This is a branching out of the thread titled "The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor"
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,65474.0.htmlAnecdotes are always more enticing than data. And lofty pronouncements ("They won't get away with this!") are always more energizing than the hard slogging work of actually figuring out or wringing from the evil admins or legislators the amount of money needed to have small classes taught by fulltime professors.
It's tiresome to see pronouncements instead of plans.
The Fiona
Ah, the ol' "put up or shut up" command. Always directive, rarely reflexive.
I'm sure she wasn't arguing for the status quo, but Madame Fiona's typically sharp dismissal of complaints piqued my interest. It would be nice to see her follow her own dictate. Surely one of the Wise Old Women of the fora has some excellent plans in mind?
In the meantime, Madame Provost, I'll bite.
Were I Queen I'd do the following.
I would increase teaching loads across the board and put the brakes on the obscenely competitive "research" model for tenure and promotion. We are producing more and more articles and more and more monographs being read by fewer and fewer people. This is not knowledge production, this is an ever-escalating, pseudo-intellectual habitrail powered by rank fear. This is also a collective action problem. We all know this system is broken, everybody complains about it, but individually we are all afraid of being the first to speak out against it in terror of social and institutional reprisal.
I'd increase teaching loads by at least a course per semester and get rid of the adjuncts and so-called graduate instructors. The STEM types who cry bloody murder can bloody well leave. I'm tired of hearing whining from those who teach one class a semester and still have lab instructors do most of the heavy lifting for them. The argument that they bring in more funding than they consume is an outright lie when one factors in the institutional costs that go towards their support. You want to be attached to a university or college, then teach for a living. If you want to write grants for a living you are free to move to a private research institute.
Similarly, I'd spin off the athletics departments so that they are independent agencies with no financial ties to the university. If they want to employ athletes who just happen to be students, just like the local restaurants do, so be it. That decision is up to the student. If the presence of such athletics institutes help draw students to our geographic area, so be it. That would be gravy, however, not the turkey. A few hundred thousand dollars spent and you have a robust intramural program that serves all students (and faculty and staff!) instead of just a few professionals.
I'd assign TA's to help with grading and to act as occasional guest lecturers, but on the model of student teachers. That is what they are, after all. Enough with this business of throwing first-year graduate students in front of their own classes. They have no training, and the sink or swim model of learning is completely unfair to the undergraduates they are teaching. Arguments against the unionization of grad-students constantly invoke the apprenticeship model. Well, let's really use it then. Carpenter-apprentices aren't asked to build the whole damn house their first year on the job. They'd build unsafe houses, so how can we ask such things of our own apprentices.
I'd put dollar figures on faculty time so that service contributions could be properly accounted for. As it is, such time is undervalued and thus overconsumed. Make a promotion system that is transparent, and values service and teaching in fact, not in word. Reduce so-called research expectations and reward teaching, including graduate student mentoring. Most humanities graduate-mentoring is a joke compared to what STEM folks do with their own students in lab, so I'd design some system that takes account of this discrepancy -- not here, give me time, suggestions welcome!
I foresee a bunch of you complaining that I'm killing the research university. Yep, I sure am. But the damn thing is in a vegetative state as it is. I'm merely pulling the plug and administering the morphine. Our system is the bastard love child of the Johns Hopkins/19th c. German version and the Oxbridge/residential college version of academia. So long as we poured public funding into this model (or, in the case of the privates, vast philanthropic wealth) we could make it comfortable and put color in its cheeks. Those times are gone. Kaput. Finis. So, we decide what we need now.
I
think we need to educate citizens, but not in the same ways. College has become more about status signifying and faux credentialing than a mechanism for real education. You need to go to Yale for the same reasons you needed your debutante ball in the past. I'm a humanist, and I'd love to see more people exposed to the ideas of the thinkers with whom I wrestle with everyday. That does not mean, however, that people need to devote a certain 4-6 years of their live to a carefully prescribed
cursus bonorum (or, in some cases, a cursus malorum) which generates for them massive debt and a fancy sheepskin.
Our institutions have engaged in a race for status themselves in order to try and differentiate the sheepskins, but it is madness. Madness, I tell you! It is a drain on our collective finances, and a misappropriation of individual energies. I want to help people learn how to write better, how to present ideas to an audience more clearly and forcefully, how to respond to criticism better, and how to live a life of the mind, regardless of their profession. I think these are marketable goods which have long-lasting value. But I can't do all of this so long as my institutional structure rewards me (nay, compels me!) to pore over the correspondence of RWE and TC in the hopes of being able to write something worthy of publication in whatever rag will accept it. I would like to do this at my own pace and in such a way that it enriches my teaching – recognizing that it adds real value to the things for which their actually is a market. The tired cliché that good scholarship is necessary for good teaching is one of the Big Lies in our field. I’ve seen evidence more to the contrary. As a rule (which has exceptions, of course) the more high-powered the researcher, the less effective they are in the classroom.
So, in short, abolish adjuncts and fake adjuncts (= grad instructors) and increase teaching loads slightly. Hire only full-time tenured or tenure track (or, perhaps, long-term, renewable contracts ala Dean Dad) faculty responsible for instruction and for most governance. Drastically reduce the number of administrators and actually reward faculty for assuming those duties, both materially and with regard to T&P. Reduce the expectations for grant-writing and other such mechanisms that burden the institution with expensive administration and tie it to the fluctuations of public monies. Dramatically reduce research expectations in recognition of the expanded duties of the faculty and in the expectation of more quality and less quantity. Get rid of the professionalized athletics and convert a fraction of that savings to intramurals.
Would we still have a crisis on our hands? Of course. We need to make our case to the public that what we are selling is worth the price we are asking. Right now, nobody is buying it. And who can blame them? They see that they are paying for trifles of no relevance to them (so-called “research”) and the things they need (instruction and accreditation for their children) are being scanted.
I’m sure there are more and better surgeries we could perform, but I have to attend to my stupid article revisions. Classes start next week, but have I even written the syllabi? No, why bother? It is much more important that I put on my clown suit and jump through hoops instead of attending to the real needs of those who pay my mortgage and put bread on my table.
