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May 11, 2009
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Lone Star exemplar
Texas business professor Jeff Sandefer connects some uncomfortable dots:
In the May 1 Austin American-Statesman, University of Texas professor Thomas Palaima asks us to "thank" tenured professors for improving "what they (have) rightly come to view as 'their' colleges and universities." According to Professor Palaima, tenured professors believe that our colleges and universities belong to them.When workers and managers believe an organization exists to serve them, and not its customers or its rightful owners, it begins a terminal decline. General Motors serves as a grim reminder of the end result.
As a successful entrepreneur and a longtime university teacher, my years inside academia have taken me to places where parents, donors, and taxpayers aren't welcome. I have seen firsthand what happens when tenured faculties act as if the universities belong to them.
For starters, interest in teaching declines. According to the federal government's National Center for Education Statistics:
--The average tenured professor now teaches fewer than three classes per year, and often no more than a handful of students at a time, despite the fact that tenured and tenure-track faculty account for the bulk of college costs.
--For so little work, the average full professor receives more than $150,000 annually in salary and benefits.
--As a result, the cost of instruction for some tenured faculty members exceeds $20,000 per student.
So who teaches our children, if not the tenured faculty? An underclass of teaching assistants, adjuncts, and other non-tenured faculty – many of whom are paid $10 per hour or less. According to the New York Times, 70 percent of the faculties at American universities are made up of non-tenured, non-tenure track faculty.
Don't misunderstand. Inside our universities are some wonderful teachers, tenured and non-tenured still dedicated to serving students. These teachers are my friends and heroes – but there are far too few of them, and they pay a heavy price because of perverse institutional incentives.
How does the tenured faculty spend its time? Writing academic journal articles that few people read. Since the tenured faculty answers only to itself, prestige and promotion rests on publishing in these journals; graduate students who desire tenure slave away to serve the tenured priesthood, often "co-authoring" articles for those already in power.
But doesn't academic research drive the economy? The Texas Legislature seems to think so. It continues to support higher education's thirst for unlimited research funding and more "Tier One" universities, never stopping to inquire whether the esoteric research designed to serve the faculty's interest is worth what it costs.
--Academic research, properly accounted for, consumes two-thirds of every dollar we spend in American universities.
--Over the last decade, Texas taxpayers have spent more than $20 billion on scientific academic research – reportedly the most economically productive academic research – to generate less than $14 million a year in net patent income. That's less than a 1 percent rate of return.
--That same money invested in college scholarships would have allowed us to double the number of Texas students who attend college.
Work done by University of Ohio professor Richard Vedder goes one step further: the waste in our universities is so great that more spending on higher education in a state leads to lower economic growth. California is an example of what happens when runaway higher education spending leads to higher taxes that cripple a state economy.
Palaima is right that tenured faculties do believe that our colleges and universities belong to them. And they might go on strike if pushed too hard. But then the joke might be on them: college costs would plummet, most students would continue to be well served by non-tenured faculty, and the state economy would prosper.
It's time for the Texas Legislature to stop writing "blank checks" to our state colleges and universities for tenured professors to spend as they please. Instead, all state higher education funding should be directed to scholarships, so universities once again will have to answer to the people who pay the bills. That's the only way students, parents, and taxpayers will ever regain control of our universities.
Think of Sandefer's idea as a debate prompt rather than a workable proposal (or, if you think it's workable -- that's great, and please explain how it would work in the comments). From my vantage point, you can't create accountability and efficacy in higher ed by confining all state funding to scholarships. While there is a huge amount of waste, and while teaching has become far less important to many professors (and institutions) than research, we still need research, and we still need the kinds of knowledge academia produces. We also need liberal arts education and the arts and humanities--none of which can really support themselves with grant money. Still, Sandefer is onto something when he speaks of the entitled psychology of an academia that has long ceased to take seriously its accountability to the public. He's also onto something when he implies that we probably need fewer research-oriented institutions and more teaching-oriented ones.
Thoughts and comments are welcome.
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Comments:
You fail to make the connection between "we need this" and "only academic researchers at Universities can provide this". For instance, liberal arts education. Or knowledge that comes from research.
I also fail to see why confining state funding of universities to scholarships wouldn't create accountability and more "efficiency" than the current system (I will gloss over the problem of defining "efficiency" when we may well not agree on metrics for costs or benefits). Isn't that the argument for primary school vouchers? Is it wrong in that case, or if correct, why wouldn't it apply to college? It would seem likely to work better, since there is far more choice at that level and the consumers have a far better idea of what it is they want.
I'd like to see the data to which he is referring. I suppose that it's conceivable that the average full professor salary+benefits is $150,000, but the average tenured professor teaching fewer than three classes a year... well that doesn't ring true. Perhaps if we include all the non-teaching researchers, tenured administrators, etc., but then it's not really a very useful statistic, is it?
As for the cost of instruction for "some" tenured faculty exceeding $20,000/student, need I point out that this doesn't really mean anything? First of all, what exactly is "some"? The most expensive 10%? A couple of folks at Harvard? It also assumes (I'm guessing) that cost of instruction/student = faculty salary/number of students. By that measure, the "instructional cost" of research faculty and most university presidents, for that matter, is (salary/0).
And then there's the unsourced bit about academic research "properly accounted for" consuming 2/3 of every higher education dollar. Well, that sure sounds authoritative. And the odd notion that the only return on investment in research is "patent income." I guess cancer research is not profitable enough.
I understand the idea that these kind of articles are supposed to start a discussion, but they remind me more of a lame high school debate, in which a series of pseudo-facts and talking points are used to score cheap points.
Statistics are wonderful things. If they are massaged carefully enough almost anything can be implied from them. I have a fine job at a strong liberal arts university where I teach 6 courses a year for $53,000 dollars as an associate professor. Despite the range of teaching loads and salaries in the profession, the suggestion that 3 courses and $150,000 is "average," in any sense, is an insult to all of us in this line of work and feeds the popular misconceptions that abound about college teaching.
Most professors are not "full." And most members of the public cannot distinguish between what being a full or associate or assistant professor means. To use the most senior members of the profession as a represntation of average, is like using the senior managerial staff of GM to paint a picture of what the jobs of most lineworkers are like.
What an intellectually correct argument.
Agreed about the way he talks about pay. By the time I left Penn, I was teaching 4 courses a year for just over a third of what Sandefer calls average--and it took a long time to work up to that point. Salaries for law professors, business professors, and academic clinicians in med schools skew the averages.
It’s time for the Texas Legislature to stop writing “blank checks” to our state colleges and universities for tenured professors to spend as they please.
Because, you know, now that I've got tenure I just spend state funds exactly as I please. I blew the department's budget on a new Volvo. My travel reimbursement typically goes for donuts.
Instead, all state higher education funding should be directed to scholarships, so universities once again will have to answer to the people who pay the bills. That’s the only way students, parents, and taxpayers will ever regain control of our universities.
That's exactly right. When I bought that Volvo I didn't have to answer to anyone! No "accountability to the public" where I come from! True, someone in the business office got a little upset, but what could he do? As a tenured faculty member, I'm in control! We tenured faculty just vote ourselves huge raises every year, and then the trustees rubber stamp them and the legislature coughs up the money. And if the state doesn't have the money the legislature just raises taxes. And if the citizenry doesn't like the higher taxes, they just have to lump it. After all, what can they do when the tenured faculty are in control? If the taxpayers get too uppity we'll put them all in the reeducation camp, not just their children.
Seriously--more seriously than Sandefer's hackery deserves--the public already is in control. In my own state, the public voted in a Prop-13-style antitax measure some years back. When, as a result, funding for higher ed finally dried up, the same public voted for a temporary exemption--basically a tax increase to stave off severe cuts in higher ed. They didn't have to do it, but they did. And they did it in the aftermath of the Ward Churchill fiasco, too.
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