The University: Warping Young Minds

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We’ve discussed the money. It’s time to talk about what you can expect for the money. We know that the majority of what a university spends is on instruction, so let’s start with the faculty. There are many myths about faculty. Since they are an important pieces of any university (I like to think the academic support and student services staff are pretty freaking important, too), I want to tackle some misconceptions head on.

Back in 2009 CNN listed College Professor as the 3^rd best job in America. With one quick blurb, CNN stated faculty get to choose what they do, when they do it, and that they get perks. While this description was true, it wasn’t exactly accurate.

It’s pretty damn hard to get a job in academia, by the way. You’ve been forewarned. Grad students who write for the Chronicle of Higher Education lament on this fact all the time.

Let’s define some parameters. We’re not going to talk about adjunct or community college faculty, or even professional teaching faculty. These individuals focus first and foremost on teaching, and the rates of pay and teaching loads can be as diverse as the schools they work for. In my area, the average adjunct makes about $3000 per class; cobbling together a living from that rate, one class at a time, is enough to give anyone an ulcer. Community college and teaching faculty can make good money, but carry course loads anywhere from 3/3 (this means how many classes they teach each semester—fall and spring) to 5/5. Most of them also teach in the summer, either as part of their teaching contract, or in the hopes of making some extra cash (called overload).

Teaching, FYI, is more than showing up to class 3 hours a week for 15 weeks. It involves grading and prep and resolving student issues and meetings…

At research universities (many of your four years, and any school with a graduate program), the responsibilities are different.

Still, a faculty member’s first responsibility is teaching, right? The answer is no. The PhD is not a teaching degree; it’s a research degree. You’re expected to be an expert in your field when your chair (your faculty advisor) hoods you (part of commencement ceremonies) and declares you a peer. At a research university, a faculty member’s first responsibility is research—even a newly-minted junior faculty.

Teaching is secondary, and other responsibilities (committee service, university service, community service, advising, and participation in professional organizations) are usually crammed into remaining time throughout the week. Professors at research universities are supposed to produce research, attend conferences, publish scholarly articles, write books, and mentor graduate students who wish to do the same in the future. While everything mentioned above is considered in a faculty member’s tenure file, research takes the lead. Those in academia often refer to this in a negative way as “publish or perish,” meaning that it’s hard to prove you’re researching unless you’ve been able to actually publish that research, and in reputable journals.

What’s this tenure thing, anyway? Doesn’t it mean you can’t be fired?  Hardly! Tenure means that you cannot be dismissed from your job without just cause. Just cause can be anything from misconduct to a department shutting down. When a person is first hired as faculty on the tenure-track (Assistant Professor), they are given a short term contracts, which can be renewed if they’re coping well and the university has the funds to do so. Those contracts are separate from tenure. Tenure review (usually happens anywhere from the 4^th -8^th year on the job; I’ve mostly seen 6^th) means that your contract letters will cover a longer period. It also means that you can stay at the university. If you do not get tenure, you leave—usually within a year.

Receiving tenure means that your research and conduct (teaching, service, etc.) has been reviewed and found to be in very good standing. Tenure actually provides you with academic freedom—freedom to research your interests and disagree with your peers; freedom to voice an opinion not shared by your university’s administration.

Tenure is a multistage process where your file (dossier) is compiled (it can take a year for you to compile that mother) and reviewed by lots of people (both at the university and external to the university). It usually goes in this order: 1) department, 2) dean 3) provost, and 4) chancellor. Everyone has to be in agreement that you are worthy of keeping around. You can be shot down at any level. If they all approve, you can call yourself an Associate Professor.

Once you have tenure, you’ll go through promotion (continuance of tenure) to become a full Professor. Let’s not even start on what it takes to become a distinguished chair or endowed professor.

Most faculty are tenured, right? It’s not like they ever deny someone tenure. False and false. First off, tenure has been steadily declining since the 1970s. According to the American Association of University Professors, today, you can expect that less than 25% of your instructors in college are tenured or on the tenure-track. You can expect over 66% of your instructors to be part time or full time non-tenure track faculty.

As for being denied tenure, it happens, and more frequently than we like to think. There are some schools who have such a reputation for denying tenure (cough, Harvard, cough) that if you’re denied tenure it’s not a stigma on your career. For most faculty, it is a stigma, however, but one that can be overcome. You don’t actually perish if denied. There are appeals processes, and you can get a job elsewhere (as long as your performance wasn’t abysmal). There IS a nasty little secret that we should talk about: women are granted tenure less than men. The National Science Foundation found that women in the sciences who were married with children were 27% less likely to receive tenure than their male counterparts. These numbers are estimated to extend to all disciplines.

What other problems do faculty contend with? In no particular order: misconceptions that faculty members only work a few hours a day and never in the summer, problems of micro-niching (where faculty specialize in super-small area in order to increase research productivity and esteem), budget cuts to research agendas, plagiarism in students (we’ll talk more about this later), the idea that they are out of touch with the real world (Ivory Tower), and are in no way relevant to normal people, grade inflation, helicopter parents, increasing innovations in teaching and technology… the list goes on.

This is depressing! Why do we allow it to continue? It does have benefits! I know most people wouldn’t agree with me, but research IS important. No one doubts the benefits of Einstein’s work, or even the benefits of Maya Angelou’s. Research, in all fields, brings us new products, understandings, innovations, and even money. As I’ve said before, I’m a big believer that an exceptional teacher is one who is still learning, and I’m not alone. When we send our kids to college, we don’t want them to be taught by Luddites who’re still stuck in the mid-twentieth century. We don’t even want them to be taught by people on the cutting edge of what’s going on today. We expect our students to be taught by faculty who are on the bleeding edge of their fields—anticipating new trends and setting the stage for where we, as humanity, will go in the future. The system may not be perfect, and there are plenty of areas for improvement, but value remains. The goal is to make decisions about how we will go forward in academia based on knowledge, not myth.