Pooling Library Resources

I was confused by this statement: “Neither does it mean that we should exploit the faculty by paying $2,300 per course, as often happens for adjuncts at traditional institutions and for instructors at online for-profit institutions – a situation that can be remedied by reducing the overproduction of Ph.D.s in certain fields.” The beginning and end of that sentence don’t connect.

We don’t even need to get into the  controversial assumption about an ”overproduction” of Ph.D.s. Cancel every Ph.D. program in the country and you won’t change the situation of adjuncts much. 

The fact is, adjuncts serve a need. They are an ever more popular way for schools to keep teaching lots of students without spending adequate money on that teaching. Schools can continue to build 4-star dormitories and giant ice rinks because they don’t pay fair wages to a large percentage of the people teaching the students.

The problem is, schools don’t have the will or, under current budgeting systems, the resources to adequately fund the need that adjuncts fill. Thus, we all accept and propagate the Wal-Mart logic of the academic workplace.

Brushing off the major problem of exploitation of contingent faculty as something that can be “remedied by reducing the overproduction of Ph.D.s in certain fields” is nonsense. It’s also really insulting.

The problem will be remedied when schools are compelled to pay a living wage to the people teaching their students, and when the principle of equal pay for equal work is not just a pleasant ideal, but a basic necessity.

And interesting article. I will be thinking about it for a while. My only query/response right now involves adjuncts and adjunct exploitation. I’d be interested in hearing you expand on those ideas more fully, possibly in a future column.
My reasons are two-fold: first, I think you might have edited material out. Second, I direct a small program. My right-hand is an hourly employee who makes under ten dollars an hour. She also adjuncts for us for under 3 thousand dollars a course. It’s the system, and I have been unable to change it on her behalf. In fact, I had to fight with HR to get the hourly salary she earns.
Because the situation is so clearly abusive, though, I have sought to ameliorate it by taking this person on as a mentee. I observe her teaching. I consult with her about curricular development. I seek to make the operations of my work transparent, so that she can learn how decisions are made, and offer insights on how to improve things. Basically, I try to treat her as an equal colleague, in order that she will be ready for big things once she earns her degree. I am trying to be decent in a crappy situation, yet it doesn’t seem like enough. Frankly, it is because it isn’t enough. Have you any thoughts, at both the micro and macro level?

Where’s the data?  Not one number, ratio, graph, chart, or even ounce of relative perspective.   Just lot’s of vague, subjective inferences. 
 ”has grown partly” — wow, thanks for the in depth insight
 ”more time-consuming and expensive to produce than most people think” – so how do you know what we think?   Got a survey?
“best researchers in the faculty were also among the best and most devoted teachers”   Hmm, any evidence of to back up that claim?

This article is good example of why higher education is so bad at evaluating itself.  They refuse to use even the most basic scientific methods when looking in the mirror.  How can you “assess” something you don’t  measure?  At the very least, give us a web link to a pie chart showing exactly where costs have increased.  Or how about a 30-year before-and-after look?  Something listing costs per student broken down by: inflation, financial aid, health care, pensions, information technology, litigation, teaching salaries, admin salaries, building depreciation, etc?  

Of course it hasn’t helped, because assessment (much as I hate it) has demonstrated that the faculty, particularly those in the liberal arts, are providing students with a rigorous education at bargain prices.  Administrators and the free farm clubs for the NFL and the NBA don’t come out so well under the assessment regime, but we’ll never hear about that because the assessment pushers were convinced that they’d discover lazy, underworked, and overpaid faculty rather than the underpaid and beleagured adjunct and regular faculty who are teaching for food and (if “lucky”) decent medical coverage.

And in spite of the propaganda, the liberal arts on most campuses have more majors than we know what to do with.  So we’re succeeding even by the right wing’s favorite metric, “the market,” too–but again, we’ll never be talked or written about in this fashion. 

For smcdonald999:  here’s the Institutional Research for my uni.  Have a look: 

http://www.ir.colostate.edu/sis123/2009/sis123bs_la.htm

Looks like my department (History) is producing more student credit hours than any department in the entire university but three, and all of those three (Art, Communication Studies, and English) are in the Liberal Arts college, too.  (Funny, isn’t it, that History and other humanities and the arts are so big on an Aggie campus?  Isn’t it amazing that we’ve been able to fool so many people?  (And can you believe that we do it with only 17 regular, full-time tenured faculty on the staff?  We must be pretty awesome at being bad at our jobs!!!)

Thanks so much for your comments, which are very thoughtful. I agree with you that many institutions, including my own, require good quality publications for tenure and promotion (with that elusive term, “good quality,” evaluated by the institution’s tenured faculty whose recommendations regarding promotion and tenure are based on reading dossiers that include the opinions of outside experts in the field). But the expectations regarding a faculty member’s scholarship are not nearly as strenuous as they are at Harvard, and teaching is given much greater weight, both because it’s considered more important and because most faculty do so much more of it. Even at the research universities that I’ve been at, some faculty members did not receive tenure because those involved in the evaluation process concluded that the quality of their teaching did not meet the institution’s expectations.

Observing the list of comments below, it seems to me that historiann’s experience teaching large numbers of students and spending a great portion of her time on responsibilities associated with them is more the norm than not.

I’m with you on getting rid of the semi-pro sports, the arenas that host them, and the entertainment culture that helped spawn. And I wish that the situation could be remedied simply by getting rid of all those pesky, overpaid administrators. But the situation we face is more complex. Studies of the administation of hundreds of colleges and universities agree that some administrators are overpaid and that there’s been costly administrative bloat, particularly at 4-year public institutions. In response, institutions such as the University of California, North Carolina, etc.,  have begun to reign in some administrative salaries and to cut back on administrative layers — streamlining, centralizing, sharing personnel or services with other institutions, etc. Yet reducing spending on administration apparently yields at best something well below a 10% reduction in operating budget  expenditures. Not enough to solve the financial problems facing most institutions, especially public ones, which experienced the most growth in administration and related costs. This then brings me back to the role of faculty. In an era when public funding for higher education is likely to remain the same or to shrink, and when students and their families balk at paying higher costs for a college education [reflected among others in the recent Ocuppy (you name the campus) protests], how education is provided and how faculty are involved in that process will likely change at most institutions, not because faculty have served students poorly, but because the needs of students are changing and because there are new ways to meet their needs. In the last decade the fastest growth in undergraduate education has taken place at for-profit and 2-year public institutions, where on-line instruction is growing rapidly.  Public four-year colleges now account for a smaller share of overall enrollments. So, eventually you may get your wish after all and  some of your students will go elsewhere (See among others, Delta Cost Project, Trends in Spending 1999-2009, Kevin Kiley, “Where Universities Can Be Cut,” Inside Higher Ed).

I think the 2-year colleges may well be the best places for the students they’re serving.  (We end up seeing a lot of the same students when they transfer to my four-year campus, by the way.)  But until I see that Malia and Sasha Obama and the children of our political and economic elite are enrolling in online universities, I will remain highly skeptical that the value of online degrees will be on a par with even regional 4-year public universities.  I’ll call my shot now and predict that this will never be a problem in my career, which will probably end 20-25 years from now.

All of this “crisis” talk and all of these warnings that change is coming so we’d better capitulate now rather than later have the smell of the political dictum never to let a crisis go to waste.  But in the case of the faculty, we’ve already been doing more with less for 15-20 years.  How much more can we give, realistically?  And by the way, I’m good with taking that 10% of the budget and investing it in the people who actually do the education around my uni.  I make less than half of $125,000, which I’m sure I’ll never make as my annual salary for my entire career.

Four-year colleges–at least mine–seem to believe that they must dominate every sector of higher ed, when I think we’d be better off doing what we do what we do well & protect our brand rather than rushing headlong into inferior online courses.  Why this ideology of growth, and of monopolizing growth, at all costs? 

Some of the instructors at my school have Master’s degrees or “A.B.D.” as their highest credential.  The lower-tier schools can easily turn back the clock a few decades and increase the number of lower-credentialed educators at cheap wages (unless there’s something I’m missing with regards to accreditation).