Small Classes, Teaching Loads, and Sad Budget Realities

I’ve mentioned before and am happy to mention again that one of my favorite commentators on higher-education issues is Claire Potter of Wesleyan University, who blogs as Tenured Radical. One of her recent posts advocating a return to smaller class sizes caught my eye both because I agree with what she says and because I know how difficult it would be to get it done.

At the moment, I’m the chair of a working group at my institution that’s looking at issues of faculty teaching load in hopes of redistributing some of that load to other activities that demonstrably have positive effects on student learning and success after graduation. One of our guiding documents is George Kuh’s booklet, High Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2008.

Tenured Radical makes some excellent points about the excellent opportunities for student engagement offered by small courses; I know she’s right, because, like her, I’ve taught a number of courses with enrollments below 10, many of which have been wonderful in every respect. In my administrative role, though, I know how hard it is to enable an institution to offer a wide range of such courses.

The math is difficult. At my institution, we have about 900 students on the campus, a full-time faculty of about 80, and a typical small-college 4/4 teaching load. We also have pretty strong financial resources (not like Wesleyan University, but we’re not poor, either), as evidenced by our student-faculty ratio of just over 11:1.  Even so, we simply cannot afford to offer a wide range of very small courses and maintain the curricula we have agreed we should offer (and please note: the curricula of the university, and the majors, are determined by the faculty, not by the administration).

Part of the challenge is in the structure of these curricula. They are undoubtedly full of various inefficiencies. But one professor’s “inefficiency” is another’s “life work,” and in a shared-governance context this kind of fundamental conceptual difference is an almost inevitable recipe for gridlock.

I’d love it if we could reduce our teaching load to 4/3 or even lower. Doing so, though, will inevitably increase class sizes unless we make a large (and currently unlikely) increase in the size of the faculty. While there’s certainly a balance, under our current circumstances I’d trade a reduction in classroom teaching (with a concurrent increase in expectations in other areas of faculty work) for a slightly larger average class size.

Unfortunately, even an administrator who has a fairly extensive teaching record and was an undergraduate at a rich small college where he enjoyed a lot of small classes (including three or four with six or fewer students), and therefore knows how great such courses can be, still has to balance the institutional checkbook. Per Tenured Radical, we certainly do need to talk about how to make better teaching, mentoring, and advising possible for more faculty members, but even though I’d like nothing more than to wave my wand and make it happen, I just don’t have the resources or power to do so.