"Only taught by professors"

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06/13/2024 22:08

Subject: Re:"Only taught by professors"

quote

Anonymous

I'm a university department chair. I'd love an entire department made up of tenured and tenure-track faculty at a variety of ages and stages, supported by a strong cohort of carefully mentored and decently supported PhD students, along with a few highly qualified and highly paid long-term adjuncts offering immensely popular courses, plus some research-oriented postdoc positions and some visiting professorships. And basic medical insurance coverage for everyone.

My colleagues at my own school and elsewhere would all laugh (and then cry) at this absurdist fantasy, which only exists at a stunningly small number of institutions nationwide. The reality is that even with modest middle-class salaries this costs much more than the market will bear. And it also costs much, much more than any readers here ( = college-oriented families and their students) should ever be asked to pay. There are serious issues of justice and equity on both sides of the proverbial desk.

When costs are too high at an academic institution, the only real way to make a sizable dent in expenses is to cut salaries. This is most often accomplished by not replacing tenured faculty when they retire, and by hiring part-time faculty in return so that the courses can still be taught. But then you need coverage for administrative duties, so you create full-time contract positions for people who teach a lot and also do some administrating. Since there is no tenure involved, you can be ready to move this contract salary around from one department to another as student interests, public tastes, and industry needs shift over time. Market response, nimbleness, and cost savings can coincide when you just discontinue one contract position and create a new one in a different field. Unfortunately, this also leaves a contract holder out of a job.

You can also bolster any given field or department on short notice by hiring visiting assistant professors who will likely maintain their research interests during the short time they are working for you. These positions tend to be even more temporary than the contract ones: contract holders ideally build relationships with the institution and can even be repeatedly renewed over quite a long time. Visiting assistant professors, however, tend to be term-limited, usually no more than three years before they are required to move on.

In a perfect world students should feel very little of all of this: our primary job is, after all, to educate them, not to bemoan the terms of our own employment. Many of us, even those of us who are convinced of the value and satisfaction of our careers, could reasonably find some other way to make a living if this one became too precarious for comfort. Tenured faculty provide stability, prestige, leadership, published research, and work contributions that often go far beyond salary expectations. But at the same time by their very existence they limit the economic ability of academic institutions to deal with change. That is why even my fantasy department contains a mix of different kinds of positions. We need that flexibility in order to be able to adapt our staff to the needs and interests of our students.