exceeds productivity expectations: Record of productivity and performance for this faculty member clearly and substantially exceeds expectations.
Verbose.
How are expectations formed, and why should they matter? Only performance should matter. I would expect much more from a researcher who is talented in the past and be disappointed that he is merely the best researcher in the department this year. If I know a professor is a lazy bum and am pleasantly surprised that he publishes a paper in a fourth-rate journal, that is not high-quality performance.
Of course, the drafter probably didn’t really mean “expectations”; he was just using business jargon for “satisfactory performance”.
[delete]
Meets productivity expectations: Record of productivity and performance for this faculty member demonstrates a sustained record of performance. Annual reports for this faculty member provide evidence of an overall sustained meet expectations or higher rating during the last 5 years in the areas of productivity.
Verbose.
Why “sustained”? What if he publishes three books in the first year and none in the next four? Why productivity and performance? Why rely on the annual reports, instead of using all available information?
[delete]
Does not meet productivity expectations: Performance falls below the productivity expectations outlined for the faculty member.
What are “productivity expectations outlined for the faculty member”? Nobody can lay out precisely what a researcher should show over the next five years. If you try, you will let the researcher game the system. If you ask for 3 publications, that’s what you’ll get— lousy publications in low-quality journals. If you ask for his work to be cited 40 times, he’ll get his friends to cite him 40 times. This problem is well-known in academic economists and in business: if you reward an executive for, say, increasing sales 10%, he’ll meet that exact goal, even though he could exceed it with more effort, and he’ll do it by reducing prices and profitability. If you reward him for increasing profits by 10%, he’ll do it by jiggering the accounting numbers, as can be done legally by discretionary choices like the estimated probability of bills being paid. If you reward him for increasing the stock price, he’ll release new product info to drive it up, even if that gives competitors a chance to catch up. Bonuses and raises based on overall performance, undefined in advance, work much better, and are what are traditionally used.
We saw a silly example of this pseudo-scientific management approach used to justify President Pamela Whitten getting the maximum possible contractual bonus of 25% for 2024. The University faced a budget crunch, and employees had an average raise of just 1%, less than inflation (IU called it 2%, but they reduced the retirement contribution by 1% at the same time, for a net raise of 1%). President Whitten had had a disastrous year, with faculty voting no confidence in her by a margin of 80% and the Trustees deciding they needed to create a new position, Chancellor of the Bloomington campus, because she didn’t dare show her face in Bloomington. The only thing doing well was the football team. But the Trustees said she had met her performance goals, which sounded easy, including things like finding someone to fill the new position of Chancellor that had been created exactly because of her poor performance! And, of course, her bonus wasn’t given because she had found a good candidate for Chancellor (though she had), but just because she had succeeded in filling it. If you set the goal that low, it’s easy to meet it.
[delete]
A faculty member who receives an overall unsatisfactory rating for their annual report during one of the previous 5 years
This is crazy. Suppose the faculty member has done great in four of the previous five years, but unsatisfactory during one. Are we really going to say he “Does not meet productivity expectations”? This is a five-year review, after all. We should look at all five years.
In research, it is completely normal to have bad years, with zero measurable output, and even with zero measurable success, which is a different thing. Suppose I am a history professor writing a book on the Civil War. You don’t research, write, edit, and publish a book in one year. After one year, you have a mass of messy notes. Indeed, it is not uncommon for that to be what you have after five or ten years. In my field of economics, it routinely takes two years to write an article, and another two years to find a journal that will publish it and to revise it for that journal, and another two year before it actually appear in print. Moreover, not every project works out successfully. I don’t know how often good historians give up on books, but good scientists fail with their experiments and good economists fail with the ideas they conjecture are true. So rating performance on just one bad year is a silly idea. It isn’t what the Statehouse was thinking of, which is a five-year review.
[delete]
and/or has demonstrated a pattern of failing to perform duties assigned by Indiana University,
If the “one bad year or you’re in trouble” clause is ridiculously severe, the “pattern of failing to perform duties” clause is ridiculously lax. Suppose I refuse to do any teaching in 2025, even though I’m assigned four courses to teach. That’s not a pattern; it’s just one year of failing to perform my duties. So I don’t fall under “Does not meet productivity expectations”. I don’t fall under any of the other three performance classifications either, though, so it isn’t clear what box the chairman is supposed to check. This is another reason for not trying to specify categories in too much detail: you’ll very likely end up with lots of cases that don’t fit any of the four categories.
Having overline precise categories is also bait for lawsuits. If I am the professor who didn’t teach any of his classes one year, and the University tries to fire me on the grounds that this is the category I best fit into, I’ll say, “the University promised me, in return for my work, that I wouldn’t be rated poorly, and they did it in plain language.”4
What should happen, of course, is that a professor who says he won’t do any teaching next year should be fired immediately. There should be due process, of course, but it can be very simple. The Dean fires him; he complains to the relevant faculty committee; the committee meets for ten minutes and agrees he should have been fired; he appeals to the Provost; the Provost looks at his appeal for ten minutes and turns him down, and it’s done. Having due process does not mean, in a simple case, requiring a lot of effort.5
[delete]
and/or has sustained violations of applicable state and federal law and/or Indiana University policies and procedures, all noted in the annual reports, are evidence of does not meet productivity expectations.
As with the previous clause of “a pattern of failing to perform duties”, this really pertains to discipline, not productivity, and it’s ridiculously lax. Suppose Professor Smith bludgeons his wife to death, as my fellow game theorist Raffy Rob of the University of Pennsylvania did a few years ago, not that long coming to give a research talk at Indiana. What rating would he get? He was a famous researcher, and he did not have “sustained violations of applicable state and federal laws” on his record. He only murdered one wife, and it wasn’t likely to happen again.
There already are policies for dealing with faculty discipline, i.e. the Policy on Faculty Disciplinary Procedures BL-ACA-D27, Policy BL-ACA-D27 is just a Bloomington campus policy, though, so it would be replaced by this new Trustee policy where “every dog gets one bite” or “every professor gets one murder”, and where no action is taken till his five-year review comes up.
Replacing the University’s disciplinary procedure is probably not what the drafter of the Post-Tenure Policy intended, and is certainly not what the Statehouse wanted with its new law— but it’s what the drafter did. When you’re writing down rules, it’s not good form to whine, “I know the words say that, but it’s not what I really meant.”
[delete]
Unsatisfactory productivity: Faculty member has failed to meet the expectations for productivity and performance. The faculty member has received an overall unsatisfactory annual report rating for two or more of the previous 5 years, and/or has demonstrated a pattern of failing to perform duties assigned by Indiana University, and/or has sustained violations of applicable state and federal law and Indiana University policies and procedures, all noted in the annual reports, are evidence of unsatisfactory productivity.
“Unsatisfactory Productivity” has the same problems as “Does not meet productivity expectations”. You’re not allowed to have two bad years and three great ones, but the rule does allow you to utterly refuse to perform your duties once, plus one free murder.
[delete]
I’ll stop here. The Post-Tenure Review Policy goes on to detail the many stages of paper shuffling involved in each review, the setting of Dilbertesque “Performance Improvement Plans”, and automatic probation, and automatic dismissal penalties. The rest of it is just as easy to make fun of; it’s just that I’m tired, and probably, gentle reader, you are too. Throw the whole policy out and start over. I will make one suggestion. Require the chairman to draw up each year a list of the five members of his department he would be least reluctant to lose and to show that list to those five members. Then have a faculty committee and administrators look at the five-year reviews of those members as they come up, giving them special attention and asking the chairman why he doesn’t value them. The legislature’s goal is to get rid of deadwood faculty, or at least to incentive faculty so they exert some effort and don’t turn into deadwood. The University does need a kick in the pants to get moving with that; it’s just that the Post-Tenure Review policy isn’t going to do it.
Footnotes
Incompetent tenured faculty are not as much of a problem as lazy ones. To get tenure, a professor must work for six years and go through a strenuous and detailed process that does a pretty good job of weeding out people who can’t hack it. To be sure, we must add the caveat that this is subject dependent. Tenured economists are the cream of economics PhDs and tenured clothing design professors are the cream of clothing design PhDs, but how good the cream is depends on the cow.
The Administration did show the draft policy to a few professors who were leaders of the faculty senates of the various campuses (flagship Bloomington, Columbus, Gary, etc.), but it isn’t clear those professors actually read them, much less suggested any changes or found any mistakes. Professor Philip Goff, President of the IUI Faculty Council, says in “Board of Trustees Meeting Update,”
Faculty leadership were involved in its initial writing. Every five years, a review will be done using a faculty member’s previous five annual reviews. It was written so as not to be onerous for faculty to put together, as well as easy to move up the normal channels to the Office of Academic Affairs. Because it will be based on annual reviews, very little will be required beyond a summary by the faculty member.
The new rules are clearly onerous for faculty and administration, as anybody can see by reading them and seeing how many memos have to be written and how many people have to read them. Faculty have to write a report every five years good enough to avoid getting themselves fired by accident. Administrators have to read all those reports. Everybody has to meet deadlines and pile up documents and file them in the proper places.
It’s inexcusable that the Post-Tenure Productivity Policy got all the way to passage by the Trustees with nobody noticing that it cites to the wrong law. Another example of this kind of error is in the Indiana University Statement of Policy on Institutional Neutrality of September, 2024. Notice the “its” versus “it’s” mistake:
University Community members shall use due diligence to make a distinction between the official position and statements of the University, including it’s schools, colleges, and departments, from the individual viewpoints and opinions of the University’s employees, contractors, students, and alumni.
Indiana pays its chief counsel (sic) , Anthony Prather, half a million dollars per year, but he can’t check citations or write at the college level. A chief counsel does not have to have those abilities, but he does have to know how to hire people who do, and apparently none of his staff noticed either. That is shocking for an organization with a four-billion dollar annual budget. It’s bad enough with personnel policies, but remember that these clowns are also drafting multimillion dollar contracts. How can the University avoid getting outwitted in every contract it makes? See, e.g. my article below.
"Explaining Incomplete Contracts as the Result of Contract-Reading Costs," in the BE Press journal, Advances in Economic Analysis and Policy. Vol. 1: No. 1, Article 2 (2001). http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/advances/vol1/iss1/art2. Much real-world contracting involves adding finding new clauses to add to a basic agreement, clauses which may or may not increase the welfare of both parties. The parties must decide which complications to propose, how closely to examine the other side's proposals, and whether to accept them. This suggests a reason why contracts are incomplete in the sense of lacking Pareto-improving clauses: contract- reading costs matter as much as contract- writing costs. Fine print that is cheap to write can be expensive to read carefully enough to understand the value to the reader, and especially to verify the absence of clauses artfully written to benefit the writer at the reader's expense. As a result, complicated clauses may be rejected outright even if they really do benefit both parties, and this will deter proposing such clauses in the first place. http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_01.negot.pdf
I’ll sue on the basis of the University’s plain language. Will I win? That’s unclear. Indiana state law says that employee handbooks aren’t part of the employer-employee contract. But if Indiana University pretends that this Policy will be followed and thereby gets a professor to accept employment, to say otherwise is fraud, possibly criminal fraud. For example, if the university says, “Take a job with us, Professor Rasmusen, and we’ll pay you $100,000 for your research and teaching each of the next five years” and then the employee handbook says, “We expect each professor to publish one article per year”, then if I meet that target and am fired anyway, the Court is going to look at that clause as evidence of what “for your research” means in the contract.
What a contract means can be quite complicated. One thing is for sure, though: the University will get sued and have to pay lawyers to find out.
A problem is that when there is any formal process at all, people do tend to take it too seriously even in the easy cases. “Important decision” does not mean “A decision that you need to spend a lot of time on”. Deciding whether to cross the street when a truck is coming is extremely important to get right, but it’s so easy to make the decision to stand still and stay alive that we don’t even consciously spend time on it.
In the academic context, I remember when I went up for promotion from associate professor to full professor. I already had tenure, and it doesn’t affect one’s salary, so I just bundled up my research articles and teaching record and slapped on a brief explanation of a couple of pages or so. The vote to make me a full professor was unanimous at all levels, and one of the business school committee members said that they all noticed that my dossier was the thinnest and the decision to promote was the easiest they’d seen that year. But most professors are more timid and would agonize over promotion even though everybody in th department tells them they’re a slam-dunk case and they know it rationally.
That is not to say slam-dunk cases never fail. I was an easy case for tenure, and my department voted unanimously for me, but then the School voted 2-1 against, the Dean for, the Campus voted, I think, unanimously against me, and the top administrators confirmed their vote. I doubt extra work on my dossier would have made a difference, though, so it would have been wasted. Something weird was going on with the Trustees or the Statehouse, perhaps since three other tenure cases worked out similarly. I did get tenure, after writing a twenty-page informal appeal and after a lot of economists wrote to the University President that denying me tenure was insane.
Eric, you are tilting at windmills. Your well thought out and very wise suggestions will, of course, be ignored. Have you ever considered running for public office?
The wrong use of it's jumped off the screen at me, so thanks for your aside on that.
It strikes me that the creation of "a whole new disciplinary pathway, with dubious new criteria, and extensive new compliance and paper work" makes terrific sense as a higher ed institutional response:
1. Dubious criteria create ambiguity, a bureaucracy's sweet spot to inflict arbitrary pain on its subjects; and 2. New pathways, compliance regs, and forms create meaningless busywork, a bureaucracy's sweet spot for easier work justifying greater budget. Both increase opacity and centralize power away from faculty, for whipped cream and a cherry on top.
From their perspective, well played.