Sexism in Academia & Bureaucracy 

08-27-2019

By Samantha Hill

As a new semester approaches, Troy Vettese chronicles Sexism in the Academy. Littered with statistics about the ways in which academic structures, like teaching evaluations, halt the upward mobility of female academics, Vettese paints a bleak picture: There are two tenured men for every tenured woman. The proportion of black women among tenured faculty has fallen since 1993. 

The seemingly endless list offered rings true. But at the end of the essay Vettese writes:

The iron cage of bureaucracy may be an unlikely object of radical politics, but it is likely the best mechanism to reduce the old boys’ club that has such a tight grip on appointments. 

This turn of hand, reveals an underlying moralism. And while inequality is a serious problem in academia, bureaucracy and social policing on campuses cannot solve the structural institutional problems academics are facing. It is ironically the privatization and bureaucratization of universities that has led to a loss of faculty governance and tenured positions overall. There are more administrators on campuses than professors today. And at the same time, bureaucracy has led to an increase in policing mechanisms that further erode what little faculty autonomy is left, and an environment where professors can be fired for political opinions expressed publicly. Too often the language of inclusion leads to a form of exclusion that pushes a certain political agenda. We need thoughtful solutions to these problems exacerbated by bureaucracy, not more bureaucracy.