Page 287 - Crisis in Higher Education

258 • Crisis in Higher Education

The faculty has a responsibility and a role in reducing the cost of higher
education. This is the case, even though (1) administration is a primary
driver of higher costs and (2) there has been a large shift in the mix of
faculty from full-time, tenured faculty to full- and part-time contrac-
tual faculty, who earn much less. Further cost reductions mean improv-
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ing faculty productivity, so more students gain more knowledge with less
effort by faculty and students, leading to lower tuition. This is not simply
increasing class size or asking faculty to teach more classes; rather, it is
changing how knowledge is delivered.
To begin, consider the different types of faculty—tenured, professional,
and instructional plus graduate teaching assistants—and match their skills
with the different levels of curricula from general education to PhD course.
The approach is to pair the skills of faculty with needs of the courses so
learning is both effective/high quality and efficient/productive. Increasing
productivity requires faculty to rethink long-held values about education
and technology. For example, why should a three-credit-hour course have
three hours of face-to-face instruction each week for 15 weeks? Can mul-
tiple faculty members teach a course in ways that take advantage of their
different skills? There are a variety of learning styles and supporting tech-
nologies that allow faculty to teach more students while expending the
same or less effort. This is the essence of productivity improvement and
cost reduction.
As universities wrestle with faculty’s role, it is important to note
that faculty unions are on the rise. Most people would be surprised to
learn that about 386,000 college faculty members in the United States
are covered by union contracts and a little more than half of these are
4,5
at two-year institutions. This number includes part-time faculty, so
it is headcount and not full-time equivalent faculty. Why is the num-
ber so large? In general, history shows that unionization is a reaction
to poor treatment by owners, and the primary goals are to protect the
interests of workers, including higher wages and better working con-
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ditions. Faculty chose unionization because of their eroding power
and dwindling influence, which has led to slower wage growth, higher
workloads, and diminished stature. The natural reaction from disen-
franchised faculty is to regain some measure of control, and unioniza-
tion is one-way. The difficulty is that unions often create an adversarial
relationship between administration and faculty, and they inhibit the
kind of communication needed to make innovative changes in instruc-
tional methods.