I was talking to a prof from a different department who presented a dilemma: faculty positions have been vacated for various reasons but new searches are not being approved, so the department is scrambling to fill in the blank spots with overloads and adjuncts. If they do too good a job demonstrating that they can meet students' needs without filling vacant full-time positions, then the Powers That Be may decide that those full-time positions are surplus to requirements--but if the department does a lousy job covering essential courses, students will suffer.
I suspect that many departments across campus are in the same position. We can move heaven and earth to make sure our majors get the courses they need, but then it looks like we don't need to refill vacant positions; or we can make no extra effort to cover required classes and our students will be short-changed.
Somehow we need to straddle the fine line between too much and not enough. We need to provide the courses our students need, but in a way that shows how desperately we need to fill some empty positions. We don't want students to lose confidence in the program, but allowing them to feel a little discomfort would prove a point--except we don't want to use students as political pawns in the staffing wars.
We're all working hard to manage a difficult situation, but you know what they say: Accomplish the impossible and they'll add it to your job description. Maybe we need to be just a little less competent, a little less eager to pick up the slack--but not so much that we appear expendable.
4 comments:
The battles of full-time profs vs. adjuncts vs. enrollment vs. retention vs. grade inflation vs. monetary allocation vs. frustration vs. logic vs. illogic vs. polarization vs. a great educational experience for students vs. an average or below average educational experience for students vs. us vs. them are battles that have been engaged in for decades. We all wish there were solutions. But stay in the fight. That’s the only way quality education can ever survive.
Amen to that!
Over the years I’ve noticed that universities have added huge numbers of non-teaching administrators whose salaries seem only to be a drain on resources. If it were my call, I’d cut back on this staff and focus salary money on teaching faculty. With the cost of college rising to close to $100k per year for families and through student loans, schools need to keep costs down and curriculum quality high. In the past I taught as a part-time adjunct at a law school. It bothered me that the full time faculty had declared itself to be non-teaching— they felt their job was to research and write law review articles. So teaching fell to adjuncts. The friction was ugly. My response was to try to inject as much practical experience and know how into my courses. Why? I felt the students were missing the intensity of challenges they’d face in their cases and needed to be able to perform on their feet. My law school education years ago had included questions about procedure, how to form the arguments, and how the rules of evidence worked within the fact patterns of cases studied in each course. Integration of subject matter as part of our progress through the three years of law school helped us with the bar exams and as a new lawyer entering practice. Administrators and self-appointed “we only do research” faculty don’t provide this kind of quality education if they aren’t in the classroom challenging students and integrating the pieces of our field as we go along. I keep reading articles about how college applications are dropping. I think it’s in part due to over-focusing on administrative costs, and in some cases, over-investment in research faculty who don’t want to teach once they get tenure. Teaching well produces grads with excellence in their understanding of their subject. Isn’t that really our product???
Good insights. Administrative bloat is a real thing everywhere, but we don't have any non-teaching faculty here. We focus on teaching and struggle, with varying degrees of success, to do research and professional development. But I take your point.
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