I wish academia could get through its brilliant-but-conditioned-toward-polite-neutrality-head that what's happening with cuts and winnowing and targeting is not a misunderstanding; it's a hostile takeover. There will be no 'educating' your administrators into seeing your value. You're not going to open-letter your way into the security to write freely.
The academy as a whole is undergoing an asset conversion which is tantamount to theft of a public inheritance; your ONLY option is to organize.
And even then, you're probably going to lose. Not everything, but a lot of things. We are in a battle to hang onto collective benefit as a concept fundamental to the republic, because iterative capitalism is coming for it as it eventually had to. This is truly a war, and losses are inevitable. I suspect that makes academics even less willing to engage the fight, accustomed to 'winning' as y'all are.
I'm gonna try hard not to spend the next four years shouting about this from the inside; I have other things to learn. But damn, y'all need to learn to pair some serpent with your doves. And you would be well served by doing some analysis on how it came to this, including the role of faculty culture and academic formation in allowing it. Y'all sat on your inheritance a little too long, and hit the elitist koolaid a little too hard.
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