Notes from Past and Future of Higher Education, 10/28/15
- This week, we started by breaking into groups to discuss the readings. Then we broke into different groups to discuss the general themes of the week.
- I joined the Bok group:
- Group expressed frustrations that Bok only mentioned student participation in governance through activism, but faculty and administrators typically don’t like when we protest
- Bok just goes through the four main constituencies: students, faculty, academic leadership, and trustees.
- Goes into a bunch of detail, but then concludes saying “we’re taking this way too seriously, it’s not the crisis people think it is”
- Government interferes with public institutions
- Says you need very open access to information, and more communication is better
- Maybe the crisis is in the sense of being unable to trust other
“stakeholder” groups to manage their own positions; there’s no faith in the other participants in the governance system - Lack of student participation in governance; Oberlin is actually unusual in how accessible trustees are to students
- Bok claims that the trustees are an important check on the institution because they represent outside interests, but how effective are trustees at directing the goals of the institution? Oberlin’s board seems to be hesitant to take a stance on issues, is this typical?
- Problem: lack of attention paid by faculties to large body of research on teaching and learning
- You can be an amazing researcher but an awful teacher
- Why does research happen in academic universities?
- PEW does really excellent research outside of academe
- Just as Bok says not every system is good for every campus, not every change is equally good for each of the four “stakehoders”
- Second groups: academic freedom, tenure, governance, academia and the law, cultural shifts
- I joined the tenure group
- What’s the point of tenure?
- Shrecker: covers history of academic freedom to the present time. Funny chapter because she’s a strong supporter of academic freedom; argues it has 2 pillars: 1) faculty governance and 2) tenure. Over the course of the chapter she talks about how all of those protections have been lost.
- Previously, academic freedom protected faculty from being punished for saying things that are unpopular/controversial. 1) Over time that has been removed from the individual faculty member and given to institutions 2) State rulings have shown that through Garsedi case and Hong case, employees who criticize their employers have no first amendment rights
- Whistleblower laws; they should do something similar to tenure but they aren’t upheld well. Shouldn’t everyone be allowed to criticize their employer?
- If you don’t have tenure, academies will begin to fire faculty that they don’t like and silence opinions they don’t like
- McCarthyism
- It’s so much easier to fire people without tenure
- Shrecker: covers history of academic freedom to the present time. Funny chapter because she’s a strong supporter of academic freedom; argues it has 2 pillars: 1) faculty governance and 2) tenure. Over the course of the chapter she talks about how all of those protections have been lost.
- Note: no one mentions staff
- All the authors discussed tenure in a very selfish way; it was all about needs of professors
- It’s important to talk about how tenure impacts relationships with students
- Seems that tenure is being abused; power differential between tenured and untenured is a big problem
- Also, tenure produces a personality type issue; those who don’t fight the current academic system end up leaving the academy
- Tenure does not incentivize making real change because your paid by publishing not by impact
- We’re not arguing getting rid of tenure, but amending the current system
- How does tenure impact junior professors?
- Do you get rid of tenure to get rid of the few underperforming professors, or are they the price you pay for academic freedom?
- In Finland, if you aren’t teaching well, you’re taken out and given more training until you get better. Could we do that here?
- What if part of tenure was learning how to run a classroom and doing research about teaching?
- Part of the problem is that to evaluate teaching is a time consuming and resource intensive task, and we do it cheaply.
- Teaching outcomes have to do with what the academy rewards
- Protecting faculty from politically driven pressures is not the same as “publishing 3 articles, 4 books, been to 5 conferences, etc.” Tenure has developed into this antiquated way to judge faculty rather than really securing academic freedom. What if instead of “tenure” we call it “publishing” and “instruction.”
- Problem with tenure: it’s so absolutist. Sometimes you’re just a bad fit for a university. Not getting tenure is like a death sentence for your career. It’s inhumane.
- Teachers teach the entire next generation. They are susceptible to a huge amount of pressure because of that role. a) they need to be prepared for that role (though they may not be totally), and b) they need to be protected from political pressures
- What’s the point of tenure?
- Larger discussion:
- Academic freedom:
- Can someone have academic freedom without tenure? Deep connection between the two
- Who should have academic freedom? Just tenured faculty? Students? Staff?
- How does funding impact academic freedom?
- Governance
- Timelines of different positions
- Trustees are present the longest
- How can students participate in governance when we’re only here for 4 years
- Transparency
- All the bodies need to trust and be accountable to each other in a way that they can do their jobs well; this isn’t currently happening
- Relationships established need to be solid before anything else
- Juxtaposition between democracy and efficiency
- How do you know which bodies to address and when?
- Academia and the law
- Different parts of what the law means
- Government institutions; state budgets; litigation involving academic freedom and tenure; first amendment
- Presence of police on campuses
- In loco parentis
- What role universities take in discipline and socialization
- Cultural shifts
- Board of trustees; what does the board do? Even they don’t know
- Is it all money? Is the selection process about money?
- Board composition:
- Has the role of the board changed from less of an advisory body towards one that is misused both on the part of the institutions for cultivating fundraisers + politics and also on the part of individuals as a badge and resume pad
- Basic idea: you need outsiders who have sense of loyalty but aren’t directly dependent on it so they have an outside perspective
- Changes in trustees represent generations in which they went to school
- At Oberlin, “they’re just you with more money”
- Often presidents will try to keep faculty and trustees apart from each other; when you talk to the trustees you actually get to like them a lot; greater discussions would be important; part of the problem with the trustees is they aren’t here for very long and when they do their schedules are packed, what they’d like to do they can’t do because they don’t have the time
- Neoliberalism and tenure
- In a context of neoliberalism, as capitalistic systems are thought of as more efficient, maybe more people are questioning why tenure system deviates from this model
- Blurring of culture and economics
- Neoliberalism as a cultural shift and financial pressures as an economic shift. Which is really influencing which?
- Which is really influencing tenure policies and academic freedom?
- Board of trustees; what does the board do? Even they don’t know
- Academic freedom:
- Large group discussion
- This is not a big of a deal as we’re making it, or at least not as big a deal as other things in higher education
- Therefore, why are we spending a week on this?
- If you wait until the system is totally broken, you’re too late; you don’t have to only think about one problem at a time
- Who is not represented in this “shared governance system” that is really just made up of the faculty, trustees, and administration? Where are the students and staff?
- Is protest effective?
- Excellent protest in which students followed administrators around in lab coats
- Part of the issue is to have clever protests
- You may not see the impacts of protests when you’re a student, but in the next 10-30 years they will have impact
- Faculty and students used to unite on protesting, but that seems to have declined, making protests much less effective
- Because of how individualistic our society has become, to protest is a big deal, to make that decision seems different than it did in the past
- It’s hard to get all the necessary voices to come together in the right way
- Increase of individualism; less collaboration
- We fail to teach people how to collaborate and work well together
- Actually the conservatory teaches people this because you HAVE to overcome your personal opinions for the good of the ensemble (for example, you can’t each play a different tempo)
- In some sense, the tenure ship has sailed. Now only about 30% of faculty have tenure, so it can’t provide the protections it’s supposed to provide
- Why should teachers have this protection when no one else has it?
- It stands in this incredibly sensitive position where nearly everyone gives there children over to these teachers to educate them
- Is governance inefficient?
- Faculty are as frustrated as everyone else by a very slow process of getting anything done
- Faculty often have a veto power, which can makes come things difficult to accomplish
- The solution to that frustration is actually more democratization: finding time to sit down and talk together. Let’s have more discussions about what matters to us
- Sense that we used to have more time to do academia well
- Remember that this was a time controlled by white men who had wives at home to take care of everything else
- Faculty used to live in town, now most do not
- Sense of administrators being at one institution for a long time is long gone
- All this means that we need to construct our own forms of how do we think about shared governance that make sense to us