AAUP
···
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 1995 23:09:25 -0500 (EST)
From: "Jamie W. Moore, 953-4856, 883-3089" <MOOREJ@Citadel.edu>
Subject: 60 Minutes Program
From: "Charles J. Parrish" <cparris@cms.cc.wayne.edu>
(Charles J. Parrish)
Sender: aaupxdir-request@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
To: miaaup@aol.com
Cc: aaupxdir@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
Subject: President's Report for Michigan Conference Newsletter
Date: Thu, 02 Mar 1995 18:36:39 -0500
Teaching, Research and Administration:
It's Time for a Thoughtful Reassessment
On Sunday, Feburary 26th, Sixty Minutes broadcast a report on an
issue that has been of recurring concern in higher education.
It focused on teaching in colleges and universities. The point
was made that at the University of Arizona 87% of all freshman
sections are being taught by graduate assistants or part-time
instructors and went on to the usual point that tenure was granted
at Arizona, and in most four-year colleges and universities,
exclusively on the basis of research output. It found
faculty members to interview who agreed with this assessment
and were willing to trot out some of the more egregious advice
on how to suceed in academics. One stated that he knew of junior
faculty members who were told that their good teaching ratings by
students were signals that they were spending too much time on
teaching. Leslie Stahl walked down an aisle of journals, dismissing
the research results reported there as trivial and without worth.
Naturally, her producers founding a professor to support this
opinion with a wisecrack about nobody ever reading the articles
except for a few of the author's closest relatives. If the
faculty member qualified his statement with a further comment, it
was lost on the cutting room floor, as Stahl and Sixty Minues went
for the sensational, rather than the thoughtful.
If the treatment of teaching in higher education by Sixty Minutes
was superficial, the issue is not. It is worthy of serious
discussion and measured thought. The facts are clear: research
is the most important, and too often the only, consideration for
achieving tenure, not only in our leading reasearch universities,
but in almost all of our four-year colleges and universities. The
question of the relationship between good teaching and academic
research is a serious one that deserves a better treatment than
it was accorded by Sixth Minutes. As is so often the case, where
you sit is where you stand in this discussion. The public too
often assumes that the life of the college professor as one of
leisure in which she or he teaches a few courses each week and
has the rest of the time to spend watching the O.J. Simpson trial
and, perhaps, the trials of Bart Simpson. This view is abetted
by public policy discussions in which teachers, in both K-12 and
post-secondary education, as a whole are found to be an easy
target for abuse. Polls have shown that many people who agree
that there are many problems in our educational system, but also
think that their local school and their state colleges and
universities are doing a good job as evidenced by the recent
Michigan survey reported in the news. All the responsible
studies of workload in higher education show that the work
week of the college or university teacher is longer that the
average in other areas of work. and most show that it is much
longer. There is a case to be made that faculty members spend
too much time attending committee meetings, supervising graduate
students, doing research or providing public service. But these
activities, along with the hours spent preparing for and in the
classroom, are important to what these institutions do and, in
the aggregate, represent the diverse activities that make
American higher education of value to society.
University administrators, arguing that they are being pushed
by policy makers, often try to increase teaching loads for
faculty members whom they view a unproductive (e.g. not doing
research, often redefining research as grant-funded research).
At my own institution, we have seen the case where a faculty
member who had published many articles over the past several
years was designated for an increased teaching load, ostensibly
because he did not bring in grant funds, but, we suspect, because
his Dean and his Chairperson did not like the direction of his
research. Here a teaching load question has quickly, and
justifiably, become an academic freedom issue.
Unfortunately, the forces that are at work that lead to the
situation described by Sixty Minutes at the University of
Arizona cannot be altered by increasing teaching loads by
50% or even doubling them. First of all the other work that
fills the days of college teachers will continue to have to
be done on top of the extra classes and to the degree that
these activities are crowded out of the professorial
schedule by extra teaching, the institution's overall value
will be diminished. To argue this is not to offer a defense
of the isolated case where a tenured faculty member with
has given up the ghost and fails to teach, do research or
provide any service. Where this is the case, there are legal
remedies to which the AAUP and other defenders of the faculty
do not object.
Second, the major problem that higher education faces is not
from low productivity among faculty members, whether this is
defined in teaching or research terms. It is that the funding
for higher education is being crowded out by other policy demands.
States are floundering in a budgetary swamp. The pubic wants
more criminals put away: state political leaders pass
appropriations for new prisons (three are provided for in
Governor Engler's new budget). The cost of health care
continues to rise at a rate double the rate of general inflation.
This means that although Medicaid increasingly provides fewer
of the poor with health care, the cost of the program for both
the states and the federal government is skyrocketing. The
new Republican Congress is intent on devolving as many programs
back onto the states through block grant programs. In the past,
policy makers have found that block grants are easier to cut
because the money they provide is fungible and it is spread
around through decisions made in Lansing, Tallahassee and Pierre.
This cuts the direct link that categorical (or single purpose)
grants established between state, local, and private service
providers had with Washington funding agencies and makes it
harder to defend cuts in the aggregate block grant amounts. The
result that education, from the elementary to the research
university level, is competing for a pool of state money that
is not matching inflation in its growth.
As higher education tries to provide a solid education for
its students, it faces troubling dilemmas. Administrators
not only pressure their faculty members to accept higher
teaching loads, but they turn to financial devices that have
pernicious effects. They press for the expanding the
part-time faculty and the hiring of lecturers on annual
contracts, without the prospect of getting a tenure track
appointment. Further, they make almost no effort to downsize
the administration and to turn administrative positions into
teaching positions. Not only do the figures reported to HEIDI,
the Michigan higher education data base, confirm the continuing
growth of administrative budgets at the expense of teaching,
but the IPEDS data show this nationally. If there had been
any serious effort to downsize administration in higher education,
can anyone doubt that we would have heard about it? One thing
that college presidents have learned is never to do anything
that might have some publicity value quietly. The New York
Times recently reported on a hospital that, in order to
become more efficient, cut 23 of 34 senior managers. We have
seen headlines shouting out the message of the downsizing of
corporations, hospitals, government and so on, but how many
of you can remember a news story announcing reductions in
administrative costs in higher education so that we can get
more faculty into the classroom?
There is no doubt that teaching in higher education can be
done more effectively and that a very serious discussion of
this subject should be the order of the day. However, the
discussion should be much broader than merely, let's make
the professors teach more, as Sixty Minutes seemed to be
proposing.