TITLE: A Few More Thoughts on the Future of Universities
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: June 13, 2011  7:11 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
Our state legislature still has not passed a budget for the
next fiscal year, which leaves the the university hanging,
waiting to set its course for 2011-2012.  We expect another
round of big cuts, the latest over more than a decade in
which the funding base for state universities has eroded
rapidly.

I've written before about the
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2009-06.html#e2009-06-11T20_24_02.htm">
   fault lines under higher education</A>.
I'm really not a Chicken Little sort of person, but I do
think it's important that we pay attention to changes in
the world and prepare them -- maybe even get ahead of the
curve and actively build an institution that serves the
state and its people well.

Over the weekend, I read William Deresiewicz's recent piece
in <EM>The Nation</EM>,
<A HREF="http://www.thenation.com/article/160410/faulty-towers-crisis-higher-education">
   Faulty Towers: The Crisis in Higher Education</A>,
which looks at the pyramid scheme that is graduate education
in the humanities.  Deresiewicz writes about places like
Yale, but much of what he says applies across the academy.
This passage made sirens go off in my head:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
As Gaye Tuchman explains in <B>Wannabe U</B> (2009), a case
study in the sorrows of academic corporatization, deans,
provosts and presidents are no longer professors who cycle
through administrative duties and then return to teaching
and research.  Instead, they have become a separate stratum
of managerial careerists, jumping from job to job and
organization to organization like any other executive:
isolated from the faculty and its values, loyal to an ethos
of short-term expansion, and trading in the business blather
of measurability, revenue streams, mission statements and
the like.  They do not have the long-term health of their
institutions at heart.  They want to pump up the stock price
(i.e., U.S. News and World Report ranking) and move on to
the next fat post.

...

What we have in academia, in other words, is a microcosm of
the American economy as a whole: a self-enriching aristocracy,
a swelling and increasingly immiserated proletariat, and a
shrinking middle class.  The same devil's bargain stabilizes
the system: the middle, or at least the upper middle, the
tenured professoriate, is allowed to retain its prerogatives
-- its comfortable compensation packages, its workplace
autonomy and its job security -- in return for acquiescing to
the exploitation of the bottom by the top, and indirectly,
the betrayal of the future of the entire enterprise.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Things aren't quite that bad at my school.  Most of our
administrators are home-grown, not outside hires using us as
the next rung on their career ladder.  But we are susceptible
to other trends identified in this article, in particular the
rapid growth of the non-faculty staff, both mid-level
administrators and support staff for the corporate and human
services elements of the university.

Likewise, the situation is different with our faculty.  We
have relatively few adjuncts teaching courses, and an even
smaller proportion of grad students.  We are a "teaching
university", and our tenured and tenure-track faculty teach
three courses each semester.  That's great for our students,
but our productivity in the classroom makes scrounging for
grants and external research dollars hard to do.  We may be
more productive in the classroom than our research-school
brethren, but with less recourse to external dollars we are
more dependent on state funding.  Unfortunately, our board
of regents and our state government don't seem to appreciate
this and leave us hanging by much thinner threads as state
appropriations dwindle.  Now there is talk of assigning
faculty who are less productive as researchers to teach a
fourth class each semester, which will only further hamper
our ability to create and disseminate knowledge -- and our
ability to attract external funding.

The idea of career administrators hit close to home for me
personally, too, as I enter my third term as a department
head.  I am at heart a computer scientist and programmer,
not an administrator.  But it's easy to get sucked into the
vortex of paperwork and meetings.  I need to think of this
year not as the first year of my next term but as the first
year of my <EM>last</EM> term, or perhaps as my third-to-last
year.  Such a mindset may be a better way for me to aim at
goals I think most important while preparing the department
for a transition to new leadership.

One last passage in Deresiewicz's article got me to thinking.
While talking about the problems with tenure, he points out
one of the problems of not having tenure:  Who will pursue
the kind of research that cannot be converted to a quick buck
if faculty can expect to be jettisoned by universities at any
time, but especially as they age and become more expensive
than new hires?

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Doctors and lawyers can set up their own practice, but a
professor can't start his own university.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I've been thinking about this idea for a while but don't
think I've written about it yet.  It's something that really
intrigues me.  There are so many obstacles lying in the way
of achieving the idea, and the differential immediate applied
value of the various disciplines is only one.  yet it is an
interesting thought experiment, one I hope to write about
more in the future.
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