Colleges and universities can’t have it both ways

A recent discussion on Crooked Timber centers on whether higher education is due for a scandal. Daniel Davies argues that scandals typically involve things that are taken for granted in one domain being discovered by the public. Given this, Clay Shirky suspects that low teaching loads might lead to such a scandal. He writes:

What the public doesn’t understand (and what many academics don’t understand that the public doesn’t understand) is that the social compact between taxpayers and selective public colleges has been re-written. Up through the 1960s, state schools committed most faculty to teaching most of the time, while directing only a few institutions to hire and promote based on research. (Clark Kerr, PBUH, designed his famous Master Plan assuming that very few California schools should be able to offer Ph.D.s)

This limitation proved unsupportable. After WWII, research was where both the money and prestige was. This shift in our self-conception coincided with the spectacular but unsustainable support we got from the states after Sputnik. For fifteen glorious years, academies were funded as if we ran missile systems instead of monasteries. We used the money to reduce our teaching loads (in the old Carnegie model, a 4-4 load was considered full time) and allowed course release for anyone who brought in additional research dollars.

When our Cold War funding began to ebb in the mid-1970s, rather than go back to the classroom, our selective institutions began calling up an army of TAs and adjuncts to shoulder the teaching load, a transition so enormous that contingent faculty is now the majority, and we tenured faculty the minority.

As long as college was still cheap, and a degree consistently raised income, the public was largely indifferent to the increased reliance on contingent faculty to fill the gap left when we reduced our teaching loads. That period is ending. Constantly rising tuition and the emergence of a Bachelor’s degrees as a prerequisite for middle-class life is exposing the American academy to a degree of scrutiny and skepticism that little in our history has prepared us for.

Shirky argues that recent events to increase teaching in the North Carolina system are emblematic of this sort of change.

The problem for colleges and universities is that as they have reduced teaching loads for faculty members, they have increased demands for research. Although I have a 3-2 teaching load and small classes, then, the demands for publication are much higher than at my previous institution where I taught a 3-3 load, where they were slightly higher than those at institutions with 4-4 loads (or higher). More publications are associated, somebody must assume, with more prestige (even if this is more closely related to endowments), making our institutions worth the high cost of attendance. I would argue, though, that publication expectations and teaching loads are out of alignment. I teach one fewer course per year than somebody in my position thirty years ago, but my publication expectations are an order of magnitude higher. As I wrote in my post on academic false consciousness:

Because administrators want to increase the rankings of our institutions, they want each generation of faculty to be better than those who came before. They want us to publish more and in “better” journals while teaching more students with fewer resources. They want us to become internationally-known experts in our fields while denying sabbatical requests that would allow us to finish a book. And we do it. … Administrators have continually raised the bar for tenure-track faculty members and rather than refusing to play their games, we buy into the idea that the administration’s view of the world is real and meaningful.

It seems like the logical result would be to reframe the expectations of faculty at many institutions, increasing teaching loads and decreasing publication requirements. It seems that there is room for a college or university to find success by increasing teaching loads but maintaining small class sizes and drastically reducing publication requirements, making its message to parents that their children will always have small classes and never be taught by an adjunct. This sort of change, though, would require faculty and administrators to be on the same page. Anybody who has sat through faculty meetings can also attest to the fact that logic is not always high on the list of things that are on display.

In my view, the institutions that are going to successfully navigate the transition that higher education is undergoing will be those that can most quickly figure out who they are and how they can best fulfill their niches. Those who try to continually operate under the rules of the old system likely have bleak futures.

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What Becker and Goffman did when they couldn’t get jobs

The history of the sociology job market contains some interesting peculiarities. For example, George Herbert Mead received an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and then went to Germany to work on his Ph.D. Before his dissertation was completed, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan where he taught philosophy and psychology before later following John Dewey to the University of Chicago. He never completed his Ph.D. (Imagine the field day that a certain job site would have with his hiring today!) It was, I suppose, a different time. (A certain job site does have a field day with discussions of full professors whom it is argued couldn’t get a tenure-track position in today’s market with their current records.) The cases of Howie Becker and Erving Goffman show that not all of the big names in sociology had such an easy time on the job market while reinforcing how different things were back then.

At ASA in San Francisco this year, Howie Becker was the discussant on one of the “Young Ethnographer” panels (the one without Alice Goffman). About the papers, he said something along the lines of “How am I supposed to talk about such different papers at the same time” and then moved on to a discussion of his belief that the best ethnographic work (he actually stated that he prefers the term “field work”) is typically conducted by young people in graduate school who have the benefit of time.* Early in his career, he and his fellow University of Chicago graduate Erving Goffman (if this had been the session with Alice Goffman he could have brought things full-circle…) were unable to find work. So they conducted research.

According to Wikipedia (which has incorrect information about Mead’s education and, thus, may or may not be a reliable source of information on the biographies of sociologists), after completing his Ph.D. Becker conducted research at the Institute for Juvenile Research, in a postdoc at the University of Illinois, and as a research associate at Stanford before starting as a faculty member at Northwestern. Although things might not have seemed too dire because he received his Ph.D. when he was only 23, it was over ten years before Becker started what today would probably be considered his official career. Goffman, meanwhile, worked as a research associate at the University of Chicago and then for the National Institute for Mental Health before beginning as a faculty member at Berkeley.

Becker’s point in discussing the job market woes that he and Goffman experienced at ASA this year was that they both relished the opportunity to focus on research during those years, even as their friends took pity on them. My point in discussing them is to highlight the evolution of job market pathways in the intervening years. While a candidate today might be able to get a postdoc, the increasing reliance on adjunct labor means that the prospects for somebody without a tenure-track job who wants to stay in academia are much more likely to include cobbling together a poverty-level salary from various adjunct positions than earning a comfortable living conducting research. The outcomes of these pathways are also clear, since adjunct teaching leaves little time for building a publication record that will result in an eventual tenure-track job.

Despite what might have been perceived by their friends as early-career stumbles, Becker and Goffman went on to have illustrious careers in sociology and made large contributions to the discipline. How many similar contributions does the current opportunity structure within academia deprive us of?

*Later in his career, he claimed that he found time for field work by being a bad departmental citizen. It is best that we don’t mention the advice that he solicited on this topic from a few esteemed audience members.

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The rise of academe

If you frequent the Chronicle of Higher Education or Inside Higher Ed, you may have noticed that the word “academia” appears to have fallen out of fashion in favor of “academe.” I’m not sure why this is. Google’s Ngram comparison of the two words indicates that academe has recently been used more frequently in books, but its trajectory has been much lower than that of academia in the same time period. Google Trends also registers essentially zero interest in academe. Yet it persists. For example, a few days ago it was present throughout this post about the sad state of the academic job market.

I recognize that the two words both refer to the academic community and are essentially interchangeable. I also recognize that I have a negative reaction to the word academe that is likely unwarranted. (In that way it is similar to the negative reaction when I hear people refer to articles, book chapters, or blog posts as “pieces.” At least I know that my high school art teacher is to blame for that.) Interestingly, the recent rise of “academia” in the public consciousness could explain the rise of “academe” among actual academics, like the cool kids changing trends when the general population starts catching on (“Becky, everybody is talking about academia these days. We say academe now.”).

Google’s Ngram viewer archive stops at 2008, which is likely too early to catalog the recent rise of academe among academics. I suspect, however, that I’m going to have to get used to it. That doesn’t mean I have to use it, though. Cool kids be damned!

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The reality of writing at teaching-oriented institutions

The other day Tenured Radical had a great post about the reality of writing in academia in general, but especially at teaching-oriented institutions:

The truth is that the vast majority of academic jobs, and some of the jobs that people want most because they conform to our romance of what higher education ought to be, are the least likely to forward one’s life as a writer and a scholar. Do you believe in faculty governance? OK, then, slice about six to eight hours out of your week for it, unless you are in the faculty senate or on some other major committee, and then take out another five hours. Are you a dedicated teacher? Six to seven hours a week, per class, until you start to enter Grading Hell about the middle of February, and then you can double that commitment. Do you like students? Well, then they will love you! Reserve another four to six hours a week for scheduled and unscheduled office hours, Mr. Chips, and this doesn’t even begin to count the hours you will spend advising and writing letters of recommendation.

I became increasingly aware over the last 25 years that peers who did not work at teaching intensive colleges had a great deal more time to spend on their writing. Yet strangely people act as if all full-time academic jobs are more or less the same, and that we all are similarly accomplished. We act as though there are not more than a very few people who work under the conditions that allow them to write more. In fact, I would argue that there is a kind of accelerator effect in academia, in which people who have access to the best fellowships and best jobs coming out of graduate school will, increasingly have access to more time to write than other people. It is these people who set the standard for excellence that, in the end, the vast majority of academics are expected by their institutions, and expect themselves, to meet.

This is a problem that I’ve discussed before in terms of academic false consciousness and the publication gauntlet. I am also hurrying to get some writing done before the crush of grading makes it practically impossible. While I think her identification of the problem is right on, most of her proposed solutions are aimed at helping faculty write more rather than addressing the fact that expectations no longer match a practical definition of reality for most academics.

False consciousness strikes again!

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Don’t forget your life vest

As a graduate student approaching the job market I heard a few stories about people who initially got jobs at less than ideal institutions and then published their way into better opportunities.  When I was on the job market this was even one of the reasons that I was advised to turn down a job with a 4-4 teaching load.  The implication is that candidates who receive jobs that they like only have to publish enough to satisfy the tenure expectations of their institutions while those who receive jobs that they don’t like need to publish more in order to make themselves attractive to potential future employers.

Given the current uncertainty in higher education (which you can read about here and hear about on your nightly news when state budgets are proposed) I think that the first of those statements is wrong.  Rather than being able to lower their publication standards to match the expectations of their institution, I think that faculty members at all institutions are facing a situation in which a strong publication record is a life vest.  While you may hope that you never have to use it, this life vest will be crucial if you should find yourself needing to abandon ship in these uncharted academic waters.  As those who are on the job market know, there aren’t enough life boats for everybody so your publication record may mean the difference between academic life and death.

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Tenured Radical wants a raise, gets a cartoon

Based on the posts last week, Tenured Radical has created a cartoon.  While it is no “So you want to get a Ph.D. in the humanities,” it is still enjoyable.  I’m starting to think that more bloggers should make regular video clips – like Ph.D. Comics but with more movement (and likely, less humor).

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Baby, you’re a rich man*

Continuing the theme of faculty compensation, Tenured Radical has posted Part III of the conversation she started earlier in the week.  In Part III she gives an overview of the wide range of responses to her question of faculty salary and notes that only one commenter, the difficult to pronounce Squadratomagico, was not worried by the current state of affairs.  Squadratomagico (it is difficult to type, too) details her reasons for this at her own blog, including the argument that this is part of the deal we accept when entering the nonprofit world.  Along these lines, I thought that academics largely accept the fact that they are not going to get rich in academia and that if they wanted doctors’ and lawyers’ salaries they should go to school to be doctors and lawyers.  I remember hearing this several times, though not quite so bluntly as this or this.

Given the wide range of salaries in response to TR’s original post, it is clear that many academics are struggling in low-wage conditions.  There are others, however, bringing home comfortable salaries despite recent stagnation.  As one professor told me in grad school, no matter how much he made, he never seemed to have any extra money (he mentioned the more expensive houses, vacations, etc. that tend to come with higher incomes, but he may as well have said this).  Beyond the fact that we should have known what we were getting into before becoming academics, I have a hard time finding sympathy for an individual making more than twice the median income of U.S. households as we slowly make our way out of an economic crisis (even controlling for the higher cost of living in certain areas).

The larger question, though, is whether the salary freezes that have frustrated even well-paid academics are temporary or part of a new world order of higher education.  Given rising costs and decreasing budgets, academic pay is likely a double-edged sword.  As Squadratomagico notes, “The larger the gap between what it costs institutions to sustain a full-time line with benefits, and hiring an adjunct, the more adjunctified the university becomes, pure and simple.”  Ultimately, it seems that the solution may need to come from larger public investments in education, which is a double-edged sword in itself.  For the foreseeable future, it appears that we’ll need to revel in the non-monetary benefits of academia if we have a desire to consider ourselves rich.

 

*This post has a soundtrack, which has reentered my consciousness thanks to its excellent use in The Social Network

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Less work for the same pay

A post at Tenured Radical yesterday brought up the issue of increasing faculty responsibilities and decreasing salaries (in constant, and sometimes absolute, dollars).  The comments on yesterday’s post are particularly interesting given the wide range of salaries at various institution types.  This is something that most people are aware of in the abstract but is still sobering when contextualized.  A post today continues this discussion and responds to Historiann’s discussion of TR’s changing opinion on salary freezes over the past few years (thankfully, academics are able to change their minds based on new information, unlike politicians).

The issues of salary and workloads are connected to current discussions of work-life balance.  At one such discussion on my own campus at which the administration reiterated its support for the health and well-being of the faculty one brave soul brought up the fact that despite these messages, the only way for faculty members to increase their salaries is to increase their workload.  He then asked whether the administration had ever considered rewarding faculty for leading balanced lives rather than simply working more.  The answer, unsurprisingly, was no.

Faculty members, then, appear to be faced with a choice between working less for less money or working more for less money.

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My last summer vacation

In my current transition between graduate student and faculty member I am experiencing a brief summer vacation that may be my last.  Sure, I have lots of work to do in preparation for the fall semester (not to mention that ASA presentation I keep forgetting about), but I don’t have to get up particularly early and I don’t have to work more than a few hours a day until I get back from ASA and I shift into full “teaching” mode.  Of course, there will be plenty of times in the future that classes are not in session, indicating “vacation” to many of those in my family, but I will likely just transition into “research” mode during those times, since teaching three courses a semester are likely to prevent much research from getting done when classes are in session.  These thoughts on “academic” versus “normal” definitions of vacationing were brought on by a recent PHD Comic:

Indeed, though my family will likely imagine me spending my summer “vacation” getting up around noon and lounging by a pool, margarita in hand, vacations from students do not equal vacations from work.

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This day will come

I wonder how many (other) graduate student blogs consist mostly of reposts from PHD Comics…

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