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The Crisis in Higher Education and Three Approaches
by
Karey Perkins
This following paper was delivered at the MLA Annual Convention, December, 2001. If you want to read
more about the topic of the first part of the
paper, discussing the crisis in higher education and the changing demographic of the American professoriate,
you can go to:
Assessing the Silent Revolution: How Changing Demographics Are Reshaping the Academic Profession. The
rest of this paper below discusses possible solutions or approaches to the problem, one of which is encouraging and
supporting research and scholarship among faculty at all types of learning institutions.
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the crisis in higher education that has been ongoing for thirty years,
and presents some approaches to that problem. Three approaches are considered:
broaden job options for Ph.D.'s to consider positions in colleges and
universities other than traditional research universities, as well as positions outsides academia,
reduce the use of adjuncts through implementing fellowship programs, and
professionalize teaching colleges through encouraging scholarship.
The Faculty Forum project is one of the solutions:
it is a change management initiative to transform and professionalize teaching institutions'
academic cultures through a faculty development program of scholarship, both broad and traditional.
I. SUMMARY OF MLA FINAL REPORT ON THE
STATUS OF THE PROFESSION
The oft-cited and much discussed "Final Report of the MLA Committee on Professional Employment" (1998) begins: "Higher education in the fields our organization represents has reached a crisis that has been building for a long time - a crisis not yet fully understood either by the public at large, whose intellectual destiny is closely bound up with the future of our colleges and universities, or by the professoriat, whose careers are intimately linked with the fate of those institutions."
The MLA Committee's explanation of the causes of this crisis1 focuses on the confluence of a number of factors, including the dual but conflicting imperatives since WWII of greater student access to education (resulting in a large influx of often unprepared students and need for large numbers of remedial courses), juxtaposed with an increased emphasis on advanced research, often federally funded, (resulting in institutional encouragement of professorial interests to become more specialized and esoteric, rewarded as more prestigious and desirable work than teaching growing basic or remedial undergraduate classes). Add to this an oversupply of PhDs, and, since the end of the cold war, the loss of much government funding and National Science Foundation endowments to public higher education. Include the increase of entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid since the mid-70's for which education funds have served as a "cash cow" ("Final Report"). All of these factors, and more, have served to contribute to the 600% increase in college educational costs per student between 1961 and 1995 ("Final Report").
But the report largely laments one primary result of these complex, interwoven factors: the trend of campus administrations to offset rising costs by turning to increasing "staffs of ill-paid, overworked part- or full-time adjunct lecturers and graduate students to meet instructional needs," a detriment to all involved in the educational system - students, professors, institutions, and society. Margaret Calahan reports that, "In 1970, 22% of faculty nationwide consisted of part-timers, but by 1993 the face of higher education had changed so drastically that part-timers constituted 40% of the faculty (qtd. in "Final Report"). Another study in Fall 1992 reports that in two year colleges, the figures are even more alarming: part-timers account for "two thirds of foreign language faculty members… and half of English faculty members" ("Final Report").
Ironically, in the midst of this reduction of permanent, tenure-track offerings, graduate enrollments in languages and literature have grown to the point that 55% of all PhDs in the early 90's were not employed in full time tenure track positions within a year of graduation.2 The problem is not limited to the modern languages; other branches of the humanities report the same crisis and concern over surplus of graduate enrollment and excessive use of part-timers; even the American Chemical society, Science magazine, and the AMA report greater unemployment rates in their field ("Final Report"). Thus we have a situation in which highly intelligent, qualified, and educated professionals with the terminal degree in hand become under-employed, under-compensated transients as universities cut costs to make up for lost revenue. These adjunct faculty become "academic nomads…condemned to spend their working lives as frantic commuters shuttling back and forth in some cases among four or five institutions without any assurance of long-term employment or retirement benefits" (Ogden 140). The MLA labels them "freeway flyers," by definition transient, and, as Jane Harper of the MLA reports, "With no responsibility or remuneration for activities other than their teaching, part-timers are not available … for advising and mentoring students, answering questions about programs, committee work, curriculum development, materials review and selection, test-bank development and other necessary professional functions that maintain the integrity of a department and its curriculum." These duties then fall as burdens on the shoulders of remaining full-time faculty, who may never meet or know their other half. Not only faculty, both permanent and part-time are cheated, but students are obviously the losers in this game of economic gain for the university.
II. A POSTMODERN EDUCATION
At the same time we teach postmodernism in our classrooms, we are practicing postmodernism in our lives and higher education today. The "shattering of narrative line" (Dillard 20) characteristic of contemporary literature is echoed in our universities. The narrative of faculty careers fragments in every direction. An individual faculty member teaches at multiple and unrelated colleges in a single semester; surface interactions dominate, rather than faculty immersion into substance and structure of a single school and its nuances, depth, character, and subtle interactions. Brief and rushed surface relations with students and colleagues echo a postmodern novel's flattened characters viewed from great distance (Dillard 37). Episodic work experience from college to college, from day to day, from year to year, occurs in discrete, separate units like quantum particles bombarding randomly with no discernible cause and effect.3 Quality of education is compromised for economics and quantity of student enrollment; technological approaches abound - accelerated courses, distance learning - certainly good business as they meet the demand of busy student lives, but personal contact - relationship, community - is lost in the name of capitalist accommodation and gain.4 Edward Said carries this concern a step further as he cites Masao Miyoshi's view of the new university as a "corporate multi-university" - in which humanists operate weakly and insignificantly as part-time wage earners and the financially struggling university sells out - educational values and quality are subordinate to profit and research university alliances to corporations and corporate agendas (Said 3).5
III. SUGGESTED APPROACHES
What is the solution then? The MLA offers no general "panacea" - for the fabric of this new type of educational community may be woven so thin as to be threadbare, but the fabric of the problem is so tightly woven that to unravel one dangling thread would collapse the whole precariously balanced system. For example, to simply pronounce immediate and abrupt 50% cutbacks of entering PhD graduate students is not an answer and would initiate ripples of many effects, some negative, some unknown ("Final Report").
Here, I would like recommend a three-pronged, interrelated solution - seeds of which can be found embedded in the MLA's Final Report, and which are developed in subsequent literature on the profession describing real life, successful approaches created and experienced by faculty and administration at varying universities. Albeit isolated instances, these provide real, positive alternatives to the educational situation today and, if instituted on a widespread basis, could successfully contribute to the alleviation of the educational crisis across the board. While by no means the final and only response to the problem, these do provide productive alternatives and a step toward improvement. These three approaches include: broadening job alternatives for Ph.D.'s, restructuring universities to reduce or eliminate reliance on adjunct faculty, and professionalizing teaching colleges; that is, instituting a culture of scholarship in those environments that do not yet encourage such activity.
III.A. Broaden Job Options for Ph.D.'s
First of all, PhD candidates should broaden and expand their ideas of appropriate, rewarding, and successful job opportunities. Unfortunately, research universities all too often try to create clones of themselves, grooming candidates only for positions in other research universities when these kinds of universities constitute only seven percent of available institutions of higher education as of 2000 ("Carnegie Classification"). Community colleges, four year liberal arts and general colleges, proprietary schools, even private, elite or charter high schools all provide rewarding teaching opportunities. In recognition of this fact, increasing numbers of research universities are now offering training seminars for graduate students (called "Preparing Future Faculty" programs), introducing them to faculty careers and, among other things, to teaching life in nonresearch university settings (Cook 3). The latest issue of Profession devotes significant space to essays by teachers with PhDs who have chosen to teach in charter and alternative high schools (some with ideal teaching situations, such as 8 to 16 students per class), in independent schools, in inner-city schools to under-prepared students, and even, in a shopping mall. Each of these positions provides rewarding teaching options, including smaller classes and often even research encouragement (though not required).
Furthermore, these schools should raise the bar of standards for teachers they recruit. In other words, it is now a "buyer's market" with a surplus of earned doctorates seeking full time permanent employment. Community colleges, et al, can easily staff their departments with a majority of faculty who have the terminal degree, with minimal and inexpensive alterations in their job search strategies: i.e.: instead of conducting regional searches by placing job advertisements in their local newspaper, they should advertise nationally in the Chronicle of Higher Education and through professional organizations such as the MLA Job Information List. These are the venues that doctoral candidates peruse for job opportunities. In addition, bringing in just a few PhDs breeds more PhDs - others will come because the culture of the department will slowly change, and the MA professors who are already there are often motivated to attain the terminal degree for themselves if they do not yet have one. These simple (and perhaps others, just as simple) alterations could result in a department with a greatly increased level of professionalism.
The intellectual culture and level of professionalism of campuses with varying percentages of PhDs vary greatly; yet with the current, and by all accounts, continuing, "buyer's market," many teaching universities can easily be staffed with a majority of PhDs, thus significantly raising the level of professionalism and quality of education delivered for virtually the same cost as it takes to staff with MAs. The PhDs, through their mere presence, can also then perform Chomsky's "liberatory" and "subversive" function to already present MAs (35) - some of whom may not have examined the field in 20 years and who may teach by rote from the textbook handed to them at the beginning of the semester.
Not to be overlooked is the option of finding a job outside academia; graduate departments should consider (and many are) preparing and training their PhD candidates for the job search both within and without the academic world. The broadening of job alternatives to realms beyond the academic one is championed by many, including Dr. Tom McHaney, graduate student advisor at Georgia State University, who recently sponsored a panel at the South Atlantic MLA in Atlanta this year on alternative careers for the Ph.D., which included, among other speakers: a former medieval literature professor, now a successful independent communications and business consultant with her own company for the past 20 years, and a former Victorian literature professor, now a communications consultant for the top firm of McKinsey & Co.
III.B. Reduce use of adjuncts through "fellowship" programs
Secondly, departments should reduce - or eliminate - adjunct faculty and over-reliance on graduate teaching assistant positions in favor of full time positions - tenure track, of course, but also, departments can employ the option of instituting "fellowships" that treat fellows (formerly adjuncts) as one of the department. The MLA recommends a reduction of use of adjuncts as is economically practicable, but as reported in Profession 2000, Georgia Tech has, through its Marion L. Brittain Fellowship program, successfully replaced all adjunct positions with full time, three-year fellowships of all ABD's or PhD's. Under Dr. Daryl Ogden's leadership, the fellowship program has transformed the working conditions for these fellows to include an apprenticeship type of atmosphere: phones, voice mail, mail boxes, and copying privileges; offices in the same area as full time faculty for optimal interaction; personal computers; health benefits and retirement benefits; peer review of classroom delivery; new media training as desired; mentoring and professional development training including pedagogical training; and C.V. and resume writing guidance. This solution takes these new fellows, former freeway flyers, off the road, and puts them in an office, interacting with permanent faculty members on all levels - including advising students, doing committee work, earning respectable compensation, and engaging in other job duties that would not be part of their job description were they serving for Georgia Tech in mere adjunct capacity. As "fellows," they are paid much less than regular faculty, but much more than adjuncts; however, as evidenced by the quantity and quality of work the institution now receives from its employees, and the quality of education the students now receive - it is money well spent. Georgia Tech is creating a departmental community with its program, and the fellows are nurtured and supported for ease of transition to another position at the end of their three years. Some criticize this solution and warn that it will create an "underclass" of professors (Berube); however, Ogden counters that, instead, it acknowledges the already present and flourishing "Tale of Two Systems" (as Ogden calls it), and creates, not an underclass, since the underclass of adjuncts is already in place, but an apprentice class. Education for everyone is improved.
In cases where a full fledged program such as the one described above cannot be implemented, the MLA recommends that at least, use of adjuncts be minimized and that then adjuncts are integrated into the culture of the college as much as possible: given offices, mailboxes, phones with voice mail capabilities, computers, meeting participation, and a voice in college life.
III.C. Professionalize6 teaching colleges -- Institute a culture of scholarship
Finally, as PhDs increasingly populate teaching situations - community colleges, proprietary schools, private high schools - that do not have a "publish or perish" requirement for job security, scholarship may fall to the wayside, but this would be a mistake. These faculty are prepared, educated and able to engage in scholarship. Since they have the capacity and desire to do so, it makes little sense to suppress that or let it wither away. Both professor and institution benefit from faculty engaging in scholarship and, taking a wider view, students and society benefit as well.
III.C.1 Why Encourage Scholarship?
Why should we do scholarship, especially in teaching institutions, and what does scholarship do? It serves to keep these highly intelligent teachers challenged, involved, and interested in their work. But scholarship does more than that. At the Presidential Forum of the MLA's 1999 Chicago convention, when Edward Said asked certain scholars to speak about their commitments, they spoke of their commitment to scholarship with the language of the soul - with words of awe, reverence, respect and need for beauty. This world is no less available or necessary for the community college professor than it is for the research university professor. They also spoke in the language of morality - with the spiritual component comes a moral component - again, no less the province of the two year college instructor or proprietary school teacher than any other professor. Michael Fried speaks of commitment, conviction and enthusiasm, and explains that he became an art historian "simply to live and work in the face of [the artwork's] insuperable radiance…" (18). For Fried, teaching is about "independence of mind, informed originality of insight, and learned persuasiveness" (Said 7), all characteristics of the scholar's pursuits. Elaine Scarry echoes this when she says that, "teaching well requires that we speak openly about the beauty of poems, plays, novels, and epics not only because it is so often the beauty of the world that has prompted the writing of those works, but also because beauty lies at the heart of education; it is among those things that ignite the desire and willingness to learn…" (21), and that part of this celebration of beauty is scholarly investigation - and teaching it to our students. Noam Chomsky cites the duty of the university to perform a "liberatory" and "subversive" function from established intellectual regimes (35); implying that knowledge is constantly changing and any teacher that does not keep up and examine it with his own mind and investigations, and ask his students to do the same, fails in some way to truly educate with "understanding," as opposed to mere "knowledge" (34). Pierre Bourdieu speaks of breaking out "of the academic microcosm, to enter into sustained and vigorous exchange with the outside world" (44), uniting intellectuals and producing community.
There are, of course, more concrete purposes for encouraging faculty scholarship, perhaps reasons more compelling to the practical needs of the teaching institution, and more directly related to the institution's perceived concerns. Besides encouraging creativity and vitality in faculty and helping to reduce faculty burnout, scholarship encourages closer faculty ties to the disciplines, as well as currency in one's field. The testing of ideas with qualified peers keeps faculty honest, humble and accurate in their teaching endeavors (Axtell 60-65). Scholarship also answers the some-time problem of isolation in the teaching profession, creating multiple communities - faculty to faculty within the institution; faculty to faculty within disciplines, outside the institution; faculty to student, as faculty share their most recent studies; and faculty to society, as discussed above. It increases respect in all arenas - faculty for each other, students for faculty professionalism, and the institution gains greater respect from the community, both academic and business, as well as for the faculty members. Scholarship transforms the departmental environment to one engaging more with the ideas of the disciplines - creating an intellectual community.
III.C.2. Scholarship's link to teaching
Perhaps most compelling to teaching institutions, and generally implied in all the reasons already recited, scholarship complements and enhances teaching.
Numerous studies show a positive relationship between faculty scholarship activity and good teaching. Their findings are often surprisingly counter to our traditional notions of the irrelevance of scholarship to the teaching process; however, most of these studies claim that while good scholarship can occur without teaching, good teaching is hindered without some kind of scholarship activity. This activity -- that is, the presenting of ideas and findings formally for public review and critique -- must occur on a consistent, committed basis for classroom teaching to excel, so the neglect and exclusion of faculty's own intellectual endeavors and the emphasis only on teaching at primarily teaching institutions may have ironically led to the decline in the quality of teaching.7
The literature also asserts the importance of scholarship to the future success of community and other teaching colleges. However, the structure of these schools often has obstacles to such activity such as lack of systematic planning or budgetary network, limited access to research materials, lack of support from colleagues, and lack of time. Heavy teaching loads, with no variety of job duties, are important culprits in the prevention of scholarship. Consequently, faculty burnout is becoming the new academic disease, as faculty members teach from year to year without significant professional development. The teaching college environment must be restructured to encourage research and scholarship, to provide faculty time to pursue activities that enhance teaching, and to institutionalize such activities
III.C.3 Restructuring the Teaching College Environment
One might argue that new professors - especially PhDs - come to their teaching jobs prepared - even overly prepared - to do research and scholarship, to write, present and publish, after the rigors of graduate school. However, scholarship does not occur in isolation, and studies show that those professors who do not already engage in it - whether new faculty who just don't know how to get involved or experienced faculty who are complacent - will not begin without some outside impetus, collegial support, and a conducive environment (Jarvis 39-55). In a research university, this impetus is the presence of colleagues who also engage in scholarship (who can guide and mentor new faculty in this area), as well as reduced course loads providing time for this activity, and not to be overlooked, the fact that scholarship is a required activity for tenure.
For scholarship to occur in a voluntary environment, restructuring must be done. Just as research universities must be restructured to reduce over-reliance on adjuncts and TAs for teaching most of their undergraduate courses, so must other colleges undergo restructuring to answer the crisis in education today. While research university professors often teach only one or perhaps two courses a semester, community college and teaching college professors teach four to five. For years this artificial distinction has existed between the sequestered research professor and the overworked teaching professor, created in part by federal funding for now-obsolete governmental cold war needs, continued today through corporate alliances with and corporate funding of research universities.
Instead, the research professor needs to be in the classroom more so students can benefit, and the teaching professor needs to be in the lab or library more for exactly the same reason. (If scholarship improves teaching, then those who engage in scholarship should be in greater contact with students, and those who primarily teach should be engaged in more scholarship.) Overworked and overloaded with teaching duties, community college professors have felt the failing of this misguided dichotomy to a greater degree than others, but both research universities and teaching colleges have suffered in terms of quality of education by this imposed job division. A balance in teaching and scholarship would benefit both kinds of institutions and their students, and especially, the professoriate. Furthermore, evidence indicates that most conscientious faculty actually prefer a balance of teaching and scholarship. 8 Course loads at teaching colleges must be reduced and greater opportunities for scholarship and professional development implemented, such as support programs, in order to avoid burnout, ensure subject currency, and teaching vitality, creativity, and quality.
Much of the literature on teaching colleges and scholarship gives similar suggestions for establishing a climate of scholarship in situations where it is not yet part of the culture, and when it is not required for tenure or permanent placement. Administrative support is crucial to establishing a climate on campus that promotes scholarship. Other suggestions are to: include scholarship as part of the rewards system, ensure release time, provide avenues for scholarly pursuits, and finally, institute a forum devoted to scholarship. Scholarship activity just does not occur in isolation; collegiality with personal contact - networking, mentoring and community - is often cited as the single most important factor in faculty development (Jarvis 40 - 41).
III.C.4 The Faculty Forum: A Case Study
The Faculty Forum was one kind of scholarship mentoring such a program.
Description
The Faculty Forum is a faculty development project designed to assist and mentor faculty in their scholarship activity at colleges and institutions where there is not a requirement or culture for scholarship.9 The Faculty Forum has three parts:
(1) one day for an in-house colloquium for faculty to share their research and scholarship - present papers, display posters and other work - to each other;
(2) in the weeks or months preceding the colloquium, several weekly or twice monthly writing workshops in which participating faculty meet to exchange, review, discuss, and revise ideas and papers in whatever form they may have them - whether simply an unformed idea in one's mind, or an outline on paper, or perhaps a fully written paper from graduate school days that the faculty member wishes to develop;
(3) and finally, after the colloquium, professors are given leads to outside conferences and journals for their papers, and otherwise assisted in how and where to submit their work.
This program has been functioning successfully on an ongoing basis for doctoral candidates at Georgia State University for many years, and has been implemented for faculty at teaching universities.
The Colloquium
The most visible portion of the Faculty Forum, the one-day colloquium at which Forum participants present their work to the college, had the benefits of enabling other faculty and administrators to see the work that faculty can do and have been doing; this created a closer community, and encouraged greater administrative understanding, support and respect for faculty scholarship, as well as encouraging other faculty to do the same. Other positive effects of the colloquium is that it provided much needed practice for faculty before they presented their work to outside venues, and it provided a motive to actually produce a work that might not otherwise have been produced.
The Workshops
Many colleges and campuses have faculty colloquiums, forums or symposium. However, the unique part of the Faculty Forum is the weekly pre-Forum writing workshops to assist faculty work on their projects (in our case, mostly writing papers) in the months preceding the colloquium. The more experienced scholars mentored the less experienced, but even the most experienced scholars benefited from the feedback of colleagues on their writing and on all aspects of this scholarship process and from the environment motivating faculty to do this work. The collegial activity became a reciprocal mentoring process, and became contagious, creating a culture of intellectual exchange in the department and across departments in the college. (Our Faculty Forum was interdisciplinary.)
The writing workshop feedback and practice of reading papers provided faculty with much support and information, but perhaps just as important, the deadline of the next Forum meeting for getting a portion of the paper completed for workshop review helped faculty immensely. Because every day duties and immediate responsibilities of professors often distract attention from scholarship (the less urgent portion of their job), the deadlines are one of the most important aspects of the Faculty Forum process. The structure of the Forum helped professors to make writing a priority.
Networking
The third part of the Faculty Forum, assistance with outside networking through providing leads to conferences and information on the aspects of submitting papers successfully in the world of conferences and journals, was just as unique and beneficial to the professors. While this information may seem obvious to those already active in publishing and presenting, it was not always known by many of the professors and made the difference between a paper that was presented at an outside venue, and one that otherwise would have not gone beyond the Forum's in-house colloquium presentation. The faculty were pleasantly surprised at how e |