Editor’s note: In the opinion page’s “Faculty Fridays” series, a different faculty or staff member writes a column each week about issues facing ISU faculty and staff, ISU students or the world at large.

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I am puzzled. Last year we were told that Iowa State had acquired $460 million in donations. Now we are told we are in a budget crunch.

Departments will have to fire temps, have less money for operating budgets, and now the men’s baseball and swimming teams have been eliminated. These two events cry out for explanation. How can we be broke if we have garnered $460 million?

Well, the governor is trying to decrease our budget, to be sure. But why?

Suppose that the governor doesn’t like the way in which all this money is being spent: new buildings, fancy stadium seats for big shot alumni and corporate sponsors, money for pretty gardens, $4 million to make Beardshear look pretty, $1.6 million to make our new CEO (excuse me, university president) happy and heaven knows what else.

Suppose the governor is asking himself – as we all should be asking – how we can turn around and ask for state monies to spend on education, when we had all that money and spent it on more palaces for the big shots and their wealthy corporate and alumni friends?

Who will suffer the most? Undergraduates. I thought our first priority was to enhance the quality of undergraduate education; to make it excellent.

But firing temps, who are by and large good and dedicated teachers, and taking monies from instructional departments are just a few items that give the lie to this public-relations rubbish. Faculty know this or should. Students know this, too.

It is the height of arrogance for administrators to be building themselves more palaces when instructional departments have to fire instructors, cut back courses and make due without adequate operating budgets to perform their essential teaching mission.

But administrators are just doing their job; being arrogant just goes with the territory. (Some faculty hope our new president will be less arrogant than our previous president. He might be warmer and gentler; I doubt that he’ll be less arrogant or corporate.)

Are faculty doing their job? People with more job security than anybody but the Pope and the justices of the Supreme Court, who have tenure only to ensure that they will have the academic freedom to stand up for intellectual and educational values, rather than cave in to administrative arrogance, either naively assume that nothing can be done except to make the most cost-efficient budget cuts or are too na‹ve to recognize that, without temps, their teaching loads will go up and that eventually they will be deprived of academic freedom, if not tenure.

Students have by and large shown more courage on this campus over the years than the faculty, even though they have no long-term stake in this institution, certainly not in the way the faculty do.

We teach our students to think for themselves, to use reasoning and evidence, not power and authority to make up their minds. (I have no time to discuss postmodernism here, except to say that the belief that all knowledge is just a mask for power serves both administrative arrogance and faculty cowardice equally well.) Yet faculty bend and scrape to the most irrational claims and lies of the administration.

We will be told that the monies that pay to fix up the Knoll and Beardshear come from different funds than the money needed to hire new faculty. And contributors certainly have the right to give their money anywhere.

But don’t administrators have an obligation to at least encourage contributors to give some money to save the swim team or hire more English instructors? Why not?

The obvious answer is that this is a corporation, governed by a top-down, trickle-down strategy: Build lush palaces to impress corporate sponsors, so that they will give money, some of which may trickle down to the English Department.

But we won’t give the English Department welfare or take monies from the rich to help the (deserving?) poor. No. But they will take money from the English Department to help new chemistry faculty who need $100,000 in start-up costs when they arrive in Ames!

The administration is only interested in research parks, new buildings and bragging about how many African-American Merit Scholars are here.

(Does anybody ask why so many African Americans, students, staff and faculty – even, in some cases, administrators – leave? It’s not just for the money, as university public relations would have it. People do not usually go into academics to get rich; I doubt if most leave just to make more money. Could it be that they would rather work at an institution that actually takes education and the life of the mind seriously?)

It’s all a gigantic public-relations shell game. After all, don’t we live in the age of Hyperreality?

One wonders if the citizens of this state, or the parents who send us their sons and daughters from wherever, know what’s going on here.

Do they know about the plush offices? Do they know their children are getting screwed to keep the palaces going?

Do they know that excellence in undergraduate education is just a PR gimmick to make administrators’ job resume look better, so that they can move on to bigger and better things after four or five years, so that new administrators can be paid $100,000 to reinvent the wheel every five to justify their salaries and proclaim the success of the latest strategic plan?

I’m not sure which is worse, administrative arrogance or faculty cowardice. Both are shameful and hypocritical. What are we teaching our students, since they are well aware of all these obscenities?

And whatever happened to the land-grant mission? What indeed?

Bob Hollinger is a professor of philosophy and religious studies.