Page 301 - Crisis in Higher Education

Reshaping Faculty’s Role • 271

These discussions must occur in a context where universities work
hard to cut costs, especially administrative costs. If costs can be lowered
significantly, these issues become easier to address.

12.5 IMPROVING FACULTY PRODUCTIVITY

When the surpluses in Table 12.2 are considered, some may question
the need to increase faculty productivity because faculty costs are small
compared to revenue. But teaching methods have changed little for many
decades, and there appears to be opportunities to improve the quality of
teaching while lowering costs. Faculty has a responsibility to take leader-
ship so this can happen.
Generally speaking, the essence of productivity improvement through-
out the millennia has been the (1) application of automation to mechanize
farming, (2) cheap and available power plus automation that drove the
Industrial Revolution, and (3) the application of computer and commu-
nication technologies that simplified product design, enhanced access to
information, and created the postindustrial society. For higher education
and education more generally, the ability to prepare, transmit, manipu-
late, and communicate digitized text, pictures, graphs, diagrams, and vid-
eos should revolutionize teaching and learning. The United States is at the
beginning of this journey.
Increasing productivity in the classroom requires three actions that are
out of character for universities and their faculty.

1. Capital investment: Universities typically think of investments
as new buildings, including the latest “gee-whiz” classrooms and
computer technology. Presidents, donors, alumni, and others love
new buildings, but there is a scenario where the need for buildings
declines as online learning takes an increasing share of the higher
education market. The hoopla over buildings overcomes the need
for universities to invest in activities that drive teaching excel-
lence as well as efficiency/productivity. Universities must invest in
sophisticated, top-quality, educational methods for communicating
knowledge across a wide variety of formats as described a bit later in
this section. This requires taking advantage of economies of scale—
spreading this investment across a large number of students—to
actually reduce the cost of higher education.