Colleges in Dire Financial Straits

[TreadingLife]

TreadingLife, are you actually blaming the faculty for the current state of higher education?  You must teach in a very different place than those I am familiar with.

Very, very few faculty are in the 1 percent, including those at the big, powerful, famous R-1s.  Most of us, if we are lucky enough to be employed full time, are somewhere in the 22 percent tax bracket.  Most faculty I know are earnest teachers, even if some are lazier than others (and please note that I said "most" since, yes, all of us know someone somewhere who never should have graced a classroom with their presence).

I'm not talking about entitled in the sense of salary. I'm talking entitled as in, I won't change what I do, who I do it for, and what impact that might have on others, because I want what works best for me, not the institution or the students.  This has nothing to do with the 1%. The faculty I am referring to don't live high on the hog at my institution.

And most of us contract to teach a certain number of classes for a certain pay, and if those classes do not achieve the minimum enrollment for economic viability, they are cancelled. 

And then what? What do those faculty do next?

If we are lucky enough to be employed full-time, we are assigned classes whether we like them or not.  Where do you teach that your faculty have that much power? 

No, its not power. It is a lack of options. If no one wants to take your classes, because either your offerings aren't of interest,  or more increasingly, because enrollments are down, the reality is that there isn't a next thing to force them to teach.  Is there always something for your faculty to teach at your institution? At smaller, shrinking places, that's not a safe assumption that someone can just be forced to teach this or that. So what do they do? Get paid to do nothing?  Yes, the answer is yes, and they think that's the institution should support them year over year because their discipline is important, even though student enrollment says otherwise.

This semester I had over a hundred students in 5 classes with 4 different preps, all of them assigned to me with no real input from my very friendly chair.

Is this on the tenure track? Or is this a term-type Professor of Practice type situation?

What I'd like to know is, why can't I teach scantron classes instead of individually commenting on the multiple papers of my 50 to 100 writing students, depending on what the school needs from me, I get every semester?  That's what chaps my hide, all these professors with GTAs who write and grade their tests for them, easy lab time, the same three classes every two semesters, and who haven't researched anything new in 20 years!!!  These are the people who...okay, I don't really believe that; I was just making a point.

But there are people like that, and at smaller institutions, it both undermines the mission for teaching excellence and an active research agenda, leading to the atrophy of the institution. But, how dare we call out the underperformers, who are causing the rest of us to drown. No, we can't do that. We must circle the wagons and deny any problems from the ranks, lest we look weak. If you can't fix the problem, fix the narrative.

I'm sure you're right that we're going to be chopping appendages off the academic corpus.  What is interesting to me are how many academics (presuming you are who you seem to be) come here to root for the constriction of higher ed because of their unique resentments.

It isn't rooting for constriction. It is looking at the situation objectively and saying, this isn't sustainable. And yet, when you say something isn't sustainable, somehow you are rooting for constriction and demise. I'm the one that wants the 30 year career.  For the past ten years, it has been head in the sand city instead of honest introspection about what it means to be viable and equitable for students and faculty alike.

[TreadingLife]

Sure, they were able to have plush 30 year careers. But as long as they get theirs, they don't really care about the impact on others. It sounds amazing to have been a professor over the past 30 years. Regular salary increases of 4%? Automatic cost of living increases? Solid health insurance plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays? High TIAA CREF matches?  It sounds like a dream! And guess what, it was. It wasn't sustainable and its over and we're not going back to that any time soon. 

I wouldn't be too sure of that, TreadingLife. There are rock-solid provisions in place that protect the entitlements of the winners of the game.

Tell me more about these rock-solid provisions. Do they hold for schools that close? Or what about programs that are eliminated due to financial exigency? Tenure doesn't protect you in that situation. Aside from the schools with billion dollar endowments, tell me who really has a rock-solid provision?

As an aside, I'm actually curious to see how hard hit some of the R1 schools are now that the COVID shutdown has brought the issuing of visas for the fall to a standstill. I am aware of one school in particular (not mine) whose student body is 30% international. I don't care how deep your endowment is, that's a big hit in a very short period of time if the visa situation isn't resolved, or if campuses are online come the fall. Both could be quite devastating to an institution's bottom line and might drive it to make consolidations. Sure, adjuncts and term-based faculty will be the first to go, but who wants to see their TIAA CREF or other benefits cut? Depending on how bad things are, a lot of people might find that they have built on sand, and not rock after all.

Have your PhD, your strong CV, but no job prospects? You made bad life choices. That's what your problem is.
No this is a well designed pyramid scheme, built to last.

Really? As hiring slows at all levels of higher ed, and as schools close left and right, you would look a history professor or math professor or business professor in the eye and say "You made bad life choices" when their school closes. Sure they might be able to switch to another industry with their credentials, but many in higher ed are here because they want that career. If every job was perfectly interchangeable, then people would leave academia in a heartbeat. But oh wait, some people actually love the aspects of academia that set it apart from most other careers.

[TreadingLife]

TreadingLife, are you actually blaming the faculty for the current state of higher education?  You must teach in a very different place than those I am familiar with.

Various sized institutions have been cutting "essential" majors left and right. This thread is full of examples, as was the one at CHE. The faculty control the curriculum, do they not? So if the faculty observe trends in enrollments and see that majors are perennially under-enrolled, some to a criminal level, then is it then not incumbent on the faculty to address that situation? Or would they rather that the provost/dean/regents just take out the axe and swing away? Perhaps the solution is to scream at the 18 year olds who should know better than to not major in X, Y, or Z. How dare they! Or perhaps the solution is to simply pretend there is no problem? As I said before, that's not financially viable at most institutions.  So what is the solution? Might it be to look inward at the organization of the curriculum and ask, ok, what are we doing and who are we serving, and is there any way we could better position ourselves to better meet the needs and interests of our students? Or is this not the faculty's problem?

Oh, pardon me. That would require change, and that's just not allowed. That would require work, thought, compromise and....change.

[Wahoo Redux]

Ooooooookaaaaayyyy.

I'm not talking about entitled in the sense of salary. I'm talking entitled as in, I won't change what I do, who I do it for, and what impact that might have on others, because I want what works best for me, not the institution or the students. 

*****
Is there always something for your faculty to teach at your institution? At smaller, shrinking places, that's not a safe assumption that someone can just be forced to teach this or that. So what do they do? Get paid to do nothing?  Yes, the answer is yes, and they think that's the institution should support them year over year because their discipline is important, even though student enrollment says otherwise.

I suspect that we have a troll who returns in different guises.  You did better this time, TL.

[Hegemony]

I'm baffled by the idea that if profs teach courses that don't enroll well, then they have no other options. Of course they have other options, or at least other directives. They develop new courses that enroll better. Maybe their whole field is shrinking, as is the case with modern languages, in which case their department doesn't replace people when they leave or retire.  But the profs keep on teaching. If Italian 101 doesn't enroll enough, the Italian profs offer "Literary Odysseys and Homecomings," Food as Language in Italian Literature," " On Love and Violence: Studying Family," and "Horror, Italian Style," all of which fulfill the university Reading & Composition requirement and thus attract students from outside Italian.  (These are all offerings of the UC Berkeley Italian Department.)  I think TreadingLife must not be in academia, because this is very obvious to academics.

[mahagonny]

I'm baffled by the idea that if profs teach courses that don't enroll well, then they have no other options.

If I am reading through the lines properly, he's miffed about professors who get to have small teaching loads or classes with smaller populations in the twilight of their career (and sometimes the sun does indeed set quite slowly) when they're full professor and making the real good bucks, who serve on committees and vote for their own interests, then vote for the interests of the younger tenured faculty upon retirement as a payback for the the sinecure they ended up with. It happens in my field, particularly in the situation of new students not being drawn to the old majors offered. He claims they don't care about how their resistance to change affects others, which, if I had said it, would result in a charge that I am trying to assess the thought processes of people I don't know. But it's really just how tenure works when it's working properly. The million dollar mistake doesn't always prove fatal. Of course, it can result in departments going belly up. That's when the controversy starts. The goose that laid the golden egg is now killed.

[spork]

I'm baffled by the idea that if profs teach courses that don't enroll well, then they have no other options. Of course they have other options, or at least other directives. They develop new courses that enroll better. Maybe their whole field is shrinking, as is the case with modern languages, in which case their department doesn't replace people when they leave or retire.  But the profs keep on teaching. If Italian 101 doesn't enroll enough, the Italian profs offer "Literary Odysseys and Homecomings," Food as Language in Italian Literature," " On Love and Violence: Studying Family," and "Horror, Italian Style," all of which fulfill the university Reading & Composition requirement and thus attract students from outside Italian.  (These are all offerings of the UC Berkeley Italian Department.)  I think TreadingLife must not be in academia, because this is very obvious to academics.

I see what TreadingLife describes all the time. Here it's what we call general education requirements -- ensure that each faculty member in departments without majors gets just enough students per course to meet minimum enrollment requirements. The system is designed to force students to take courses they don't want on made-up topics they have no interest in, so that Dr. Socks Darning can get paid for their 32nd year of ineffective, below-average teaching. Then you get some faculty members teaching a few dozen students per academic year while others are teaching close to two hundred (and we don't have grad student teaching assistants). But hey, the system can't be changed, no matter the financial ramifications to the organization or the educational quality for the students.

Berkeley (for example) has 30,000 undergrads. If 0.1% of its students have an interest in the once-every-two-years "Philosophical Implications of Pasta Shapes" course taught by the Italian professor who is otherwise unable to fill out a full teaching schedule (which is what at Berkeley, a 2:1 or a 2:2?) with Italian language courses, then there will be enough students for the course to run. But at Iowa Wesleyan (somewhat hypothetical example), where there hasn't been an Italian major in twenty years and the gen ed foreign language requirement is two semesters (completed most frequently by taking Spanish, taught by adjuncts), all the Italian professor is going to be teaching is sections of Welcome to College 101, the mandatory course in English composition, and a bunch of other courses on made-up topics that have to count toward other gen ed requirements because otherwise no students would enroll in them. And student learning in these courses is just not a concern.

[Hegemony]

I actually don't know any faculty members for whom student learning is not a concern. I imagine there must be some, because there are some bad eggs in every corner of the world, but I haven't seen any in action. It certainly doesn't correlate with being in a small field in which you have to teach a lot of gen-ed requirements.  And having been on all too many committees to redesign gen-ed requirements at massive hassle to everyone involved, I can vouch for the fact that they are not there to give dead-wood professors a way to idle away their sunset years. They're there because there are a lot of true believers in universities, who think that exposure to a variety of fields will expand students' worlds in valuable ways. I'm not even that much of a true believer in that, though I do notice that many of the students in my own field find it through being made to enroll, kicking and screaming, in a ged ed course — and then finding that they love it.  And it's also true that U.S. culture is narrow enough that one can't depend on students finding much of an expanded world in high school.  I wish their education were broader from the beginning, but oh well. Say what you want about the starry-eyed idealism of college professors, but that's what's behind the ged ed requirements, not the desire to provide students for otherwise idle profs.

[polly_mer]

I'm baffled by the idea that if profs teach courses that don't enroll well, then they have no other options. Of course they have other options, or at least other directives. They develop new courses that enroll better. Maybe their whole field is shrinking, as is the case with modern languages, in which case their department doesn't replace people when they leave or retire.  But the profs keep on teaching. If Italian 101 doesn't enroll enough, the Italian profs offer "Literary Odysseys and Homecomings," Food as Language in Italian Literature," " On Love and Violence: Studying Family," and "Horror, Italian Style," all of which fulfill the university Reading & Composition requirement and thus attract students from outside Italian.  (These are all offerings of the UC Berkeley Italian Department.)  I think TreadingLife must not be in academia, because this is very obvious to academics.

That works great at a large enough institution with people who have free elective slots that they'd like to fill with those kinds of offerings.

We had a significant problem at Super Dinky one term as registration was well underway and students in certain majors flat out refused to sign up for the remaining humanities electives available.  Yep, Zombie Apocalypse opened a second section, but there was no way for us to do a third section. 

Students flat out stated that they would rather be short on credits for a semester at only 12 credits and take general education courses at their local community colleges in the summer to transfer back over signing up for classes that the humanities faculty wanted to teach and students did not want to take.  Even when we pointed out the extra cost, the students stated the extra cost of a few hundred bucks was worth it for classes they could see possible benefit in taking.

We had some serious talks all around and had to get the humanities faculty to offer classes that students wanted to take because SD simply could not afford to pay half the humanities faculty (that's only 5 people, hence the SD) to do something else when sections will be cancelled.

At many points during my time at SD including all the time I was on the general education committee, the strong "hey, that's our JOBS!!!!" message came through at all times.  When we redid the general education curriculum and were approving new courses, the parts of the committee from the humanities were quick to vote down courses proposed by people who weren't humanities folks and to explicitly state "If you let that course run, then no one will sign up for my courses". 

Yes, all our premed students would prefer to take "Ethics in Biology" over "Life in <Specific City> in <Specific Time before Our Grandparents Were Born>".

Yes, all our criminal justice and social work students would prefer to take "Violence in Society" over "British Novels of the 19th Century" or "Intro Journalism".  We had zero majors in English, history, or journalism, but several hundred students in CJ and SW combined (i.e., almost half the college).

The fine arts discussions went similarly.  We can fill a whole section of art history taught by an adjunct and maybe two if we time it right with the other offerings to alternate with music history.  Few outside of already majors want to take performance-based courses in art or music, but people will take FA history or FA appreciation.  Those 11 art majors and 3 music minors shouldn't be the main focus if the professors still want to have a job after the next round of cuts.  I remember explaining the reality of modifying the photography class to be one that regular people want to take over focusing so narrowly on the development of the physical film, which was limiting enrollment in a course that could have had triple the enrollment to bring it up to 20.

The humanities electives had to change to what enrolled students wanted, not what faculty necessarily wanted to teach in an ideal world with tens of thousands of students with many, many elective slots to fill each.  Increasing the humanities or other general education requirements to ensure that the faculty had enough to teach was one way that Super Dinky was losing out on transfer students.

Not offering the majors that high-achieving students wanted and having an onerous, out-of-step-with-competitors-for-the-smaller-college-experience was a double whammy.

[mahagonny]

Well, as far as the developing debate about professors who don't care about student learning in these barely populated courses that are provided to give the professor a semblance of a workload, it's easily explained this way. The professors involved may very well hope that the students will learn, but that's no guarantee that they do. Not by a longshot.
The whole thing could be solved by having a system where part-time to full time conversion is a two way street. Demand for what Professor Darned Socks does is on the decrease? Make him part time again. like a small business would do. You know, those enterprises where management has to figure out how to make the business efficient and trim enough to function, instead of pleading for more dollars from the state?

[spork]

I actually don't know any faculty members for whom student learning is not a concern.

[. . . ]

For some, if there's a conflict between student learning and their preferred mode of teaching, they'll choose the latter every time. There is also another, sometimes overlapping, group that suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect -- they think they are fantastic teachers but are actually the opposite.

Much more detrimental than the above is that concerns about student learning become quite secondary to "How do I ensure that I get enough courses to teach to justify staying employed?" when it comes to curriculum design at small, struggling institutions.

[Wahoo Redux]

Students flat out stated that they would rather be short on credits for a semester at only 12 credits and take general education courses at their local community colleges in the summer to transfer back over signing up for classes that the humanities faculty wanted to teach and students did not want to take.  Even when we pointed out the extra cost, the students stated the extra cost of a few hundred bucks was worth it for classes they could see possible benefit in taking.

TreadLife jumped the shark.  That's how one knows hu's a troll.

Polly, are you on water-skis too?

[Ruralguy]

Polly,

Does SD still exist? From what you say, it seems like it should have been gone several years ago at best, around the time you left, but if somehow they survived, how did they manage that?

[TreadingLife]

I'm far from a troll my friend, but that would save you the effort of actually acknowledging that I have points to make. If you are going to call me a troll, it is Associate Troll to you, and soon to be going up for Full Troll in the fall.  I am a troll who joined academia in 2009 and has watched heads stay firmly in sands at my institution, and on this board, for the past 10 years while the same anti-change voices have dominated the airspace, much like you do here. I'm actually having flashbacks to my faculty meetings with Professor Blowhard and his colleague Professor Blowharder parroting the same anti-change points. Coincidentally (or not) they are humanities professors as well.

At smaller schools (2,000 or fewer), there is a real issue with filling teaching loads due to canceled courses. It is both a self-serving problem and a reflection of the underlying problem.  Why innovate if you can get paid to do nothing, and why should you innovate your coursework, because clearly the problem lies with student and not the fact that you are offering uninspiring and stale courses that no one wants.  Sure, the solution is to be innovative and find a spin between what you do and what students are interested in. If you can spin anything towards inequality or public health that is generally a win on my campus. But that requires work, retooling, and reflection. And at Entitled U, that isn't happening at nearly the pace it should be.  And you would think that faculty would want to try and innovate, for their own job security and the financial security of the institution, but it isn't happening. Again, the scale of the school might matter, because this problem is inescapable at a Small Dinky type places.  But then again, if Wahoo doesn't work at a place like that, then it must not be happening anywhere.

[TreadingLife]

I'm baffled by the idea that if profs teach courses that don't enroll well, then they have no other options. Of course they have other options, or at least other directives. They develop new courses that enroll better. Maybe their whole field is shrinking, as is the case with modern languages, in which case their department doesn't replace people when they leave or retire.  But the profs keep on teaching. If Italian 101 doesn't enroll enough, the Italian profs offer "Literary Odysseys and Homecomings," Food as Language in Italian Literature," " On Love and Violence: Studying Family," and "Horror, Italian Style," all of which fulfill the university Reading & Composition requirement and thus attract students from outside Italian.  (These are all offerings of the UC Berkeley Italian Department.)  I think TreadingLife must not be in academia, because this is very obvious to academics.

Approximately how big is the institution that you work at, because at Entitled U, the faculty don't innovate, and we are around 2000 students. Students don't want their core classes or their derivative classes. This is partly a reflection of teaching in a field that students are not interested in, regardless of the spin, and partly a reflection of being the type of professor that doesn't want to put in the effort to find the spin or the angle necessary to meet student interest, and to provide them the same core content in a more "palatable" form.   And from a retention standpoint, the worst thing you can do is throw such faculty into first-year programming courses where they are forced to teach a class they don't want to a population that will form expectations about the entire campus based on the quality of their classes from the fall semester.  But the alternative is that you pay faculty to knit or whittle whale bone in their offices at full pay. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.