FINDING THOSE MISSING SCHOLARS. University Diaries discovers the
relatively light teaching schedules of the economics faculty at the University of Virginia.
Let us deconstruct this very postmodern phenomenon.
You’re proud of attending U Va because it has a world-class, famous economics department.
But almost all of its economists of stature are absent.
Hence you may boast that X and Y teach at your school. You just can't learn anything from them.
I paid the site a visit and offered a
comment.
The departments that would like some research visibility have to make it worthwhile for their faculty to do research. Economics is one field that does not suffer from the overproduction of Ph.D.s, and doing good work is not as easy as it looks. The department that wants greater visibility has to pay for it. Deans don't like it, but when they don't pony up, the ambitious people leave.
This comment appears to square with a
report in the
Cavalier Daily, unless the first word of the paper's name is an adjective, not a noun.
"Top-ranked universities are hiring very aggressively," [economics chairman David] Mills said. "Duke, Columbia and NYU are taking people that we would like to hire."
The deans have a history of not ponying up.
The problem at the University was exacerbated by a University-wide hiring freeze put into place in 2001 that did not end until recently. During the hiring freeze, the economics department had a net loss of about two faculty members a year.
You would think that people who talk the talk about supply curves sloping upward would walk the walk. The employer has to respond with better pay or better working conditions.
To lure and retain economics faculty members, the University has begun to offer additional benefits not available to the faculty at large, [associate dean Karen] Ryan said. One such change includes cutting the teaching load from four courses a year to three because professors are attracted to the opportunity to do more research.
Cutting teacher course loads creates an additional strain on the number of students who are able to take economics classes.
In order to make up for fewer classes taught by full-time faculty, the University has adapted by bringing in adjunct professors, Ryan said.
Whether that last sentence heralds the camel's nose inside the tent, with future deans compelling the tenure trackers in economics to teach more or authorizing adjunct, teaching-only lines in lieu of tenure trackers remains to be seen. But that will bring
tradeoffs of its own.
My comment prompted two thoughtful responses. The
proprietor of University Diaries noted,
But if UVa's administration wants to hand out high salaries - courtesy, to some degree, of the state's taxpayers - to faculty, some of whom, by my reckoning at least, undercompensate students and thus the state in terms of teaching (and undercompensate the whole institution in terms of all sorts of other goods that aren't there when the faculty isn't there with any reliability), that's something else again.
On the other hand, legislative cost-cutting has the potential to turn Mr Jefferson's university into someplace where the harried teachers of additional, larger classes might at best be reading somebody else's interpretation of Mr Jefferson's thinking, rather than expanding on it themselves. Here's an
abridged list of publications from Virginia's economics department. You think anybody has the final say on unilateral divorce or teen pregnancy or predatory pricing?
Professor Soltan also suggested, citing a
Business Week editorial, that a research-intensive, partially (or fully?) -privatized, former public university undoes "the purpose of public higher education."
Business Week puts it,
At the same time, creeping privatization accelerates a broader movement by the top 100 or so flagships to hike their tuitions at a double-digit rate. The result is that a public good designed to give all Americans access to higher ed is turning into something more like a private one, open primarily to those whose families can afford it.
There's nothing new about that. Burton Weisbrod and W. Lee Hansen identified the state university system of California as a large regressive transfer (subsidized higher education for the children of the rich, as well as subsidized human capital investment for future rich) over thirty years ago. (Springer will sell you a copy of a
comment on the original article, which may be out there somewhere.)
Current research (.pdf) suggests the subsidy is still present.
Over three decades ago Hansen and Weisbrod (1969) published a pioneering study of questions similar to these for the state of California. A key finding of their study was that “Public subsidies for higher education in California tend to go disproportionately to students from relatively high income families and are received in quite different amounts by people even within given income classes” (p. 84). Much has changed in California over the ensuring period; the population has grown more racially diverse, the public system has continued to grow in size and stature, and the economy of the state has changed. Yet postsecondary enrollments in the state are still distributed disproportionately in the three sectors.
Although
Business Week suggests higher education has public good properties, that proposition is by no means incontrovertible. Perhaps all the spillover benefits of education can be credited to kindergarten, meaning the benefit to a degree holder is a purely private benefit. (The fact that the most popular major these days is business strongly reinforces that claim.) In such a case, there is no reason for the taxpayers to provide subsidies to raise the salaries of those who finish. Where did I see that news article about rich parents sending their kids to Flagship State rather than one of the expensive
U.S. News-ranked privates? The same elusive research faculty, better football teams, and a larger pool of hook-up buddies to boot! (I know, cost-benefit is so dispassionate. It might also be the only way to have done with watered down curricula to keep legacy alumni happy and donating money, but I digress.)
But that still leaves unresolved what the universities ought do about those missing professors. Clearly, Virginia's attempt to drive down the wages of its research stars persuaded many to polish up their latest manuscripts and their
curriculum vitae and shop the latter to institutions happy to claim affiliation in print on the former. (Mid-majors like that, too. I know.) On the other hand, to leave the required class scutwork to temporaries or to cancel classes is not right.
Timothy Burke made that observation.
You say to undergraduates, "Come for the world-class departments!" but the world-class portion of the department is essentially invisible and inaccessible to the undergraduates. So why are the undergraduates there? So that they can get a degree with a major from an institution known to have a world-class department in their area of study--but it's the credential they're buying, then, not anything like actual teaching.
Charlie Sykes made that point in
ProfScam long ago. The way in which Flagship State makes the hotshots available to the frosh, if they make such an effort at all, is to count an 800 person lecture as four courses. Then a lot of people can download the hotshot's Power Points (worst case scenario) or perhaps get a few minutes of face time during office hours. It's a good point, but as Professor Burke noted on his own site (with respect to a different problem),
Let’s suppose, however, that there is a tipping point out there somewhere, that higher education is moving towards a collective calamity in its pricing. What would it take for colleges and universities to start reducing their costs and lowering the price? For one, many institutions would have to do it at the same time. That’s because lowering the price is going to involve shucking off at least some of the product being made available. Doing that unilaterally is likely to be suicidal, especially among the top-end institutions. How to coordinate that movement without running afoul of antitrust collusion is a big issue in its own right.
The Virginia legislature is learning that lesson, as are several other state legislatures. The terms the legislature would like to offer, which Mr Sykes endorses (
ProfScam, p. 258) imply a wage cut and a shift to a less preferable workload for the best (or best-situated?) researchers. (Professor Burke is contemplating the possibility of tuition-payers rebelling against tuition increases. I envision the real customers, namely the employers, rebelling against unprepared graduates first. Either of those developments would render moot much of the positional competition for researchers.) Impounding the demand for college degrees in
ceteris paribus, the problem is one of achieving some sort of cost savings without antagonizing the most mobile faculty. I'm going to have to look at the consequences of those two-tier wage schedules at the legacy airlines from 20 years ago...
But there is another downside to keeping the most famous faculty out of the classroom. Martin Anderson's
Impostors in the Temple refers to the use in their place of the young to teach the young as "venal." It is. Professor Burke is correct to refer to the promotion of world-class departments as bait-and-switch. It is furthermore a delegation of the most important teaching responsibilities ... introducing new students to the complexities of a new field ... to the least experienced practitioners, or to individuals not given the respect and compensation of a long-term position. (Imagine flight school taught by somebody who finished ground school three months ago, and cringe.) The best-intentioned of beginners are going to have troubles distinguishing a profound but ill-posed question from a clueless one, and tactfully dealing with both. The best-intentioned freeway flyers may be too stressed. Granted, a student who gets by the first two years of cattle-call classes is likely to have much more access to the famous experienced professor in a junior or senior level class. But what do we know about the sources of attrition in the first two years?
And thus, the problem. Experienced scholars are valuable. Valuable people are valuable because they have opportunities to be valuable to others. That gives them leverage to negotiate pay and working conditions more to their liking. To criticize them for doing so, and to propose that they be forced to accept lower pay and worsened working conditions, might assuage an editorial writer's sense of outrage, but it will not lower the student's tuition bill or speed up his or her graduation date. But to pretend that the experienced scholars are doing something they are not is also a scam.
