As soon as the Board of Regents voted—and the ink dried on the nearly $3 million contract—the University of Michigan put its president elect, Kent Syverud, right to work as the university’s new figurehead. Syverud’s first task was to introduce himself to the campus community and remind its workers, consumers, and onlookers just how good and valuable his new university was. “I believe this amazing institution has been, is now, and must continue to be the best public research university anywhere,” he firmly stated. After some more fluff, he acknowledged “the rough patch” that the university had gone through, without mentioning the minutiae. From headlines alone, the rough patch could be its ties to weapons and drone manufacturers, federal funding cuts, athletics scandals, failure to bargain with unionized workers in good faith, or a little bit of all of these, plus more.

Before his recent health diagnosis hindered his capacity to assume the presidential role, now serving as a special advisor to the Board and a professor of Law in lieu, Syverud outlined a plan to get U-M out of the mud: “I will have a lot of listening and a lot of learning to do. But I am confident that with good leadership values and hard work on administrative competence, you all will be able to continue achieving the daily miracles that long have made me believe you all are the leaders and the best.”

Syverud comes to Michigan from Syracuse, where trouble and a lack of trust and confidence animated his tenure as chancellor. He failed to publicly condemn Trump amid increasing government overreach and capitulated by closing the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. He and his administration also refused to operate with full transparency regarding Syracuse’s investments in Israel and threatened administrative sanctions on students who participated in encampments. For every cut and reaction, Syverud and his administration had a rhyme and a reason that revealed how they really see consumers and workers—not as “the leaders and the best”—and what they understood to be their role as administrators of an institution with expanding purpose, reach, power, and virtuous potential.

Why would Michigan move to hire Syverud with all this ire and scandal around his tenure at Syracuse? The truth is that Syverud, and the controversies he creates and manages, are precisely what Michigan and countless other colleges and universities want in their administrators. Despite bad press and controversy, budget deficits and layoffs, protests and disruption, administrators must be able to project and hold steady narratives of progress and perseverance, benevolence and romance, safety and value. This means showing that no matter what negatives the institution and its administrators are navigating, students are still being prepped and primed for the workforce, degrees are still being conferred, and faculty and staff are still supporting students and producing and circulating knowledge. It’s this rhetorical power that administrators must be prepared to deploy: the narrative of higher education as an exceptional good and exceptionally good in changing lives for the better and advancing the nation’s progress and global standing.

In this essay, I want to ask what is, on the surface, a simple question: What do administrators do and why? What drove me toward this question is the sheer volume of faculty, staff, and students I talk to, informally in conversation and through formal avenues like teaching and research, in which they share wishes for administrators to do something or do something different and wonder why they don’t and won’t. This reads as an issue of consciousness and the ruse of contextual exceptionality in my estimation. Some see certain issues as tied to individuals and their lack of competence and political will. Others just believe in colleges and universities as exceptional spaces solely, or at least primarily, in the education business. Either path leads to a thought process that goes something like this: If we give a president a vote of ‘no confidence,’ push them out, and get someone better in the seat, things will finally change for the good. If a provost rose from the faculty ranks, then that will mean that they care about everything from student success to faculty retention.

The problem facing and debilitating the sheep owned and run by administrators is that there is a deliberate calculus that is difficult to compute, an apparatus that transcends the physical that most eyes aren’t trained to see. There is an obsession over the student outcomes of institutional higher education—escaping impoverished life circumstances and finding meaningful work—that lead most to call on administrators to improve and guard the cherished university by any means necessary, and make fashionable ideas and impulses to collaborate with administrators. “What would happen if every time people used the word ‘university,’ Harney and Moten ask, “it came out sounding like ‘factory’?” And the funny thing about factories is that its interior is often chaotic and terribly experienced, but what they produce are earmarked as good(s) always, somehow, consistently worth making and selling.

Riffing on good is good and necessary, especially when you consider how many are invested in the university and its continued existence and perfection. But especially when trying to rectify or at least understand the administrative, and thus, the university, problem, it is the logic of goodness—and in particular the manufacturing of goodness—that is most necessary to expose. It reproduces and strengthens the power of the administrative apparatus through which every administrator’s thought and decision filters and flows.

This logic carries a seemingly positive connotation and implication that can be used as a defense for the enterprise under attack and refuge for the administrators charged to manage and respond to said attacks, but it actually constrains the possibilities of what higher education could very well be but never was. Manufacturing goodness requires administrators to present colleges and universities as more exceptional and virtuous than their practices and entanglements warrant; meanwhile, administrators themselves must labor in defense of that illusion and delusion.

It’s this rhetorical power that administrators must be prepared to deploy: the narrative of higher education as an exceptional good and exceptionally good in changing lives for the better.

If it wasn’t clear already, I am not an administrator. It is under the weight and clamp of this goodness logic that I squash any internal nudges or tune out external noise to become one. I study colleges and universities as a faculty member in a school of education, with primary teaching responsibilities in higher education and student affairs graduate programs. I can confidently say that my own campus administrators, and even the students who I teach, care far more about who I am and what I offer as a teacher than who I am and what I learn as a researcher. The “consumer” and the administrator merge, here especially. Regardless of my own research that would expose otherwise, my superiors and students expect me to preach from a pulpit about the good parts of higher education, situating it as a space where promises have simply gone unfulfilled, and its fullest potential simply not yet met.

Much to my chagrin, my classroom is supposed to be a rehearsal, an audition, for the coveted role of senior administrator. I am expected to anoint and prepare my students as future equity-minded leaders. When I teach my students, the questions I present to them should apparently imagine their futures at the top of the hierarchy: “What would you do in this situation if you were the president? The provost? The vice president for “x” affairs? How should leaders respond to the issue or dilemma of ‘x’?” I’m not supposed to divert students away from the field but toward leadership within it. I am supposed to tell administrators, through my research, and aspiring administrators, through my teaching, how to make it all better. Colleges and universities need their bodies, their labor, and their empathy and critical aesthetics, so I better not radicalize them.

Insert my gripe with education schools. Graduate programs housed in ed schools, especially doctoral ones, are attractive to aspiring administrators, because they get to be in community with experienced professionals who are interested in expanding their knowledge base about higher education and leading in different, more equity-minded and socially just ways. More importantly, they obtain a credential deemed necessary for leadership ladder climbing. Ed schools have always been dedicated to preparing educators of all kinds and upholding schools as good, but that also makes them their own weakness and maybe eventually, their downfall.

Most students enter education programs with a practitioner’s desire to fix—David Labaree helpfully notes in The Trouble with Ed Schools (2006)—not a researcher’s inclination to deeply study and critically understand. A preoccupation with student life, experiences, and outcomes hums beneath many students’ desires, as they understand higher education almost exclusively through a consumer and beneficiary perspective. This preoccupation helps orchestrate the gravity of goodness as a logic, secluding other important considerations, like higher education as a site of work and labor struggle. Perhaps inadvertently, I think, the students who matriculate through such programs are being groomed to become spokespeople for the colleges and universities they may one day lead, caught in the rapture of hypocrisy and conflict that only manufacturing goodness as a logic could summon. In this sense, they are steered away from, or have little appetite for, deep and consequential study that would reveal educational institutions’ messy entanglements, and maybe even expose their own attachments as cruel and their professional aspirations as limiting.

The irony is that research shows that fewer college and university presidents and senior administrators come from education schools and training; they are coming from business and consultancy backgrounds or have considerable experience in STEM fields. The ongoing commercialization and corporatization of higher education will only speed up this trend. So it might make sense for ed schools and the faculty within them—that is, if we follow trends and data, which so many administrators proclaim to do and aspiring administrators must be prepared to do—to disillusion students, grow their critical consciousness, and reorient students to the field rather than prepare them for jobs in it.

Manufacturing goodness is principally about calibrating institutional life to societal and market commands and demands, since both the institutions that administrators govern, and the workers and consumers within them, are engaged in fierce competition to thrive and survive. Alignment in this way harbors administrators most especially from the noise of skeptics and a broader, albeit divided, public who have raised concerns about higher education’s purpose and value.

For example, administrators at Philadelphia’s Temple University are soon to partner with the Department of Defense, leveraging Temple’s proximity to the Navy Yard and positioning its faculty, students, and research in service of US military priorities. Such efforts have been carefully framed by President John Fry and Vice President for Research Josh Gladden as consistent with Temple’s mission and obligation to “develop the future workforce and grow the regional economy.” This also comes on the heels of a June 2025 statement from Fry that urged leaders to work together and identify “strategic investments that will increase revenue” and “[allow] the university to grow in areas where it has underperformed in recent years.” This type of alliance is not new or novel in any way; colleges and universities materially benefit greatly when they are involved with the military-industrial complex. However, they might become more prevalent, amid budget deficits and right-wing attacks; this is yet another, perhaps more synergic opportunity for higher education administrators to get in the federal government’s good graces.

Manufacturing goodness requires that the surface rationale be mutually beneficial and advantageous all around. In this example, such a partnership affords Temple much-needed financial capital and perhaps a future of lucrative contracts, while the federal government receives human capital and goods. The part about who these military projects might harm and toward what political project such goods will be used is irrelevant to administrators under this logic.

When held under the same view as the heavy-handed administrative responses to encampments in support of Palestine and the resources administrators yielded against student organizers, it registers that administrators are interested in the types of partners and partnerships that make them money and willfully join their projects as allies who can take on and over the world and address the demands capital requires. What administrators are vehemently against are the type of partners that force their hand in adopting a defensive stance focused on risk and impression management, or partnerships that might destabilize colleges and universities as consequence for the chaos and violence they help facilitate. Administrators look to the nation-state and other powerful investors and partners within the ecosystem to determine the rubric for what can and should be lauded as good doing.

On these grounds, we can see why countless universities and their administrators have embraced, rather than resisted, generative artificial intelligence (AI), despite generative AI being morally questionable and antithetical to most values professed by colleges and universities, let alone harmful to historically disenfranchised communities and their health. The California State University (CSU) campuses and the University of Chicago are just two of a growing number of universities moving to offer free access for all faculty, staff, and students and using mission as rationale for such an investment. Financial and market logics alone cannot explain this decision, especially because of the steep sticker price. However, the state and its institutions of higher learning operate in a lockstep manner to train students and pour into the state’s economy and the nation-state’s commitments to capital. “By providing resources and training for students to AI literacy including critical thinking and ethical awareness,” a response to a FAQ for the CSU initiative says, “the CSU is working toward expanding workforce readiness skills, which can accelerate social mobility and reinforce the return on investment for students and taxpayers.” Elsewhere, they position the initiative, in partnership with the Office of (democratic) California Governor Gavin Newsom, as an investment toward the creation of “an AI-powered higher education system that could surpass any existing model in both scale and impact.” The rejection of AI, under these terms, might put the CSU in a tense position with Newsom, one of its most powerful partners, and subvert its charter to serve California and the broader public good in part through the people they train and prepare for society.

Manufacturing goodness is also a logic that contests genuine shared governance and requires centralized control. The supremacy of this logic falls apart when administrators are stripped of power or, at a minimum, must share it. The ties to a nation-state that is invested in perfecting the afterlife of slavery while also securing the university as its intellectual arm warrant that higher education’s guardians—administrators who manage the arm rather than produce its material goods or consume its functional value—serve as drivers and overseers on the academic plantation. The task for administrators and the asks of the administrative apparatus is, then, to put into motion a management plan that contributes to the continued prioritization of the institutional structure and status quo, while still managing labor enough to where workers’ frolics and agency still feel like a type of freedom being afforded and power being shared.

When I say that historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) can be plantations, too, people are often repulsed. And that repulsion triggers a defensive posture. HBCUs are above reproach in the eyes of most, and for reasons that have a lot to do with their comfortable position at the nexus of upward social mobility and racial uplift. For me at least, this perspective cracks beyond the point of utility when I reposition the university away from that of sanctuary and opportunity, and toward that of employer and institution managed by and through the same administrative apparatus of those universities they claim to be dramatically different than and even against.

Early in my second year on the faculty at my HBCU employer, I was surprised to receive an email from the president, which was sent to all faculty, informing us that Moody’s had affirmed the institution’s financial outlook as stable and granted it an A1 long-term issuer credit rating. I had never been employed by a university in which the president said this quiet part out loud. In his emailed remarks, the president emphasized that the institution “continues to grow, to attract record numbers of students and to expand our research enterprise at a pace unmatched in our history.” “A strong credit rating,” he said, “enables institutions like ours to strategically leverage it when needed, allowing us to invest in our campus infrastructure, enhance our facilities, and fuel the momentum of a university on the rise.” The vice president for research and finance followed up, sharing “our strategy has been—and will continue to be—to make thoughtful, forward-looking investments that support our growing enrollment and expanding research mission.”

Only a few months later would I stumble upon letters written by the president, practically begging the state not to grant academic workers right to unionize. A university council compiled of faculty, staff, and student reps, in his view, would suffice. Because Moody’s considers unions and anything that limits the ability of colleges and universities to reduce personnel as risk burdens, it makes sense for the president to rest on the assertion that such rights should not be granted, while still being careful to package the argument through a purely educational lexicon. Under those terms and frames, these rights would “[create] the possibility that collective bargaining agreements and the nature of the relationship may prioritize union interests over collaborative solutions, thereby impacting curricular development and alignment with market needs.”

Moody’s isn’t mentioned anywhere in his testimonies, but I would not expect that to be the case. The board in which he is answerable to likely wouldn’t allow it either. Arguments about curriculum and alignment with market needs are key in maintaining perceptions and beliefs of goodness and well intentions, in thinking about higher education in the most educational and benevolent terms. But it is also under the primacy of the goodness logic where administrators believe they are the ones operating with the institution’s best interests in mind and have proven their institutional loyalty and capacity to “administer the present” without getting caught up in everyone’s fantastical dreamworlds, lofty change proposals, and experiences and emotions.

If it is true that all campuses under institutional higher education’s umbrella are granted their legitimate status primarily through the state’s imperative to create useful subjects, then we can conceive that manufacturing goodness is the prism that elucidates the people and work within the administrative apparatus. There are no bad apple administrators. The gig itself requires a healthy level of callousness and detachment. The job is built around making the institution look and sound good to whoever, whenever, and however. Everything else must come second or be stripped of the radical and redistributive possibility that is crucial to a different type of collective life and flourishing free of captivity. You can try to be one of the good apples—get trained in “good” institutions and commit to equity in your work—but it is only a matter of time before you eventually turn.

My colleagues in ed schools do an impressive job of shining light on administrators’ plight and the Brené Brown values that should galvanize their practices. They have developed lucrative careers developing frameworks and pushing beliefs that administrators can create caring universities. However, I remain highly skeptical of these accounts and frameworks, because the apparatus so routinely escapes interrogation. It is foolish to look to administrators to lead toward an otherwise when the apparatus that claims stake on their existence simply requires that they manage.

Much to my chagrin, my classroom is supposed to be a rehearsal, an audition, for the coveted role of senior administrator.

I fully expect, and accept, that some will arrive at the essay’s end and think that I am only contributing to the great administrator and faculty/staff divide written about and debated extensively. Others might dismiss this essay because they insist that addressing and organizing a defense against the right-wing attacks on the enterprise are a far better use of our collective energies and capacities. But either response, however well intentioned, ultimately reproduces the very logic this essay sought to expose. Either way, the logic of goodness requires that the university always be defended and upheld as sacrosanct, and administrative intentions be treated as pure or the result of a difficult decision.

I would be elated, even reenergized, if my students never go on to become presidents, chancellors, provosts, or vice anything in higher education. What would it say of me, of my teaching, of my field, if they were to become part of that apparatus? That growing problem? I always remind students at least once a term, “If you leave this course still wanting to be a college president, I haven’t done my job.” They always laugh or let it escape them as an unserious quip. But I’m more serious than they might ever know, until now that is. I’ve seen and studied too much to willingly take on the role of an administrator; I would hate for the students I teach to do the same. Even a commitment to training aspiring administrators or providing more help and guidance to, and empathy for, existing ones would suggest that the problem is one of ignorance and understanding. The logics and disconnects outlined in this essay are palpable and should drive those who clearly see higher education’s problems and possibilities toward different modes of work and organizing.

It’s time to seize control of colleges and universities and the possibilities that have long been constrained. Administrators won’t do it, so as a collective of workers and consumers within, we must. Perhaps with less leadership preparation and training—and deeper study and more of a collective refusal to engage in the tasks and asks of administration—we will educate and refuse ourselves to a point where self-governance is the only way to go, the only possibility left.