More than a month ago, I agreed to an offer to be a visiting scholar at a private US university next year. This was no simple matter because of obligations to my own family and (somewhat more unexpectedly) my department. I have made no public announcement on it yet not because I am especially personally worried by the Trump administration’s policies toward higher education, but rather because I am still completing (electronic) paperwork and background-checks from the host institution. (It would be bad luck to announce before the process is fully completed.)
Now, by academic standards, I have moved jobs (not always willingly) quite frequently and I have also accumulated quite a bit of visiting positions. I have worked in three different countries and have held all kinds of academic jobs during the last quarter century. So, I am familiar with the great variability in the process by which the (electronic) paperwork for an appointment can be completed. When it comes to paperwork before the appointment-process is completed nothing will ever beat my experience moving to Flanders back in 2009. But Stateside, I had a rule of thumb that wealthy private institutions are relatively unencumbered by paperwork relative to the state institutions in order to ‘enter’ the system. I have to abandon this maxim.
I have no prior experience with this particular private university and N=1, I shouldn’t make any claims on the basis of it. But since university administrators in the same ecology tend to mimic each other, I would not be surprised if what I am experiencing is part of a wider trend of bureaucratic enshittification [a phrase I am stealing from my friend Tom Stoneham] at US private universities. (I won’t bore you with a graph of the rise of the number of administrators in US universities, but I am not the first to remark on the phenomenon.)
