Chronicle article: what if everyone on campus understood the money?

[mahagonny]

Admin hide the answers to these questions to weaponize the answers.

This.  Once one understands that the ultimate administrative goal is a university with no faculty, online-only students, robot graders, and a gleaming administrative tower with a Matrix-style spawning room (those assistant vice-deans don't come from storks), the behavior of our masters begins to make a lot more sense.

Except the same things can be explained by starting out by accepting that administration is not as thrilled with the tenure system and what it provides and at what cost than you would prefer. Which is a much more plausible scenario.
Add to that some administrators are embittered former faculty members who thought they got exploited as faculty. So someone owes them.

[Caracal]

Except the same things can be explained by starting out by accepting that administration is not as thrilled with the tenure system and what it provides and at what cost than you would prefer. Which is a much more plausible scenario.
Add to that some administrators are embittered former faculty members who thought they got exploited as faculty. So someone owes them.

It is easy to make arguments for why tenure is a bad system. Those arguments look convincing, until you see what happens when there is no tenure. I know people who teach at new schools created in the last 20 years without tenure protections. The results are pretty bad. None of it has led to better conditions for adjuncts.

[Wahoo Redux]

People choose our school because it is the cheapest in the state, it is near our students' neighborhoods (hence these folks can live at home), and open admission.  In other words, our student body is almost exclusively from the metro area we are situated in, well over 90%, so much so that I have met only three students not from the immediate area----so much so that I ask, "How did you end up here?" and there's always been a family connection.  A quarter of the students are POC, and a large percentage are first-generation.

What are the projections for high school graduation for the next five to ten years?  Some parts of the country will see declines of 30% from the high in 2012 with no reason to expect to ever come back up as the region dies.

How have your demographics shifted in the past five years and how will they continue to shift in the next ten years?  Going from 70% of a large total number of HS graduates enrolling full-time to only half of a much smaller group that will go primarily part-time is problematic. Even if the institution manages to have the same FTE, but as part-time students means keeping income about the same, but needing to provide more support services at more expense.

Why is your institution the cheapest in the region and what's the margin on projected enrollment?  In other words, if your institution reasonably raised price to reflect rising costs of maintenance, IT infrastructure, and faculty in majors with excellent non-academic options, would your students bail?

What are the state appropriations looking like?  Higher ed is often one of the few areas that can legally be cut from the state budget.  If your institution used to get a fraction like 30% of the revenue in from appropriations and now it's going to be 10%, then that's a big problem, especially if your institution doesn't have several sources of revenue that perhaps could take up the slack.  If your revenue is tuition/fees, appropriations, and a pitiful amount of giving from alumni, then that's really a huge concern for the next three years.

How have the majors changed over the last decade?  Nursing and engineering are expensive to run.  Keeping computers updated for graphical design, CS, and a few other majors is expensive.  Internships and practicuums in social work, education, and nursing limit the size of the cohorts that can be admitted.  If you've had huge growth in the humanities, then that's good and bucks the national trends where the expensive-to-deliver majors are generally the growth areas.

How have the fractions of students who come in as essentially sophomores or as transfer students been changing?  Having to recruit much more because few students come in with no credits and stay for four to six years of full-time enrollment is an additional cost to the university, particularly if those cheaper-to-deliver-but-cost-full-price courses are the ones being skipped.  One university model is to only admit students who have already met the gen ed requirements and only offer the major courses and therefore justify a higher tuition. 

However, if the university standard tuition assumes that almost half the courses will be the cheaper-to-deliver-gen-eds to subsidize the cost of other courses, then that's a big financial hole looming, even if head count remains the same.

Polly, it is funny how you try to trip people up.  In other threads you attack admin, but in threads such as these you defend the actions of admin.

Our projections on student enrollment have been wrong for the last 5 years.  Each each we get a projected 2 percent dip in enrollment (which make us suspicious, of course, about the people making these predictions).  Actually, our enrollment has wavered by 4% up and down each of the last five years---some years we are down slightly, other years we are actually up; this year our enrollment is right on target.  We are in one of the very populous parts of the country and our state's H.S. grad rate is projected to dip in 2022-23 and then rise to rates approximately what they are now and remain stable through 2027 according to the NCES.  The exodus from our city seems to have slowed after 40 years, although the economy here is always precarious (we lost one big plant but gained a new major distributor's warehouse).

I doubt that our students would bail if we raised tuition----the big draw for most of these folks is that they can live at home.  Most want to leave town but stay in the region.  The really intrinsically motivated good students go to one of the many major-league universities that surround us.  Our salaries are some of the lowest in the state----I looked us up on the CHE database of college salaries: we are below most of the community colleges and satellite campuses, and we are just slightly above the tiny religious schools in the region as far as pay is concerned.  I think that has something to do with our affordability.

State appropriations are less than half our operating budget this year, but they are up 5% from last year; we have a pittance, approximately 4%, comes from other sources (we are not a research school); total operating budget is up 2.1%.

Now, gotta teach class.  But this is interesting, so I shall return.

[mahagonny]

Except the same things can be explained by starting out by accepting that administration is not as thrilled with the tenure system and what it provides and at what cost than you would prefer. Which is a much more plausible scenario.
Add to that some administrators are embittered former faculty members who thought they got exploited as faculty. So someone owes them.

It is easy to make arguments for why tenure is a bad system. Those arguments look convincing, until you see what happens when there is no tenure. I know people who teach at new schools created in the last 20 years without tenure protections. The results are pretty bad. None of it has led to better conditions for adjuncts.

I have lived experience to refute this last claim. A lot depends on what a union can do. Tenure is usually a solidarity breaker.
No system should have a faction of workers that is sacrificial. Talk to any tenured person long enough, even the nicest ones,  and it's clear the culture regards the adjunct that way. The claim they would be better off without adjuncts, while relying heavily on them, and getting miffed when they aren't available.. Only the privileged get to entrench lies of that sort.  They claim that their culture encourages them to look down on the adjunct, while they, the individual, in an act of defiance do not. The sort of self-congratulation one finds.
'Adjunct' means 'a thing added to the main thing, but not part of it'. Which of course is a pretty shaky claim as of the last twenty years, to begin with, but routinely reinforced by tenured and their non -TT full time minions. Remove 'the main thing' and what is left is not 'adjuncts.' It's your workforce. With bargaining rights. Unless everyone wants to vote for people like Chris Christie.

[Wahoo Redux]

How have the majors changed over the last decade?  Nursing and engineering are expensive to run.  Keeping computers updated for graphical design, CS, and a few other majors is expensive.  Internships and practicuums in social work, education, and nursing limit the size of the cohorts that can be admitted.  If you've had huge growth in the humanities, then that's good and bucks the national trends where the expensive-to-deliver majors are generally the growth areas.

In the 7 years we've been here the student body has remained remarkably standard.  Right now our big majors with 200+ and 300+ students per major are, not surprisingly, business, education, engineering, criminal justice, nursing, psychology, and, interestingly, biology.  Our poly sci and English are each about 100 majors, and we have 400+ "college credit plus" students.  If you look down the charts it would seem that majors such as Music Performance are woefully under-filled, until you realize that each individual performance specialty (strings, horns, piano, voice, etc.) has several students per, and suddenly the music major is much healthier than it appears.  After that the student body is spread about evenly among the other 71 majors.  STEM and Lib Arts are the two heavy-hitting colleges, although we just went through reorganization this summer, so we annoying lib arts people will have even a bigger punch this year.

How have the fractions of students who come in as essentially sophomores or as transfer students been changing?

Very few of these.  We are essentially a 4-year community college.  Our only transfer students come from one of the other two low-ball universities in the state or the local CC.

[Caracal]

Except the same things can be explained by starting out by accepting that administration is not as thrilled with the tenure system and what it provides and at what cost than you would prefer. Which is a much more plausible scenario.
Add to that some administrators are embittered former faculty members who thought they got exploited as faculty. So someone owes them.

It is easy to make arguments for why tenure is a bad system. Those arguments look convincing, until you see what happens when there is no tenure. I know people who teach at new schools created in the last 20 years without tenure protections. The results are pretty bad. None of it has led to better conditions for adjuncts.

I have lived experience to refute this last claim. A lot depends on what a union can do. Tenure is usually a solidarity breaker.
No system should have a faction of workers that is sacrificial. Talk to any tenured person long enough, even the nicest ones,  and it's clear the culture regards the adjunct that way. The claim they would be better off without adjuncts, while relying heavily on them, and getting miffed when they aren't available.. Only the privileged get to entrench lies of that sort.  They claim that their culture encourages them to look down on the adjunct, while they, the individual, in an act of defiance do not. The sort of self-congratulation one finds.
'Adjunct' means 'a thing added to the main thing, but not part of it'. Which of course is a pretty shaky claim as of the last twenty years, to begin with, but routinely reinforced by tenured and their non -TT full time minions. Remove 'the main thing' and what is left is not 'adjuncts.' It's your workforce. With bargaining rights. Unless everyone wants to vote for people like Chris Christie.

Maybe some places it works, but I know of places that do have strong unions and it is still a disaster.

[tuxthepenguin]

Maybe some places it works, but I know of places that do have strong unions and it is still a disaster.

Unions exist to protect the faculty. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. I know there are those that don't understand what tenure protects, or who tell stories that confuse ineffective administration with tenure, but that's what it's there for and what it does in practice. Unions and tenure are completely different animals that can coexist or stand on their own.

[marshwiggle]

Maybe some places it works, but I know of places that do have strong unions and it is still a disaster.

Unions exist to protect the faculty. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. I know there are those that don't understand what tenure protects, or who tell stories that confuse ineffective administration with tenure, but that's what it's there for and what it does in practice. Unions and tenure are completely different animals that can coexist or stand on their own.

More correctly, unions exist to protect themselves. Unions despise non-union workers in any field, including academia, and they're even not very supportive of faculty who belong to the bargaining unit but choose not to join the union. They often oppose flexibility in work arrangements because the more uniform they can make working conditions the more they can ensure that faculty interests align with union interests. Where they differ, union interests win.

[Wahoo Redux]

Maybe some places it works, but I know of places that do have strong unions and it is still a disaster.

Unions exist to protect the faculty. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. I know there are those that don't understand what tenure protects, or who tell stories that confuse ineffective administration with tenure, but that's what it's there for and what it does in practice. Unions and tenure are completely different animals that can coexist or stand on their own.

More correctly, unions exist to protect themselves. Unions despise non-union workers in any field, including academia, and they're even not very supportive of faculty who belong to the bargaining unit but choose not to join the union. They often oppose flexibility in work arrangements because the more uniform they can make working conditions the more they can ensure that faculty interests align with union interests. Where they differ, union interests win.

You've always been a fan of the blanket statement, Marshy.  Careful with those.  What you've said is not necessarily true.

A long time ago, when I was unskilled blue-collar, I worked for a union shop.  It was Big Brother.  It coddled the incompetent.  I also defended the weak.  I landed right after the union sued our employer for forcing workers to finish their shifts off the clock if they didn't get their work done.  Illegal and immoral.  The union defended truck drivers who would be awakened in the middle of the night at their motels by shift managers who could not locate this or that on a palate.  I don't know about you, but I don't want a driver hauling one of those big rigs through mountain passes who's been awakened at 2am after a hard day driving----yay union.

We've worked for both a non-union and a union school.   

God Bless the union.

I might suggest watching fewer movies.

[mahagonny]

Maybe some places it works, but I know of places that do have strong unions and it is still a disaster.

Unions exist to protect the faculty. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. I know there are those that don't understand what tenure protects, or who tell stories that confuse ineffective administration with tenure, but that's what it's there for and what it does in practice. Unions and tenure are completely different animals that can coexist or stand on their own.

If you think tenure protects academic freedom as a principle you are seriously mistaken. If you think it protects the application of that principle to a subset of educators because they are special people who get special privileges, you are accurate.
Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Durden

"On June 6, 2017, Durden appeared on Fox News in an interview with Tucker Carlson, discussing a Black Lives Matter chapter that held a Memorial Day event exclusively for black people. Durden defended the chapter's actions, saying "Boo-hoo-hoo... You white people are angry because you couldn't use your 'white privilege' card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter's all-black Memorial Day celebration." Carlson responded by calling Durden "hostile and separatist and crazy" and "demented".[11] Two days later, Durden was suspended from her position of adjunct professor at Essex County College in Newark. Two weeks later, she was fired.[11][12][13] Durden described the experience as being "publicly lynched".[11][13] College president Anthony Munroe said the firing was in response to concerns and fears expressed by students, faculty, and prospective students following Durden's remarks on television.[14]

A legal analysis by the campus free speech organization Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) said that the firing violated established First Amendment law for public employees, and rejected Munroe's claim that Durden's remarks made it impossible for her to do her job. FIRE stated that "if simply offending others and causing an 'outpouring' of criticism and consternation were sufficient to overcome a faculty member's First Amendment rights, freedom of expression on campus would be reduced to a nullity."[15

Of course, in response, an outcry of support for Prof. Durden's right to express herself without threatening anyone or causing any harm to her institution or falsely claiming to speak on its behalf came immediately from the college's tenured faculty...not.

In case anyone needs a refresher course on how adjunct faculty have the right to think, study, and teach, but are not eligible for tenure,  (academic freedom protection) and never will be, no matter what their qualifications or job performance...https://www.essex.edu/employment-qualifications/

[marshwiggle]

Maybe some places it works, but I know of places that do have strong unions and it is still a disaster.

Unions exist to protect the faculty. Tenure exists to protect academic freedom. I know there are those that don't understand what tenure protects, or who tell stories that confuse ineffective administration with tenure, but that's what it's there for and what it does in practice. Unions and tenure are completely different animals that can coexist or stand on their own.

More correctly, unions exist to protect themselves. Unions despise non-union workers in any field, including academia, and they're even not very supportive of faculty who belong to the bargaining unit but choose not to join the union. They often oppose flexibility in work arrangements because the more uniform they can make working conditions the more they can ensure that faculty interests align with union interests. Where they differ, union interests win.

You've always been a fan of the blanket statement, Marshy.  Careful with those.  What you've said is not necessarily true.

A long time ago, when I was unskilled blue-collar, I worked for a union shop.  It was Big Brother.  It coddled the incompetent.  I also defended the weak.  I landed right after the union sued our employer for forcing workers to finish their shifts off the clock if they didn't get their work done.  Illegal and immoral.  The union defended truck drivers who would be awakened in the middle of the night at their motels by shift managers who could not locate this or that on a palate.  I don't know about you, but I don't want a driver hauling one of those big rigs through mountain passes who's been awakened at 2am after a hard day driving----yay union.

We've worked for both a non-union and a union school.   

God Bless the union.

I might suggest watching fewer movies.

For the record:

• Canada has a higher unionization rate than the U.S.
• Canada has stronger protections for unions than the U.S.
• I am represented by two unions; one for my "day job", and one for my "side gig".

I'm basing my comments on experience. (I can't think of any "union" movies I've watched, and I can't imagine staying awake through one.)

Have unions done good things? Yes.
Are unions a good thing? Especially in un- or low-skilled labour situations, in industries with competition, yes.

In the public sector, and in professional situations, where there are real (in the public sector) or virtual (in professional settings) monopolies and where unions are highly protected, then they have an inordinate amount of power, since during a strike there is no other option for the services provided for their members. (Where real competition exists, an organization in regular conflict with its workers is going to lose market share because it will be unreliable. The organization with productive, satisfied workers will have a huge competitive advantage, whether that is because of a union or not.)

[mahagonny]

I'm basing my comments on experience. (I can't think of any "union" movies I've watched, and I can't imagine staying awake through one.)

Have unions done good things? Yes.
Are unions a good thing? Especially in un- or low-skilled labour situations, in industries with competition, yes.

In the public sector, and in professional situations, where there are real (in the public sector) or virtual (in professional settings) monopolies and where unions are highly protected, then they have an inordinate amount of power, since during a strike there is no other option for the services provided for their members. (Where real competition exists, an organization in regular conflict with its workers is going to lose market share because it will be unreliable. The organization with productive, satisfied workers will have a huge competitive advantage, whether that is because of a union or not.)

Tenure track unions are partly there to protect members from each other. Because they have tenure, some of them, when they get enough of a gang together, may feel they can afford to get vengeful, aggressive. Because they have academic freedom, some of them will oppose each other on educational or political things and it all gets personal. Because they get to be (or have to be, as you prefer) rotating chairs...you know. Some of the rules they live by seem to be in a state of flux or open to interpretation. And they're rules with consequences.