Times & Tenure

This story from the NYT about the diminishing prevalence of tenure in American colleges and universities in their top-stories feed. I think that they do a decent job presenting the basics, but—as is always the case&mdahs;miss some of the larger issues that are presented with diminishing tenure track positions.

While the story talks exclusively about public universities and all of the examples cited here are non-flagship public universities, the same trends can be seen in private universities as well. The number of tenure-track positions is drying up across the board. While the administrators may cite the lack of public funds and the inconsistency of public funding from states (or cities and counties for many community colleges), this trend is not entirely due to the the lack of funds. It is true that public higher education has suffered in recent years and often the non-flagship universities are hit harder than the flagship universities^[1], but if it is also happening at private and flagship universities there must be something larger. Furthermore, this trend is coming at a time when tuitions are so high that Congress is considering action and endowments of many universities are through the roof.

Much of the problem stems from the fact that many universities are employing WalMart-like management strategies. WalMart, the biggest private employer in this country and largest retailer in the world, perfected the art of "just-in-time" delivery of goods. Rather than paying for the manufacture, shipping, and storage of a huge inventory, they honed the method of supplying just enough product to meet demand with as little time as possible. No sense in those Christmas hats sitting on the shelves on Boxing Day when they couldn't be sold until the next year. Get just enough to meet demand, get more delivered next-day if you run out and constantly re-stock the shelves straight from the delivery truck. The same now works for professors teaching classes. Rather than having a full-time job with job security, professors are hired on semester contracts. Their pay, healthcare (if they have it), retirement benefits (again, if they have it), access to the library and university facilities lasts for those 17-weeks. If the department has enough enrollment, the professors receive a full course-load—if not, well...I hope that they planned on getting half the paycheck or less for those four months.

What ends up happening to many of these professors is that they try to line up a full-time teaching load by stringing together three or four jobs at three or four local institutions. In Michigan, as the NYT article mentions, professors would go from U-M Ann Arbor to U-M Dearborn to Wayne State to one of the several community college systems in the area. While they are teaching full time, they aren't getting full-time benefits because they technically have three to four different employers. The pay is bad, healthcare is either not offered or unaffordable and they are lucky if they have an office in one of the four campuses, nevermind all four.

Just-in-time operations for retailers may work^[2], but for educators it is a disaster. Professors, at their best, are supposed to be working with students to provide them the tools they need to understand the world, both for their future employment and as engaged citizens. They are not lawnmowers, lawn gnomes, cheap clothes or groceries or any of the other thousands of items available at WalMart. They are not a product on a shelf waiting to be taken home by a family paying the lowest price. When a professor is teaching four classes at four different campuses without an office, they aren't providing office hours, answering student's questions, contributing to the service functions on campus - all of the things that allow professors to have a real impact on students' lives. No, they are driving interstate highways rushing back an forth, trying to grade one exam in time to receive another that day. And, of course, forget term papers or semester projects that allow students to expand their knowledge to their own interests. In the ever-demanding just-in-time world, they give tests that can be answered by scantrons (if they are allowed to use the grading machine). Ultimately, education as a whole suffers and students who have the most tenuous grasp on a college education, first-generation college students, minorities, working mothers who are enrolled at community colleges and local state universities are the ones who are forced to deal with this the most.

It's a deplorable situation that needs to be fixed. If Congress, state legislators, education policy wonks and others are serious about fixing American higher education, then this is a problem that urgently needs to be addressed. Otherwise, no amount of fancy new tech center, student gym or other expenditures made possible by the egotistically exorbitant gifts by donors so that they can view their name a building are going to matter if the professors mandated with teaching the students can't teach.

Cross-posted at Free Exchange

^[1] In my experience, this is in no small part due to the fact that many state legislators are often alumni of the flagship universities and tend to be less so for the non-flagship local campuses. Supporting a local branch of the state university system is seen as garnering pork for your constituents but trying to get money for the state flagship universities as part of one's alumni obligations is seen as noble -- and is one of the few things that can cut across party lines.
^[2] Of course, there are also major problems for workers and communities for the just-in-time methods of corporations like WalMart as well.

Academic Freedom is Us

I feel very good to have finally fulfilled a long-standing promise to start posting away from my home here at Free Exchange on Campus. The blog is one of the major components of the work being done by the Fre Exchange Coalition. The Coalition was set up in order to counter the kinds of outlandish and false attacks by David Horowitz and others on true academic freedom in our nation's colleges and universities^[1].

The problem with these people is that, in the cloak of arguing that they are attempting to "eliminate liberal bias" in the classroom, they are arguing that there should be a kind of litmus test applied by the states in order to make sure that classes being taught are "fair and balanced" (in the FOX News sense of the term). Seriously, they have proposed legislation on the issue and even acquired floor votes in some state legislators. The goal is not to increase diversity, but to go back to the standard "Great Man" theory of teaching (specifically using Universities to teach how great America is because of the work of now-dead old-white-men).

The problem with all of this is that, just like the media being attacked for a liberal bias, Universities are overly conscious of something that is probably not a wide-spread problem and it stifles debate on campuses around the country. Although this is not the only problem facing academic freedom (lack of tenured faculty lines would be a good example of another), the fact that true academic freedom is under attack at all is very disconcerting and something that needs to be addressed. Hopefully this effort will be one part of that.

Anyway, you should check out the blog and my first post.

^[1] For a great example of the kinds of things that they propose, check out Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Of course, don't take everything there at face value, check out TPM's coverage on Horowitz's inaccuracies and exaggerations.

Congratulations to Good Friends

Congratulations to the folks over at Free Exchange for their positive coverage in today's Inside Higher Ed. It seems like those who want transparency of our academic institutions are themselves not so transparent.

In my dual role as a graduate student and employee

I was catching up on the internets today since I finally have service at my apartment [which, is also serving as my "office"] and was reading an interesting series of posts from Female Science Professor. FSP is a fascinating blog by a woman employed at as a full professor at a Research I university in the physical sciences and often has interesting tidbits about the life of academics and the particular life that women face in science departments in the country.

In this series of posts, FSP is reacting to the NYT article on Harvard's task-force report that teaching should be institutionally emphasized (available here). The task-force's summary of Guiding Principle (p.5) is:

To renew its commitment to excellence, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences must motivate and empower committed teachers as well as distinguished researchers, and actively encourage intelligent pedagogy as well as pathbreaking research. Devoted teachers abound at Harvard, yet their individual efforts are often not perceived as central to institutional priorities.

and, among the major principles that should be addressed:

Tenured faculty should lead by example, requiring of themselves the same commitment to teaching that they ask of junior colleagues and graduate students who are at earlier stages of developing their capacities as scholars and teachers.

That this is garnering attention because it is Harvard disturbs me a little bit; but, on the other hand, the fact that it is garnering attention is a distinct positive. The Harvard interim president acknowledges, “If we don’t do it ourselves,” President Bok said of the government pressure, “they’re going to make us do it their way.” And to see "their" way, look at the crumbling school infrastructure and massive privatization under No Child Left Behind.

Following the initial commentary, FSP took on two issues that were brought up in the comments of the initial post: first, she commented on the teaching/research/service requirements while teaching at a research university; then she discussed the issue of "buying-out teaching requirements. The first post is an interesting read for those interested in tenure and a discussion of promotions in academia [although, as an interesting side note, I find it interesting that neither FSP nor her commenters found that teaching and research were related activities], but it is actually the second that I found more interesting.

The question revolves around the practice of "buying out" teaching requirements. This is a practice where one would write into a grant proposal a certain amount of money that would be used to pay the professor's department a set fee in order that the professor does not have to teach the class that semester. Often, the department will then hire an adjunct or, if it is a required graduate course, strong-arm a less-prominent researcher to teach the course [or, simply not teach the course].

As I posted there, I have two major concers about this practice.

1. In my role as a student, I have found the course offerings in graduate level courses to be strinkingly sparse. While graduate education is certainly not built on a foundation of taking classes in the same way that an undergraduate course of study is, graduate-level elective classes are often the time where students are exposed to the background literature in their field or sub-field or where new literatures can be discovered. By curtailing these offerings, my department has made it more difficult for me to obtain my degree in a timely manner (another, apparent pet-peeve of most universities).


2. Second is the prospect of my future employment in the field of academia. As Dr. K points out in the comments, the adjuncts that are hired to teach these "bought-out" semesters are paid far less than the tenured or tenure-track professors who bought out their commitment. Adjuncts have no job security, and what security they have depends on their evaluations from their students which, logically, leads to grade inflation. They have severe curtailments on their academic freedom as they are at best short-term contract employees and, at worst, at-will employees.

I find it interesting in the debates surrounding academic freedom and adjunct parity often overlook at the entire context of institutions of higher education. When I have brought up the issue of graduate education in debates about adjunct parity, I am often met by either a) open hostility telling me that adjuncts could never instruct me the way that tenured or tenure-track professors could or b) outright confusion. I seem to get the response, "What the hell does this have to do with anything?" The same could be said about debates I have had regarding academic freedom - we (rightly) concentrate on Horowitz's big legislative agenda, but often forget the day-to-day, quotidian (thanks wobblie) experiences that threaten academic freedom on campus.

I know that there must be dozens of other banal rules, regulations and policies that threaten the very ideals of a free and fair academy such as this one. While we target the large-scale n'er-do-gooders such as Horowitz and ACTA and fight with (or as) the adjuncts and contingent employees that deserve fair treatment with legislation and national campaigns, short term goals should include targeting policies such as these to make them more fair, equitable and just. I believe that research should provide an instrument to help teach and that teaching should provide the energy and ideas to supply creative research. At times, one needs more resources to commit to research; I just hope that Harvard and other instutions take seriously the recommendations of the task-force to value teaching the same way they value research.

Déjà Vu

Why won't this man go away?

Although this story is somewhat old, I was reminded of it from a post on Free Exchange by someone named "cps" who I am not sure should be believed, but since I think that he spent time in Utah fighting crazies, I will give him the benefit of the doubt...[1]

Anyways, while the Free Exchange story was about the latest installment of the Bush Administrations' game called "Finding the perfect fox for this particular henhouse", the post links to a story about Ward Connerly's latest attempt to find states to continue his crusade. Having just fought against one of these disasters in Michigan, I hope that the people of the states of Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Wyoming and Utah (alright, I only really reserve hope for rizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Oregon and South Dakota)start thinking about this campaign early and, for heaven's sake please at least force a real discussion about race and gender and not be so timid. This is their goal, to make it a political campaign:

"'He [Connerly] will seek to divide each state and will generally be successful,' said Waymire [Connerly's spokesman on the Michigan campaign], who called Connerly 'a brilliant political strategist.' He added, 'There is no good to come out of this, and nobody benefits except for Ward Connerly and his association.'"

As DR pointed out at the end of the campaign here:

...and now I think I've pretty much convinced mysel that Prop 2 opponents ought to talk about race. Here's the thing. The core of the argument against affirmative action programs is the claim that race doesn't matter in America. That claim happens to be false, but when supporters of affirmative action avoid talking about race, they themselves make it seem as if it were true. I mean, if we can have a debate about affirmative action without mentioning race, how could it possibly be true that we ever need to think about it?

So, please, please, please, please have a real discussion about race in this country. Talk about Katrina; talk about black male incarceration rates; talk about school quality differences; hell, talk about NBA officiating but just have a real conversation. If you do have the conversation, you may win or you may lose the ballot initiative, but at least you are discussing one of the fundamental inequities in American society. But if you insist on following a strategy with an 0-3 record, you lost even the opportunity to really talk about fundamental inequality in America.

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[1] If this is, in fact, untrue - I will be happy to delete this statement from this post.

The Dismal State of Higher Ed

This week in the Huffington Post, Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the lack of value of a college degree. Yes, I know, this is the same Barabara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed and who helped found (with SEIU) United Professionals, a quasi-union in order to help out white collar workers who have been downsized or can't find jobs. Unfortunately, while she talks about college grads in her "manifesto", she apparently believes that Higher Education is "a scam."

Chiding MIT for releasing the Dean of Admissions, Ehrenreich writes:

Can you be fired for doing a great job, year after year, and in fact becoming nationally known for your insight and performance? Yes, as in the case of Marilee Jones, who was the dean of admissions at MIT until her dismissal last week, when it was discovered that she had lied about her academic credentials 28 years ago.

And, the great insight learned from this action is that, "But in the last three decades the percentage of jobs requiring at least some college has doubled, which means that employers are going along with the college racket." She also goes on to say that she believes that most employers want college-educated students for one of two reasons: 1) Because they know how to conform or 2) they are in debt up to their ears and, therefore, become subservient employees unwilling to risk being unemployed.

What is even more depressing is the comments after the article. These are people who read the Huffington Post who are vehemently against colleges and believe them to be a racket as well. One notable post reads:

Nice post. 'Bout time.

My experience with Ivy League is that if you actually used your mind, i.e. challenged the tenured professor and the carefully crafted conclusions (history) then you would receive a grade reduction; regardless of how well argued your case.

Indoctrination.
How NeoCon.

I don't care if we launch Free Exchange on Campus, or FACE, or any number of other initiatives. The true NeoCons have done such a good job destroying the American academy with an "employment focused" and "market based" attitude with the complicity of the current American academics who refuse to enter into "political" discussions because it might "taint" their research. If this is what readers of the Huffington Post believe, then we are doomed.

I would also guess that most of them don't know that more and more of our teaching is being done by contingent labor. Employees who can be hired and fired at will, who keep their office hours in their cars, and can't take the time to remember their students' names because they have a thousand of them. Until we are successful at getting the Ehrenreichs and Huffinton Post readers of the world to understand where the American academy has changed, then we are going to be woefully unsuccessful in front of our own legislators.