Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Morris from Maine Wonders About The Atlantic's Survey on the Future of Education, The Abolition of Tenure, and The Need for Remediation. (Oh, And There Are Graphs.)
I'm sure I'm not the only one to have seen this today and wondered what drugs the survey respondents (30 college prezzies) had taken before answering this survey.
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Again, I couldn't get past the very first question. They asked university presidents whether incoming students were prepared? They would have done a better job asking the custodial staff. They, after all, have actually seen students.
ReplyDeleteDr Nate is right. And if you check the institutions of those 30 presidents, you can tell that the remedial student thing could be better asked to different people as well.
ReplyDeleteWhy don't we talk about this?
ReplyDeleteIf they abolish tenure and adopt a 100% adjunct labor force, everything would change, it is true.
However. If they abolished tenure and created some sort of middle ground -- say, 10 year contracts at a reasonable middle class income -- how much would change absolutely? More people might get hired, because it's "Ten years" rather than life. Perhaps that is where these Prezzies were going.
I can think of other benefits to that sort of system, but they involve bitching about all the silverbacks who never do any work because they stopped working after they got tenure 25 years ago.
Please provide counter-arguments.
My point was that President's opinions are not to be trusted, even on the tenure thing.
ReplyDeletePersonally, tenure is just about the only thing that makes me want to do this job. I want freedom to choose my own research projects and take chances. I want to be able to try new things when teaching. And I want job security - very few industries will want to hire university professors.
Without these things, I think they will find they will actually have to PAY for the talent they want, instead of having people clamoring for jobs.
But I might be wrong. I'm surprised at how many people become permanent adjuncts.
One of the presidents quoted in the article is correct - multiyear contracts w/o tenure allow a school to take a chance by promoting an assistant professor without the commitment that tensure requires.
ReplyDeleteFaculty continue to perform well and everybody's contract gets renewed. Sure, you could get let go but replacing faculty is a lot of work for everybody, especially the people who do the firing. There's incentives for everybody to just get along.
I'm not sure that much would change with global tenure abolishment. The already tenured folk would probably stay where they are for a variety of reasons. Most departments in my field look to hire at the assistant professor level since those folks tend to come cheaper and you want to hire someone who will adjust to your ways. I think that universities know that the faculty are the enduring anchor in a sea of change. I don't think that they will jump to fire anyone but the very worst and intollerable (and I don't know many of those).
ReplyDeleteThe replacement process is also expensive and time consuming. You won't find many departments eagerly voting out their colleagues for completely flippant reasons since the act will inevitably cost them research time to participate in the search process. Most unis will probably give most weight to the departments recommendation.
I think that in the immediate wake there will be some people so angered they will leave. But in the short to mid term there wouldn't be a lot of change. I would not speculate on the long term consequences.
Nationwide, only 15% of 12th-graders are prepared for college-level mathematics. Around 50% go to higher education. That means that about 70% of incoming freshmen must need some remediation. That's the figure that we see at the open-enrollment state university where I work. The transfers that I have done show that many private colleges just hide it.
ReplyDeleteNope. Tenure goes, I go. They don't pay me enough to make it worth it without tenure.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is the answer then. If tenure goes, half of the profs will go, and the clogged system will finally unclog itself. Please tell: Where will you go, Marcia?
ReplyDeleteThis whole thing is sort of a moot point because tenure is on its way out anyway. It won't happen tomorrow but it will happen. It will be phased out entirely.
ReplyDeleteAs for where people will go, every single person I know that left academia ended up with a higher paying job, with better benefits, some with less education than I have. My friend, a civil servant with a B.A., is a clerk for NYS and makes more than I do, with a FAR better benefits package.
@academic monkey: part of the reason academia is "clogged" is precisely because tenure exists. People do still have that hope that they will get a tenure-track job somewhere. If tenure goes, and the potential of job security and the protections it offers ceases to exist as we know it, far less people will go into academia.
is there any reason why a university couldn't simply declare that new hires will not be offered tenure, but will be hired on long-term contracts?
ReplyDeleteThe elimination of tenure is likely inevitable at all but the top schools. Marcia and I won't have to go anywhere, because I doubt they'll take it away retroactively. They'll just slowly stop hiring for the tenure track, thus eliminating the tenured classes by simple attrition. It will be cleaner and less gruesome that way.
ReplyDeleteThe consequences of this are another matter entirely. Monkey seems to want to hope that the system will unclog itself and opportunities will suddenly open up for the mass of non-tenure-track folks out there. Under the most optimistic version of that scenario, people would be hired on five or ten year contracts and paid a middle class wage with benefits.
Maybe that will happen. But even if it were to happen, on what basis would such people be selected, and retained/renewed? The evaluation criteria that are currently in place would have to change. There would no longer be any incentive for universities to grant research leaves or course releases for research/writing, especially in the social sciences and humanities. If you only have someone in place for a term contract, the incentive is to work them like a rented mule and then grab someone fresh who can be had at the entry-level rate. So best case scenario for the elimination of tenure would be that you spend seven years getting a Ph.D., then you get hired on a five year contract to teach a 4-4 or a 5-5, plus some mandatory summer teaching as well (since you don't need research and writing time anymore), after which you get jettisoned in favor of another fresh, cheaper body.
Under that scenario, the elite schools will keep tenure and lower teaching loads, so that they can say "look, our faculty does research and isn't just a bunch of underpaid high school teachers." Because you are kidding yourself if you think that with tenure gone that most places will not jump at the chance to transform college and university professors into glorified high school teachers.
And like a lot of people in this profession, I got into it for the chance to do research and write about it. I don't loathe teaching, and I'm pretty good at it, I think. But if teaching had been my main goal in life, I'd be making more money teaching at some private high school right now. Take away tenure, and you are taking away the research part of the profession for all but the tiniest elite.
But I'm a pessimist, so I think that if tenure were gone, they'd run out and hire adjuncts on semester contracts that pay below the poverty line. Never mind that this would spell the end of anything resembling quality in higher ed. The administration mind just works that way.
Don't get me wrong: I am playing entirely devil's advocate here. I don't harbor any delusions that the masses will stop going to grad school or that suddenly professors will start being treated better. I just wanted to get some alternative ideas out there, since presidents seem to be mostly out of touch with the realities of academic freedom, teaching loads, and administrative duties.
ReplyDelete@Middle-Aged & Morose: Some unis have already started to do this. One college I know of recently did some variant of this tactic. The trustees got together and decided that it was bad for the school to have so many tenured people. So they decided that every department should have no more than 60% of the faculty tenured. So while they will still offer tenure-track jobs no one will actually be granted tenure until enough people retire. People who "earn" tenure are dumped into a waiting tank for tenure contracts to become available. This really sux for those in departments filled with faculty under 45.
ReplyDeleteArchie pretty much nailed it, I think. I'd add to the picture:
ReplyDelete--Universities don't even have to officially "jettison" existing non-tenure-track faculty if they keep their starting salaries so low, and raise increments so minimal, that any intelligent human being (which presumably includes a reasonable number of Ph.D.s) eventually concludes that (s)he can't keep working for such wages. Eventually, faculty will realize they want to retire some day and go away on their own (I'm getting close to this stage), or add so much off-the-books work, and/or simply get so bitter, that they'll underfunction enough to be fired/non-renewed.
--I agree that the research component of the job is important; not only does it feed our personal intellectual appetites; it makes us better teachers. But don't leave out service. Awful as committee work may be, the alternative (which I've experienced to some degree) is worse: having a small number of people make decisions about classes which they don't teach (or teach as part of much smaller loads than the average faculty member). Even with all the good will in the world, the few people in the "administrative" (read tenured) class become overwhelmed, start dropping balls, ignoring important issues that aren't their favorite thing to deal with (but might be right up the alley of someone who doesn't have "service" in his/her job description), and generally annoying the equally-overwhelmed, very intelligent people they're trying to administer, who would (almost) kill for a chance to stop, reflect on what they've been doing, and perhaps come up with a plan or two to make it better. It's a very efficient system for getting the least out of two groups of highly-intelligent, able people, and potentially setting them at each others' throats in the process (which may be exactly what the traditional administrative classes want -- see below).
--My definition of academic freedom is to be able to tell the Dean, Provost, and/or University President that, although a certain approach would save money, it would not improve instruction (see all of the above), and be absolutely certain that doing so will not cost me my job. As a contingent faculty member, I'm not at all certain that I have that freedom (which means that, in practice, I won't experiment with exercising it -- well, actually, I may, but it's probably not particularly smart for me to do so.)
I think too many people here are focusing on the poll numbers and not on the outfit that ran and published the poll; i.e., the "Atlantic Monthly." This is the same magazine that said that airpower would win the Afghan war, that a US-Chinese war is inevitable, and that corporatization of the science labs of US colleges was a good thing. So it's an ex-liberal, moving towards neoconservative rag. Notice that these college professors think that if students are going to jump ship and go to another country's colleges, they will go to China! The very same China where students can pretty much bribe their way to a BA/BS! The whole thing reminds me of the corporate happytalk during the 1990s "downsizing" boom, which is (I suppose) what organizations do when everyone with power is in la-la land.
ReplyDeleteOh, I'll go teach high school. As Archie notes, it pays somewhat better, and thus far they are keeping tenure; I also have experience with younger kids. But I also think they won't take tenure away retroactively. So after a horrible slog, 5 years on the market and a completely unliveable first job, it looks like I might be on the lucky end of things. And as I said then, I'll say now: it isn't a meritocracy in the least. It's all blind fucking luck.
ReplyDeleteBlind luck. Yes, blind luck.
ReplyDeleteHow depressing. Off to slog a drink or 5.