Further Assaults on Tenure

On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal published an alarming editorial by Naomi Schaefer Riley arguing that tenure is an outdated idea and that tenured faculty deserve no special protection from arbitrary dismissals. As she notes, this isn't an idle thought--there's already been one case on the issue:

In 2003, the board of trustees of the Metropolitan College of Denver -- a public school in Colorado -- changed the school's handbook to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty in case of financial exigency. Under the current system at Metro College and elsewhere, some professors who have been at an institution for a period of about seven years are eligible for a job for life. They can technically be fired for gross misbehavior or incompetence....

In response to the handbook change, five Metro College professors sued. They claimed that the terms of their employment had been significantly altered. The state district court ruled in favor of the trustees. That decision was appealed -- with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) filing an amicus brief -- and in 2007 a state appeals court ordered a new trial. In its brief, the AAUP argued that "depriving the tenured faculty of a preference in retention places the tenured faculty at greater risk of being singled out" because of an administrator's or trustee's dislike for his teaching or research, or for positions taken on public issues.

The results of that new trial came down earlier this month. Rather than simply deciding that the change in the handbook altered what was a "vested right" of the professors, Denver District Judge Norman D. Haglund ruled that "the public interest is advanced more by tenure systems that favor academic freedom over tenure systems that favor flexibility in hiring or firing." He also noted that "by its very nature, tenure promotes a system in which academic freedom is protected."

Riley uses this case as a springboard to launch familiar attacks against tenure, tinged as they generally are by an ideological stain ("The fact that university professors donated to President Obama's campaign over John McCain's by a margin of eight to one is only the tip of the iceberg").

Yesterday, I posted grim statistics about the loss of tenured and tenure-track positions at PSU. They represent one kind of assualt on tenure. Riley's is a more dangerous variant, one that seeks to undermine the very intention of tenure. Her view is so constrained that she could write this passage without seeing the implications:

The school even offers a nutrition major. These are all fields of study that have fairly definitive answers. Faculty members don't really need the freedom to ask controversial questions in discussing them.

We need independent scholars. In fingering nutrition, Riley unwittingly made a strong case for exactly why we need scholars. The field of nutrition doesn't have difinitive answers--it's a field even more subject to the storms of money and corruption than most. "Nutrition" is a moving target. Defined by food or supplement companies, it means something entirely different than it does to a scholar. If we remove the protection of tenure, who will protect independent research about what is actually healthy?

Universities, perhaps more than ever, need the protection of tenure.

PSU's Incredible, Shinking Tenured Positions

As bargaining continues, we are beginning to collect together some data that track important trends here at PSU. In several earlier posts I documented the national trend of relying on non-tenured faculty to teach classes. Below, you can see the trend mirrored here at PSU. Let's start with the raw numbers and finish with some talking points. Below is a table illustrating the decline of tenured positions at PSU.

Table: Decline of Tenured Positions at PSU

__________________________1996___2002___2007
Tenure Track/Tenured_______54%____49%____39%
Fixed Term, Full-time______12%____21%____26%
Fixed Term, Part-time______17%____21%____27%
Other (TAs, emerita, etc)__17%_____9%_____7%

A graph of these data begins to show the decline of tenure positions (click to enlarge):

But it's really when you divide tenure and non-tenure positions that you see the dramatic decline (click to enlarge):

The numbers tell the story: as elsewhere, PSU's administration has been shifting the teaching load away from tenured faculty to fixed-term faculty. This saves the administration money and allows them more "flexibility." But we have an important secondary data point that shows even more starkly what this means. Have a look at the table below. In it, you'll see that not only has the teaching load shifted, but the number of students has shifted too (CH = credit hour):

__________________________Mean____Mean____Median
_________________________Class___CH Per___CH Per
__________________________Size____FTE______FTE
Fixed Term________________23.8____37.5_____31.5
Tenured/Tenure-track______22.0____25.5_____20.1

As you can see, fixed-term faculty are expected to teach more students than tenured faculty. The upshot when you combine the two sets of data is this: a far greater number of a student's classes will be taught by non-tenured faculty than would have been the case a decade ago.

Talking Points
AAUP's membership is comprised of more than just tenured faculty. (I'm a fixed-term researcher, in fact.) It's easy to think in terms of our own job category and, for those of us who aren't tenured, to wonder why we should care about this. For me the answer is straightforward. Over the past two decades, we've seen support to faculty diminish in terms of benefits and salary when adjusted for inflation. (Credit where credit is due: our health insurance has remained consistently good.) During that time, even as our salaries flatlined, the administration was saving costs by shifting the teaching load to lower-paid faculty who have no long-term job security.

We have asked PSU to provide details about the growth of administration jobs and salaries during the same period. If it follows national trends, we will expect to see that both salaries and overall job numbers (in terms of total FTE) have grown far faster on the administration side. These are all critical points of information as we look at potential salary cuts for the coming year or two. The takeaway should be this: if the administration has grown fastest during fat times, it should shrink fastest during lean times.

Graph: Decline of Tenure-Track Faculty

This week I'm highlighting some of the more important findings in the newly released AAUP annual report on faculty salaries. The following graph illustrates rather starkly the decline in the percentage of tenured and tenure-track faculty in American universities. (Click to enlarge.)



In 1975, 57% of university faculty were tenure or tenure-track, and just 30% were part-time faculty. By 2007, the numbers had reversed: 31% were tenure or tenure-track, and 50% were part-time. That's a remarkable change for just three decades. Even if current trends flatten out, what will this graph look like in another three decades?

Faculty Salaries are Not Driving Up Costs

Yesterday I quoted from a nice piece talking about the state of higher ed and the sharp increase in the use of adjuncts to cover cost spikes. Below is from an email AAUP General Secretary Gary Rhoades sent out a couple months ago adding to the argument. He offers three critical data points to debunk the myth that faculty salaries are driving cost spikes. I'll quote from his email and then distill it into three handy talking points. First, his points:

1. You can't blame faculty salaries for increases in tuition and costs. Faculty salary increases have been well below increases in tuition and well below increases in senior administrators' salaries, which have increased disproportionately. Adjusted for inflation, tuition increases between 1989 and 2005 averaged about 6 percent a year; between 2002 and 2006, tuition at public universities increased by over 29 percent. From 1999-2000 to 2007-08, the yearly increase in overall average faculty salary ranged from 2.1 to 3.8 percent; adjusted for inflation, faculty salaries either decreased or increased less than 1 percent in six of those years (see table A in the 2007-08 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession). Between 1995-96 and 2005-06, presidential salaries increased by 35 percent, adjusted for inflation, compared to 5 percent for average faculty salaries (figure 3, 2006-07 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession ); from 2005-06 to 2007-08, the two-year increase in senior administrators' salaries outpaced both inflation and the increase in average salary for full professors (figures 1 and 2, 2007-08 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession).
2. You can't blame increases in faculty numbers for increased tuition and costs. Full-time tenure-track faculty numbers have increased at a far slower rate than have numbers of other professionals and administrators. Between 1976 and 2005, full-time tenure-track positions in the United States increased by only 17 percent, compared to a 281 percent increase in nonfaculty professionals and a 101 percent increase in administrators (see figure 3 in the 2007-08 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession).
3. Spending on instruction has declined in all sectors of higher education, while spending on administrative costs has increased. Between 1995 and 2006, overall spending increased, but the share of instruction was down in all sectors (for example, in public master's institutions it was down from 53.9 to 50.8 percent; in private master's institutions it was down from 45.0 to 43.0 percent). The share of student services increased (from 9.9 to 10.9 percent in public master's institutions and from 13.9 to 15.6 percent in private master's institutions), as did that of administration and other support (from 36.2 to 38.2 percent and from 41.1 to 41.4 percent, respectively--See figure 8, Trends in College Spending, Delta Project).

Talking Points
The take-away from the data is stark. Costs are up, but priorities have shifted. Tenure-track and tenured faculty positions are frozen while non-faculty and administration positions have proliferated. As a proportion of the pie, the amount going to faculty continues to decline.

• Faculty salaries have increased far more slowly than tuition increases or administration salaries.
• Since the 1970s, universities have barely added new tenured faculty, but nonfaculty numbers are up 281%, and administration numbers have doubled.
• Administrative costs continue to eat up a larger proportion of total spending, while money devoted to teaching declines.
  

The question to ask is: are these the right priorities for our universities?

The Trouble With "Flexible Faculty"

Among the many problems besetting higher education is the increasing reliance on adjunct faculty to manage teaching loads. The Nation recently had a great story on this issue:

Nienow is among 391,000 part-time or "adjunct" faculty at community colleges and public universities, positions that have increasingly replaced full-time, tenure-track jobs. Despite being the source of most of the teaching at colleges, these short-term appointments pay only about a fourth as much, per course, as tenure-track positions, seldom come with benefits and offer little job security or possibility of advancement....

The percentage of "contingent faculty"--a term that includes part-timers and full-time, non-tenure-track lecturers--on university payrolls has risen from around 43 percent thirty years ago to 70 percent in 2005. The rate of these hires at many colleges has only accelerated amid the economic downturn. To cash-strapped educational institutions increasingly run like corporations, adjuncts and part-timers are cheap labor--stopgaps in university budgets.

"We're the flex faculty," said Niame Adele, a sociologist and part-time instructor at the University of New Mexico.

Call them flexible or fungible, it is precisely this vulnerability that makes part-timers and adjuncts an expedient solution to budget shortfalls.

"Flexibility" is a word we're going to be hearing more and more, particularly as economic times worsen. But it's important to recognize the reason universities are cash poor--ballooning administrative costs, not rising faculty salaries.

But this change has not come about because of the increased cost of educating students: over the past 15 years, tuition at public institutions has risen 2 to 3 percent above inflation, per year; yet the amount of money spent on educational services has remained stagnant. This is due in part to a decline in state support, but also to a shift in priorities. The money, Bousquet says--and the savings reaped by hiring adjunct faculty--has gone toward ballooning administrative costs, positions and salaries; venture partnerships with corporations; and the construction of costly, extravagant facilities that critics say have more show value than instructional utility.

Now that these sources of income are strained, administrators say they must trim back elsewhere to proceed with scheduled construction. Many colleges, however, are stopping short of reducing salaries for top-paid administrators, which have risen 35.6 percent in the last five years. Ohio, which announced it would cut overall spending on public higher education by $25 million, is sparing any cuts in salaries of its 154 top administrators, among them the highest-paid university president in the nation, Ohio State's Gordon Gee, who makes $775,008 per year (before bonus). The median salary for public university presidents in Ohio is $355,000. On top of rising administrator salaries, the number of administrators at many colleges has risen as well, according to the Associated Press.

Times are tough, and universities are asking to shoulder the pain. These numbers help explain why universities are struggling through tough times in the first place.