WASHINGTON MONUMENT SYNDROME. That's the public-choice dynamic, noted at opinion journals as diverse as
National Review,
Reason, and
Washington Monthly, in which a government agency reacts to a proposed budget reduction (in some cases, a smaller than usual increase in the appropriation) by eliminating a relatively cheap but visible and popular service. The short form is "closing the Washington Monument," although I'm not sure the National Park Service has ever done so.
Something similar may be at work in the
academy's increased reliance on contingent faculty.
“We have to contend with increasing public demands for accountability, increased financial scrutiny and declining state support,” said Charles F. Harrington, provost of the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. “One of the easiest, most convenient ways of dealing with these pressures is using part-time faculty,” he said, though he cautioned that colleges that rely too heavily on such faculty “are playing a really dangerous game.”
Mark B. Rosenberg, chancellor of the State University System of Florida, said that part-timers can provide real-world experience to students and fill gaps in nursing, math, accounting and other disciplines with a shortage of qualified faculty. He also said the shift could come with costs.
The article appears to be conflating two things: in nursing and accounting, the practitioneer who picks up one class as a way of supplementing the income from his or her day job (or, in engineering, to be able to talk shop with junior engineers in competing companies without violating the antitrust laws) is a perpetuation of the honorable tradition of the adjunct professor as a nonacademician with a bit of the vocation, but in many of the other disciplines the adjunct faculty are attempting to make a career out of multiple part-time jobs, while
retaining some expectation of a tenure-track job. Much of the article is about the travails of such wanderers, as well as of the students who take classes from the wanderers.
“Really, we are offering less educational quality to the students who need it most,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, noting that the soaring number of adjunct faculty is most pronounced in community colleges and the less select public universities. The elite universities, both public and private, have the fewest adjuncts.
“It’s not that some of these adjuncts aren’t great teachers,” Dr. Ehrenberg said. “Many don’t have the support that the tenure-track faculty have, in terms of offices, secretarial help and time. Their teaching loads are higher, and they have less time to focus on students.”
Dr. Ehrenberg and a colleague analyzed 15 years of national data and found that graduation rates declined when public universities hired large numbers of contingent faculty.
Several studies of individual universities have determined that freshmen taught by many part-timers were more likely to drop out.
“Having an adjunct in a course is not necessarily bad for you, but having too many adjuncts might be,” said Eric P. Bettinger, an economics professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Students say they can often tell when a professor is part-time. Mike Brennan, a sophomore at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, said the courses taught by adjuncts tend to be more basic and the exams less challenging. “They have so many classes that they give tests that are easier to grade,” Mr. Brennan said.
Carly Matkovich, a senior at the university, said she had bonded more with her part-time teachers, in part because they have more practical experience. But it is usually hard to find time to talk with them outside class. “They’re never around,” Ms. Matkovich said. “It does make me feel kind of cheated.”
Trust the economists to get it right. Now we have to start educating the fourth estate about total factor productivity.
At some departments the proportion of faculty who are tenured is startlingly low. The psychology department at Florida International University in Miami has 2,400 undergraduate majors but only 19 tenured or tenure-track professors who teach, according to a department self-assessment. It is possible for a psychology major to graduate without taking a course with a full-time faculty member.
“We’re at a point where it is extreme,” said Suzanna Rose, a psychology professor who said she stepped down as department head in August, primarily because she could not hire as many tenure-track professors as she thought the department needed. “I’m just very concerned about the quality.”
Ronald Berkman, the provost at Florida International, disputed her numbers, saying the psychology department has 23 professors who are tenured or tenure track and 5 full-time teachers on contracts. The department is conducting a search for three more tenure-track professors, Dr. Berkman said.
“Which is not to say that they don’t need more, which they do,” he said.
In particular, students
will switch majors when they run into trouble completing their schedules.
Right now, a friend of mine is a journalism graduate student trying to land an internship with a newspaper. A question that pops up at every interview – the question that almost blocked him from his graduate program altogether – is, “If you’re so interested in journalism, why were you an English major in college?”
It’s because your chances of getting into the journalism class you want or need are about the same as my chances with Natalie Portman. So my friend traded in a useful major that’s near-impossible to nail down for an easy-to-schedule major that’s borderline useless for his intended career. With scenarios like that playing out, one could almost jump to the conclusion that the school doesn’t care about our education and just wants our money.
Making sure your students get the classes they need isn’t some obscure pet project that can be tackled at leisure. It’s an essential function of this institution, and something that can damage people’s futures if it isn’t fixed quickly.
A little history: the journalism majors are fortunate to have journalism classes to be closed out of. Fifteen years ago, the state board of higher education attempted to cram-down a "rationalization" of the state universities under the misleading rubric of "priorities, quality, and productivity." (In those days, the business fad was to come up with an acronym with a "Q" in it someplace, and thus demonstrate your commitment to a superior product. Pure symbolism over substance.) Among the intended "economies" was the abolition of the journalism degree along with a few other "not socially useful" programs. Journalism continues to function, albeit at a reduced output, and I cannot reject the hypothesis that schedule-completion hassles are the Washington Monument syndrome at work: inconvenience the students sufficiently, and perhaps they and their parents will gripe to the legislature and Springfield will cough up the cash.
The administration, however, engages in rent-seeking of its own. Here's a University Diaries
quip about the revealed preferences of Florida International's administration. At 11-D, Laura
makes a connection to the family policy problems inherent in Adjunct U.
One class can consume about 20 hours per week devoted to lecturing, lecture prep, grading, and student conferences. Over the course of a semester, adjuncts, many of whom have spent a decade in graduate school, make less than a worker at McDonald's. Tuition for one student in the class exceeds their pay.
Adjuncts live in the shadows of universities teaching Intro to History and writing classes and survive on ramen noodles and coffee. Universities, which have been tauted as bastions of liberal thought, turn a blind eye to this injustice in their midst, because nobody really wants to teach Intro to History or those writing classes. How many of those adjuncts are women with children who don't have the freedom to relocate to tenure track opportunities across the country?
That's another Ancient and Honorable tradition of the academy: employing the faculty spouse, for many years the wife, as office help or technician. Expanded labor force participation by women disrupts that arrangement. I would note further that faculty reluctance to meet those introductory classes is faculty complicity in access-assessment-remediation-retention: there's no entry level quality control, no reward for the faculty to do so, and posting whinges on anonymous weblogs appears to be sufficient release.
A
commenter proposes an adverse consequence.
Making everyone adjunct means all teaching and no research. No research -- in partnership with the executive branch's attempts to kill science -- puts an end to the one thing the US still excels at. How to demote a nation in two easy generations!
I'm not sure that's true -- industry and some parts of the government continue to sponsor applied (rather than basic) research. I suggest, however, that a university in which nobody is attempting to expand the frontiers of knowledge, because everybody is busy reading somebody else's prepared slides, isn't really a university.