Who has it correct? 60 minutes or the AAUP

AAUP

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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.

[Dan Miller (950307)]

Chuck Tucker (950307):

Chuck, thanks for the letter. After the program I walked
around, sputtering, for at least half an hour. Here at dear
UD our administrators keep loading work on us, because we are
NOT busy. I think that they are projecting.

I hope they read your letter. I do not know what can be done
to keep Leslie Stahl from doing hack jobs. Little, I suspect.

Meanwhile, us lazy professors prepare, teach, grade, write,
council, advise, read, do committee work, and suffer the slings
and arrows of outragious ontologies. However, I suspect that
there will be an abundance of books and articles analyzing
the O. J. Simpson trial.

Perhaps colleges and universities should perform a sort of
"role inversion." That is, have the Administration and Full
Professors teach the grunt classes while the junior faculty and
instructors do the administering. I suspect that some interesting
things might happen. Thinking as I do that junior faculty and
instructors think more about education (and perhaps know more
about it), then maybe they will set new priorities that focus
on teaching and the production of new knowledge in the solution of
problems. At the least this little experiment couldn't hurt
much. It might be quite successful. Now if I had me some magic.

Later,
Dan Miller
millerd@udavxb.oca.udayton.edu

I was mailed this letter (very indirectly) a few days ago. This
seems to be the answer to your questions about the accuracy of the 60
Minutes report. It's long, but it addresses many of the specific points
made by 60 Minutes individually.

        I removed the email headers to save space.

___________________________________Message Received___________________

The University of Arizona has asked us to forward to you President
Manuel Pacheco's response to 60 Minutes' February 26 report on tenure
and undergraduate education. We are happy to do so. The text of
President Pacheco's response follows:

March 3, 1995

Dear Colleague:

        I watched Lesley Stahl's report on undergraduate education at major
research universities unfold on 60 Minutes with growing disbelief. The
crew spent hours with renowned researchers who teach undergraduates;
they talked to the faculty members who helped to launch significant
improvements in undergraduate education; they heard parents on campus
tours express positive reactions to their children's educational
experience; and none of it showed. Now I understand why they turned down
my own invitation to talk to them about my commitment to undergraduate
education in a strong research university.

        We cannot expect 60 Minutes to be a cheerleader for higher education,
but higher education deserves fair and professional treatment. To be
polite, it was a hatchet job.

        Clearly, not everyone shares the opinion of 60 Minutes. In the same
week that the program appeared, The University of Arizona received a
national teaching award and a congratulatory letter from President Bill
Clinton for excellence in undergraduate mathematics. A week earlier,
the Chronicle of Higher Education had cited our writing program as a
model for connecting teaching and research in the classroom. A few
months earlier, Science magazine said the University of Arizona puts its
money where its mouth is when it comes to undergraduate education.

        One of the most outrageous suggestions by 60 Minutes was pure
fabrication. A professor from a private college agreed with the idea
that parents may be forking out $15,000 to $20,000 a year to subsidize a
professor doing research.

        Maybe parents at his University pay $15,000 a year, but in-state
tuition at the University of Arizona is one of America's best bargains
- --$1,800 for in-state students, and $8,000 for out -of -state students.

        More important, tuition dollars are not spent to subsidize research.
To the contrary, research dollars support undergraduate education.
Eighty percent of the equipment used by our undergraduates in science
was paid for by research. Research dollars have constructed buildings,
outfitted laboratories and supported thousands of student with on-campus
jobs that give them real world experience in their career field. The
time is long past when state governments alone provided adequately for
our students.

        Equally outrageous was the statement that 87 percent of our freshmen
teaching is by teaching assistants. All engineering lecture courses are
taught by faculty members. Music students are required to meet with
faculty one-on-one for an hour each week. All architecture lecture
courses are taught by professors. All agriculture lectures are given by
faculty members.
In fact, the majority of lecture courses university wide are taught by
faculty members. Teaching assistants, on the other hand, do the
majority of the teaching in basic skills courses such as composition
and math and beginning languages, and lead the majority of lab and
discussions. 60 Minutes apparently equated a three-hour lecture course
with a one-hour lab or discussion section to arrive at their statistic.

        60 Minutes ignored the fact that The University of Arizona takes
teaching very seriously. Our guidelines have been revised to strengthen
the role of teaching in promotion and tenure decisions. When faculty
are hired, their job offer letter spells out the expectation that they
will be involved in undergraduate teaching. Some faculty hold office
hours in residence halls. First-year students can find advisors and
tutors in the Student Union after five o'clock, available for unplanned,
walk-in help. Every freshman has the opportunity to enroll in a small
class taught by a senior professor--in some cases, that professor is the
past president of the University, or myself. Recently we announced a
"Finish in Four" program that helps students to graduate in four years.
Research enriches education for our students; it does not replace our
commitment to them.

        The most blatant error made by 60 Minutes was its narrow and outdated
vision of higher education. Every 60 Minutes image of "good" teaching
was an image of a professor in front of the room, imparting knowledge to
docile, attentive students. That is no longer the only way students
learn.

        60 Minutes did not realize that when they used the image of Professor
Donald Huffman crouched beside a strange looking machine with flashing
lights, they were also seeing an undergraduate classroom.

        Donald Huffman and his students work in blue jeans, in a crowded,
chaotic lab, watching results of their tests with tired, intent faces.
The lab doesn't have the visual appeal of an urbane professor perched on
the edge of his desk, expounding to students. But it represents first
class undergraduate education in a research university--students engaged
in solving real-world problems.

        Research universities are places where students and professors alike
question, debate basic premises, take risks, fail, test ideas, push the
edge of what is possible. They solve problems. They are the source of
new ideas. They infuse students with the spirit of inquiry. They teach
competitiveness. They work.

        It is remarkable that the American research university is the envy of
the world, yet 60 Minutes missed the story.

                                                Sincerely,

                                                Manuel T. Pacheco
                                                President

------- End of Forwarded Message

···

---
Bob King
rking@psy.gatech.edu
Ga Tech School of Psychology

My reaction to Mr. Pacheco's defense of higher ed and of his
institution is that it's all beside the point. The point is the
student. Let the students talk, as they attend school, five years
after they attend school, ten years after, and so forth. Presidents
mention programs, equipment, awards, grants and the like as if they
proved something about the benefits derived by the individual mind.
They prove very little, as it's only by association. However, I must
admit that such impassioned, high-minded defenses of higher ed have
their place outside the university--like in a statehouse education
committee--which is the bog in which presidents justify their
CEO fare.

Thanks so much for sharing your info with me. Very best wishes.

Faust.
Name: Prof. Faust Pauluzzi
Place: Univ. So. Carolina
E-Mail: FAUSTO@SCAROLINA.EDU
Tel.: (803) 777-2686 / 4884
Fax: (803) 777-7828