The Academy

That’s what the emails from the English department to and about the Virginia Tech shooter show.

They knew there were problems. They were trying to deal with them. They helped him as much as they could. They looked for ways to keep him successful.

It is also true they didn’t recognize some warning signs, but hindsight is simpler than the warnings appear in the rapid pace of real-life living.

And, yes, I do know his name. But I make it a policy to forget the evil and remember the good.

Liviu Librescue deserves to be remembered. He was a Holocaust survivor who vowed to never let his students be taken and when the time came, he stood by that vow. Every single one of his students at Virginia Tech got out safely. He died. His is a name worth remembering.

My CC2 students noted that his name ends with “rescue.” I told them that “libre” means free. He appears to have been aptly named.

What would you do with a shooter in the hall? I carry a glass-breaker in my purse and tell my students where it is. I tell them that if we all rush him, even a gunman is likely to go down. I talk them through the exits and the safest ways to be stuck in the room if escape proves impossible.

I consider that part of the education I am responsible for sharing with them.

They ask me if I will, like Librescue, stand between them and death. That is a very scary question. I don’t have an answer I like.

Erin O’Connor at Critical Mass wrote a post on tenure.

One reason people want tenure is for academic freedom. If you have tenure, the theory goes, you can oppose the administration politically at no cost to yourself.

Let’s think about that for a minute.

If you are opposing the administration, are you really going to wait until you are tenured? No, you’re not. And as a result, you won’t get tenure.

If you are opposing someone at no risk to yourself, isn’t it possible that you will oppose them out of vengefulness, pettiness, or simply desiring to be annoying? Yes, it is.

So tenure = academic freedom is a “get out of jail free card” for teachers who just want to make the administration miserable. No, everyone doesn’t do it, but some of them do. You probably know one or two.

Then there’s the idea that tenure rewards hard work. As my grampa used to say, “The reward for work well done is more work to do.” If a teacher is teaching (and researching, at a research institute), then they will be rewarded. No administration in the world wants to have to pay to go look for candidates to replace good people they already have. And they’re not going to do that, most of the time. Yes, sometimes someone gets in a squabble and maybe it isn’t the teacher’s fault, but most of the time this won’t happen.

My high school had tenure. (Yes, you read that right.) And there was a Spanish teacher who didn’t teach anything in her classes. She had tenure, so she didn’t have to. Now, there were forty teachers in my high school and only one wasn’t doing her job. But the 39 who were doing their job, would have done it without tenure. And the one who wasn’t, could have been let go without tenure.

On the other hand, if there’s no tenure, then full-time faculty may be increasingly replaced with part-timers, or, more likely, as new teachers are needed, only part-time faculty will be hired.

How can we get around that?

First, schools who are hiring lots of adjuncts don’t have high standing, in their communities or in academia. And, believe it or not, all schools want to have a high standing. So why are they hiring mostly adjuncts? It’s financial considerations. And tenure or not isn’t going to change the financial considerations for most of those schools.

Next, what about fixed term contracts? My SLAC has three-year fixed term contracts. Most of the teachers there have been there for the last twenty years on those contracts. They haven’t needed tenure to have job security, because they and the school fit each other.

Now, however, there are differences coming, and some of them may not have notice the changes in the wind. The SLAC is moving towards being a research institute. So without publications and presentations, a person won’t get hired there. I would not be surprised if, eventually, the school starts letting go people who don’t have the publications they want. But that won’t be soon. Remember what I said earlier? It’s way easier to keep what you have than to get something new. So even with the winds of change blowing, most of those teachers will keep their jobs for multiple more contract terms without needing to improve their publication/presentation rate. And those who want to stay on and who people want to keep, they’ll get the idea (either themselves or through a nudge) that they need to get to work.

Therefore, I am for fixed year contracts over tenure. I don’t think tenure does much for a school and I don’t think it really does a lot for the teachers.

Of course, I’m speaking from the outside, as someone without tenure, without a full-time position, so some may discount my opinion. But I think it makes sense. And I think we are moving towards that model in academia.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the relatively high percentage of the upper- division undergraduate courses taught by non- tenure- track faculty members across all three institutional types. English departments do sometimes hire journalists, artists, actors, technical writers, and members of the legal profession for upper-division undergraduate courses in literature, composition, film, and writing. But the numbers here suggest that there are not enough tenured or tenure- track faculty members to cover upper-division under-graduate courses. Or, perhaps, for tenured or tenure- track faculty members to maintain their involvement in the lower division, department chairs have had to turn to non- tenure- track faculty members to teach courses for majors—even a very small percentage of courses for graduate students. (8) 

So said MLA’s “Education in the Balance,” their 2007 report.

Obviously at my CCs there are no upper-division courses. The sophomore courses are 99% taught by the tenure-track instructors. The 1% is the May-term class which doesn’t count toward the 10.5 month contract and is taught by whatever willing adjunct can be found, which in this case was me.

At SLAC, I know the upper-division grammar class is taught by an adjunct, but I think that is the only course that is done that way. And they have enough faculty to teach it; no one wants to though. That teacher has a PhD and is a grammar specialist, though, so her work is not a sloughing off of a bad job to a poor adjunct.

MLA seemed to be surprised that full-time faculty in baccalaureate institutes taught just as many first-year courses as they taught upper-division classes. But there are a lot more first-year courses than upper-division classes and in most BA schools, there are still plenty of faculty teaching and not focusing on research.

These figures show that, of all the faculty members hired by departments, no more than one in seven was hired to a tenure-track position. (9)

This is not surprising at all. For every tenure-track position, most colleges have to hire two part-timers to cover the same amount of classes. But they can afford to hire six for the same amount of money. So they get the equivalent of three full-timers for less pay. Of course they are going to hire part-timers as long as the emphasis is on finances.

The committee is drawn, on the one hand, to the argument that the concept of a non- tenure-track faculty is an illegitimate exercise of institutional authority; it is, and it ought to be, contested by whatever means available. (15)

I do not understand why hiring non-tenure-track faculty is illegitimate. My SLAC has three-year renewable contracts. Those have been stable for decades, although they are changing now as the president moves the college towards more research-intense work. Even when the letting go of traditional faculty who have not been publishing happens, as I expect it will in a few years, most of these teachers know it is coming and can do something about it now.

Neither of my SLACs, including the one where I taught as ft, are mostly staffed by part-timers. 90% or more of their English departments are full-time. Obviously one has no tenure-track, but even so most of its faculty has been there for years, with the exception of two new hires last year who replaced people who left four years ago when the college was in a downturn. (They retired.) The other has one position in the department that is full-time, non-tenure track. It is staffed by an MFA who does not intend to get a PhD. This is exactly the position she wants.

At a time when the percentage of undergraduate courses taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty members is in decline, it seems imperative that we set standards for the appropriate levels and areas of participation by tenure-line and full-time non-tenure-track faculty members in the undergraduate curriculum. We understand that the first obligation of the tenured and tenure- track faculty is to majors and graduate students. (17)

This goes back to a discussion I started in Adjunct Crunching as a response to Erin O’Connor’s “Adjunct Crunch.

Erin is arguing in her post that freshman composition should be the main focus of teachers in the English departments. Obviously MLA disagrees with her.

What do I think? I think that most English departments are supported by their freshman composition classes and they should give support back to those classes. In a CC most of the tenure-track teachers are teaching two freshman and three sophomore classes every semester. Some teach three freshman and two sophomores. But that means that in a year they teach 7 or 8 freshman comp classes. An adjunct, who can now teach 7 classes a year, will teach all 7 as freshman comp. And at CC1 there are three adjuncts for every full-timer. At CC2 it is a 1 to 1 ratio. There are as many full-timers as there are part-timers. At SLAC, there is a ratio in favor of full-timers, but not by much. This means that at CC1 far more of the freshman classes are taught by adjuncts than are taught by full-timers.

Adjunct is a dirty word.

If you didn’t know it was, you haven’t known any adjuncts personally. It is amazing what people will say about adjuncts, even to their faces.

But here’s why:

The average adjunct is not as qualified as the average new full-timer. (I’m not addressing the folks hired back in the 60’s, when the market was entirely different.) And I’m not just talking about them receiving less institutional support, though that’s certainly true. Full-timers are recruited nationally, and vetted by search committees, deans, and vice presidents. It’s not unusual to get hundreds of applications for a single position, even at the cc level. When we hire someone to the tenure track, we’ve chosen the best of hundreds. Adjuncts are hired locally, ensuring a far smaller pool. They’re often chosen based on their availability for a given time slot. Yes, some of them are excellent instructors. Yes, sometimes we luck out and find really good people whose life circumstances steer them to us. (That was me, back in the mid-90’s.) But the idea that, on average, the best of hundreds aren’t any better than the best who live within a thirty minute drive and are available on Tuesdays at 12:30 just doesn’t pass the sniff test.

Absolutely the chances are good that the best of hundreds will be better than the best who live within an hour and a half drive. (I’m in Houston, after all.) That does not mean, as Community College Dean makes clear, that some aren’t good. Some are good. Some are excellent.

But we are regularly treated as if we are “the one living within driving distance who agrees to go to X campus.”

Even when we are not. Even when we have a PhD and more teaching experience than the full-timers. Even when our evaluations are glowing and our classes fill up immediately upon opening.

It reminds me of how doctors often treat their patients. Many doctors routinely treat their patients as if they are idiots and do not recognize their own symptoms. This happens even when the patients are bright, well-educated, and self-aware. The doctors do it because they have the expectation that the patient won’t be intelligent.

Maybe the academy has that same expectation. They expect the adjuncts to be poor teachers, place holders, cogs in a giant wheel that are interchangeable… And they get those things, to the detriment of the students. Maybe the colleges should give more and expect more from their adjuncts.

If students perform well when confronted with high expectations, shouldn’t teachers work the same way? We’re just older folks (usually). If adjuncts are expected to be underqualified, high graders without significant content in their courses, then that’s who they will become.

I work at three colleges with very different community cultures.

At one college everyone is introduced as Dr. if they have received one and by their first name as not. This is even when you are giving your name to colleagues. At this college, my PhD counters my adjunct status, as does the fact that relatively few of the faculty are adjuncts.

At one college the twain do not meet. Adjuncts (60 or so) have a four computers/tables office in a building, while the full-timers have individual offices in other buildings. Both the adjuncts and the full-timers have a start-of-school meeting, but the adjuncts’ is at night and the full-timers’ is in the day. Even adjuncts who could attend the full-timers’ meetings don’t because it means coming back to campus without pay. And it just continues that way. They don’t interact. This is CC1, which has offered adjunct certification.

At my third college, the adjuncts are invited (as far as I can tell) to everything the full-timers are. The adjuncts have offices in the same area as the full-timers, though they share an office and the ft have their own. (That’s okay, though, since few of the adjuncts are in the office area at the same time.) People talk to the adjuncts, instead of ignoring them in the halls like at CC1 and CC2. It’s a much more comfortable school to be an adjunct at.

Why am I working at three colleges?

I have been away from teaching college for fifteen years, teaching my children. Now I am trying to get back into teaching. I’ve been working at the local college for a while, teaching a Saturday morning or a Thursday night class. But this year my youngest is attending the local college for dual credit, so I am teaching part-time at several places trying to beef up my experience and my skills. I know that colleges look more at presentations and publications and I have been working on those. I have eight presentations this school year and two publications.

So I am working at several places, getting my feet in doors, hopefully getting to know people, and, next time they hire, I want them to be looking at me first. But when people think of adjuncts as the sweatshop workers, as at one of the colleges I applied for a full-time position, where they never hire their own adjuncts for full-time positions, maybe more adjuncting was not a good choice.

Full-time college teaching has become an undervalued resource in the United States.

Cost to Students
A new study shows that first year students are more likely to drop out if they are taught by adjuncts.

That is not just a cost to the students; it is also a cost to the colleges in terms of retention, which is a rate that they are judged on. Apparently, though, it is not sufficiently an issue to begin to hire more full-timers.

Those at community colleges who don’t drop out are less likely to transfer to a four-year school.

Since this is not something that community colleges typically track, it doesn’t matter to their bottom line. If they did track it, or someone did, it would matter more.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed, students were much more likely to drop out if the high stakes courses (like freshman English, in which an A is required for nursing) were taught by adjuncts.

If we want an educated populace, then it seems that we ought to hire full-time teachers who are teachers first to educate and care for the students in the gatekeeper courses.

The Journal of Higher Education looked specifically at community colleges and found that those with high percentages of adjuncts had lower percentages of students completing school.

Possible future cost to colleges:

Again, since they don’t track this, it is not an issue for community colleges. If USA Today or US News & World Report published this information, disseminating it to the public, then it would become an issue.

Regression analysis indicates that graduation rates for public community colleges in the United States are adversely affected when institutions rely heavily upon part-time faculty instruction. Negative effects may be partially offset if the use of part-time faculty increases the net faculty resource available per student. However, the evidence suggests that this offset is insufficient to reverse negative effects upon graduation rates.

I wonder if the community colleges have someone who keeps up with this kind of information. It seems like if this became more known, people would stop going to community colleges until they hired more full-time faculty. Of course, for those to whom price is the biggest issue, this is not true.

Over the past three decades, one of the most significant changes in the delivery of postsecondary education involves the dramatic increase in the use of contingent or part-time faculty. The pattern is particularly pronounced at community colleges, where part-time faculty provide virtually half of all instruction.

I hate to break it to him, but part-time faculty at my college provide three-quarters of the… Okay, maybe not. Three-quarters of the faculty are adjuncts, but until two years ago, adjuncts were only allowed to teach five courses a year- which is half of what a full-timer can teach. However, two years ago, this was increased to three courses a semester. Now part-timers can teach nine a year while full-timers teach ten a year. Most part-timers teach seven a year. So with 3/4s of the faculty being part-timers and the ration of 7:10… Adjuncts teach 52% of the classes at CC1.

And the number of adjuncts has increased while the percentage of full-time faculty has dropped. In 1970 78% of faculty was full-time. In 2005, the percentage dropped to 52. That’s a 26% drop in 35 years. By the time I retire, if the trend keeps going, only 35% of the faculty will be full-time.

Why is this happening?

Why is full-time teaching decreasing while part-time is increasing?

The bottom line, of course, is cost. If my CC hired me full-time, I would be making $57K a year and they would be having to pay basically $114K for the privilege (with taxes and health care). Part-time, they pay me and another like me $22K. And they don’t have to pay health care for me. So their cost for a “full-time equivalent” is $33K. They can hire six adjuncts who teach more than three times as many classes, for the price of hiring me full-time.

But the cost wouldn’t matter if the public were not going to schools with high levels of adjuncts or if accrediting institutions considered the percentage of adjuncts.

Transparency coming?

New America reports that the government is considering requiring transparency in number of adjuncts at a college. The colleges, of course, are resisting this. It’s not that they don’t know how many they hire. They do. They just don’t want the general public to know.

As of now, accrediting institutions rarely require any sort of definition of part-time faculty, leaving that to the institution, and do not require that schools follow any rules about hiring, evaluating, or maintaining part-time faculty. It’s not an issue to the accrediting agencies, so it isn’t to the schools.

John at Discriminations has a wonderful post on a NYTimes OpEd that says that the SAT predicts graduation rates better than high school GPA. He wrote the author about a possible objection and the author wrote back an answer!

The OpEd starts off:

FOR some years now, many elite American colleges have been downgrading the role of standardized tests like the SAT in deciding which applicants are admitted, or have even discarded their use altogether. While some institutions justify this move primarily as a way to enroll a more diverse group of students, an increasing number claim that the SAT is a poor predictor of academic success in college, especially compared with high school grade-point averages….
So, here is the question: do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages?

Go read the NYTimes article, then head over to
Discriminations to read the rest. It’s a very good discussion.

As a homeschooling mother of a son presently applying to multiple colleges across the country, I am pleased to hear that the SAT is such a good predictor. My son’s grades are high, but that is partially a feature of our early homeschooling rules. For the first eight years of education, the boys had to get a perfect score. If they didn’t get something correct, they had to keep working on it till it was all correct. This was a built-in motivator for getting their work done correctly to start with. This (mostly) carried over into high school.

My son’s GPA for dual credit courses at the CC are also reasonably high. (He is on the President’s honor roll and is a member of Phi Theta Kappa.) So in his case I don’t know that they don’t both indicate how well he will do. In fact, as a worried mum, rather than a college professor, I am relieved to know that something outside my grading says he will do well.

It’s also a good thing for homeschoolers in general because some of the universities presently require that homeschoolers take the GED. (None of the ones E is applying to, though. That was one of the requirements to start. That and top 100 ranked schools and his program.) With this as an argument, there should be more maneuverability in getting that changed.

California State University system will turn down 10,000 eligible students. It doesn’t have the money to educate them.

“The bottom line is there will be 10,000 qualified California graduating students from the largest high school senior class ever in California’s history who will not get into the CSU system because of budget cuts and the probability that next year’s budget will be even worse,” said Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, who serves as a University of California regent and a California State University trustee.

Many of these will be low socioeconomic students who are among the first to go to college in their family.

However, the new changes can work against financially strapped and first-generation students, who may not apply quickly enough to the increasingly competitive schools.

I cannot imagine that 36 students could support 40 jobs. I think they used the downturn as an excuse to cut. But…

Beloit College

announced that it will eliminate 40 positions (with faculty jobs included in the mix) — about 10 percent of the college’s total employees. The reason is that this year’s total student enrollment is smaller, by 36 students, than the college had planned. (Total enrollment ended up at 1,289.) At Ohio State, 36 students would be a rounding error. But at Beloit — and at many liberal arts colleges — that’s enough to create real problems and force real change, including layoffs.

Beloit is not among the colleges that need to explore mergers to survive — and is by most measures highly successful, known for the strength of its liberal arts programs and as a Wisconsin alternative to the large public universities that thrive in the Midwest.

Cascades College in Portland, Oregon closed its doors with $4 million in debt.

Will others also close?

The article said that 4,400 colleges are in the US. Three are closing. They are all Christian colleges.

One quarter (1,100) have endowments of less than $50 million. That was before the downturn. If colleges had money in the stock market, as is likely, many of those lost a third to half their funds.

Ouch.