Where's My Professor? by Ellen Schrecker, 08.11.10, The disappearing faculty and the lost soul of American higher education

Source: Forbes
URL: http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/01/professor-disappearing-faculty-education-opinions-best-colleges-10-schrecker.html


Sometimes technology does not work. Faced with a drastic decline in state funding, administrators at the California State University’s Bakersfield campus decided to cut costs by replacing all the sections of the remedial mathematics course in the fall of 2009 with an online computer program overseen by a single instructor. Unfortunately substituting the Internet for personal contact with a classroom teacher proved disastrous, especially for the 700-plus ill-prepared undergraduates who needed intensive work to bring their math skills to a college level. When these students took their final exams only about 40% passed, compared with a 75% success rate the prior year.

As Bakersfield’s experiment shows, America’s colleges and universities may be in trouble, but their problems can’t be solved by eliminating faculty. And yet even as concerned politicians, parents and other citizens (rightly) worry about rising tuitions and declining graduation rates, professors are disappearing from the nation’s classrooms. Though few institutions have copied Cal State Bakersfield, roughly 70% of the people currently teaching at American institutions of higher learning have contingent appointments. They are part-time adjuncts and temporary instructors who have no job security and can be dismissed at any time for any reason, or for no reason at all. Tenured and tenure-track academics, the professors many Americans may assume are educating the nation’s undergraduates, are on the verge of extinction.


Since the financial crisis of the mid-1970s forced the academic community to pay attention to its bottom line, it has been under pressure to keep its enrollments up and its expenditures down. Replacing full-time, tenure-track faculty members with part-timers and people on temporary appointments seemed a good solution. Such instructors were cheaper to begin with, since adjuncts rarely get benefits and are typically paid no more than $2,500 a course, if that. Moreover, disposable faculty members give academic administrators the flexibility they supposedly need to meet fluctuations in student demand, even though most contingent instructors teach required introductory courses like freshman composition and remedial math.

This casualization of the academic labor force has not helped higher education. Naturally it is traumatic for the faculty members involved who, even when they work at several campuses, as many adjuncts do, average about $12,000 a year from their teaching and must sometimes rely on food stamps. Some, it is true, are skilled professionals like lawyers or engineers who teach courses in their field as a hobby or civic engagement, but many are well-trained Ph.D.s who do want regular academic positions and got blindsided by a poor job market.

These men and women are perfectly good teachers, by all indications as capable as their tenured and tenure-track peers, but they cannot devote as much time and attention to their students. As they scurry from one temporary job to the next, these freeway flyers, as they are called, can rarely do research or even stay current in their fields. Many lack offices or access to university computers, making it hard to maintain contact with their students outside class. In addition, because they do not know from one semester to the next what courses they will teach--or even if they will teach--and are often hired at the last minute, they have little time to prepare their courses. Their students suffer as well; several studies have shown that they graduate at a lower rate than those taught by traditional professors.

The precarious nature of their employment undercuts the integrity of the education these faculty members offer. Because course evaluations often determine whether someone will be rehired, teachers on contingent appointments can and do lose their jobs if they offend their students by challenging their preconceived ideas or giving them non-inflated grades. Unlike their tenured and tenure-track colleagues, part-time and temporary instructors must teach haunted by the fear that tackling a controversial subject or flunking a football player might land them on the street. They have, in short, no academic freedom.