What Ever Happened to the Faculty? Drift and Decision in Higher Education.

What Ever Happened to the Faculty? Drift and Decision in Higher Education.

By Mary Burgan.

(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006)

What Ever Happened to the Faculty? by former AAUP (American Association of University Professors) General Secretary Mary Burgan is an important book in understanding how the traditional rights and responsibilities of university faculty have been eroded. Instead of being the center of the university, faculty are increasingly considered employees by university administrators as universities imitate a hierarchical business model as opposed to a collegial one. Faculty, according to higher education circles, must "be suffered, led, negotiated with, cajoled, and kept out of trouble" (xvi). In fact, Burgan observes that in her discussions with the higher education establishment in Washington, DC, "the faculty were hardly ever present in the imaginations of the policy makers" (xvi), but were considered only as one of the "stakeholders" in higher education.

Burgan does not situate her argument in the broad context of the neoliberal agenda. Instead, she carefully analyzes the components of the erosion of faculty rights and responsibilities which include the faculty star system, the emphasis on learning over teaching, the expansion of distance learning, and the increase in the number of contingent faculty, which compromises academic freedom. In addition, she discusses the ratcheting up of tenure standards, the pressure on faculty to secure grants, the establishment of honors colleges, and the desire of some administrators to eliminate tenure. Throughout the book Burgan calls for the necessity of faculty to come together in shared governance and collective bargaining and to insist that faculty must participate in all institutional decisions.

In fact, Burgan argues, it was precisely because Bennington College and the University of Minnesota lacked effective shared governance that it was possible for Bennington to fire long-term faculty and for the University of Minnesota to attempt to undermine tenure. (1) What Ever Happened to the Faculty? concludes with five successful examples of faculty organizing and of faculty repossessing university decision-making.

Mary Burgan's wide experience makes her particularly effective in developing her argument. In addition to having been a faculty member in the English Department at Indiana University-Bloomington and serving on the Faculty Council, she served as Chair of her department and as Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences. In 1994 she became Secretary General of the AAUP and led the Association for ten years. But throughout What Ever Happened to the Faculty? Burgan writes from the perspective of a faculty member.

Many of the market-driven reforms of higher education are driven by the perceived need for more money and by the desire to enhance a college's or university's reputation through national rankings. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hiring of academic superstars in a university's effort to increase grant money and to attract better prepared students. In her chapter "Superstars and Rookies" Burgan argues that this "winner-take-all society" increases the disparity between the salaries of the faculty who have taught for many years and the superstars who do little teaching, demoralizes older faculty, and damages the "founding notion of American higher education as an instrument for spreading opportunity in many places" (127-128). Star faculty are recruited usually at higher salaries than were paid to last year's star hires and are promised little or no teaching, often at recently established honors colleges within the university. (Ironically, the absence of teaching is considered a mark of institutional prestige.) (2) Once hired, star faculty experience pressure to publish and secure grants as soon as possible, often choosing research projects to obtain immediate results, which has deterred some academic scientists from pursuing long-term research. All of this results in what Burgan calls "mission creep, the tendency of ambitious schools to leave their own work behind as they try to imitate the activities of those in higher echelons of the academy" (142). Participation in shared governance by faculty gets ignored as university administrators often make it clear that such work will not be rewarded if faculty do not support administrative decisions. To fund the hiring of superstars, retirees are replaced by less expensive contingent faculty, which further erodes governance as adjuncts are usually not included in faculty senates. A reliance on contingent labor also compromises academic freedom as adjuncts have no job security, or as Burgan states, "disposable faculty [both adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty] would not speak truth to power, but rather do its bidding" (185).

In "The Myth of the Bloviating Professor" Burgan takes on the teaching/learning controversy. She contrasts the reformers of pedagogy with the reformers of curriculum that she had discussed in a previous chapter, "Getting the 'Liberal' Out of Education," in which she examines the American Council of Trustees and Alumni's (ACTA) desire to move to a great books curriculum that does not question United States history or current U.S. foreign policy. According to both the reformers of pedagogy and the reformers of curriculum, the faculty are to blame for being reluctant to change. This mindset further contributes to the public denigration of faculty. Countering this, Burgan posits "the main common ground for any reform must be sponsorship of teaching in the reward system in the academy" (25); she also states "professional reformers can help more by advocating reasonable class sizes and the hiring of permanent faculty than by peddling room design, hardware, or their favorite methodology as solutions to the problems of scale in mega classes" (47). According to Burgan, large lectures for introductory courses have become routine because of the pressure to increase class size due to increasing enrollments and the need to provide light teaching loads for star faculty and research time for faculty who must now write at least one book for tenure.

The "learning community" model, derived from the world of work and influenced by Peter Drucker's Post-Capitalist Society, developed in reaction to large introductory course lectures. However, instead of a professor reflecting years of study and research in classroom lectures and discussions, the learning community teacher, according to Burgan, becomes a "manager-conductor--orchestrating course exercises, PowerPoint sessions, [and] computer chat rooms" and "turn[s] to technology to make education 'student centered.'" This results in "an inescapable pedagogical polarity" between teaching and learning with the emphasis being on learning (27). To be politically correct in mainstream pedagogical circles today one must speak only of learning and how it may be measured. This has lead to the outcomes assessment movement, which privileges "teaching toward the test," rather than a professor presenting her own research often in a lecture form. Such a move deprives a teacher of her agency in the classroom and shifts that agency to the students. Consequently, Burgan suggests, "the term professor [in the eyes of the public] is taken to imply the prideful claim to superior information, the assumption that there are things to know as well as ways of knowing" (40). Perhaps Burgan is too harsh on the "learning community" movement, but I have found to be true her observation that this movement tends to be generated by management who encourage faculty to attend pedagogical conferences when they often would rather participate in conferences in their disciplines.

In "Distance Makes the Heart Grow Colder--Online Education" Burgan worries that technology is used "too frequently as a replacement for rather than an enhancement of faculty work in the classroom" (77). Although she agrees that technology is essential in teaching today's students, Burgan argues that higher education's move to embrace technology has lead both to the proliferation of for-profit proprietary schools and "the unbundling of faculty into robotic entities who can be contracted as 'content providers,' 'assessment experts,' 'mentors,' and 'performers'" (100). Promising that their courses are learning-centered, standardized, and testable, and that they would be tax-paying institutions, proprietary schools have been granted accreditation, thus allowing them to be eligible for federal loan and grant programs, or, in other words, public subsidies for private education. Burgan also traces the connections between personnel in the Bush Department of Education and the online University of Phoenix, which may have smoothed the way to accreditation and federal monies for proprietary schools. Further, Burgan contends, online education has contributed to the denigration of full-time faculty as many online degree programs are taught by contingent faculty who are hired on a course-by-course basis. At my own university faculty contracted with the administrator of the online degree program to be paid money to develop courses and then were required to sign away their intellectual property rights to their courses so that contingent faculty could teach the courses. This is not a process promoting faculty collegiality or shared governance.

Not to leave the readers of What Ever Happened to the Faculty? in a slough of despondency at the conclusion of "The Disposable Faculty Tenure Now," Burgan concludes her book with "Staging a Comeback: Exemplary Cases," in which she examines five cases of faculty activism through shared governance or collective bargaining. She states that her "effort to imagine the faculty as more than ghostly presences on our campuses is less a romantic dream than a conviction that faculty still have the power to makes choices that can resist the deterministic sense that all is lost" (191), or, in other words, it is not too late to reclaim faculty rights and responsibilities. Faculty power has atrophied not only because of a pervasive managerial culture, increased competition, and political meddling but also because faculty fear that time spent in governance and collective bargaining will neither further their careers nor remedy the situation. Although speaking as a faculty member, Burgan is critical of faculty who have abandoned the collegial for the market-driven model; she also acknowledges that faculty senates can become "a debating club for academic theorizing or a rest home where campus historians tell stories about better days" (117). She does, after all, entitle her book What Ever Happened to the Faculty? For Burgan, faculty are partially responsible for the erosion of faculty rights and responsibilities. But Burgan does believe in the possibility of resistance.

The first case Burgan describes in "Staging a Comeback" is the case of Francis Marion University in South Carolina, in which the new president abolished the faculty senate when faculty objected to his assertion of total power over them. The faculty's struggle to regain control was aided by the NEA, the AAUP, and friends in state government. After faculty called for an audit of the president's expenditures, financial irregularities were discovered, and the president was dismissed by the board. The current president, who had formerly been a faculty member in another South Carolina College, treats the faculty with respect and observes due process. At the conclusion of each of the five cases, Burgan lists principles for shared governance. Two of the principles following the Francis Marion case are that faculty members must have the majority vote in faculty senates and that important information, i.e., college budget, retention figures, the numbers of tenured, untenured, and contingent faculty, must be made available to the faculty.

Adelphi University's financial scandal, declining enrollment, and the hiring of conservative star faculty outside of the traditional hiring process are the subject of Burgan's second case. Here because the faculty senate was moribund, faculty took control using their AAUP union chapter and petitioned the New York Board of Regents to investigate President Diamandopoulos's administration, leading to the dismissal of the majority of the Adelphi Board of Trustees and the firing of the president. Case three concerns the San Francisco Art Institute faculty who managed to get tenure and retirement benefits through collective bargaining, and case four describes how Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo obtained the possibility of tenure for non-tenure-track faculty in their contract through solidarity with contingent faculty and imagining solutions through an understanding of budgets, personnel practices, and strategic planning. Finally, Burgan describes how the faculty of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, exercised their academic freedom in objecting to President George W. Bush's speaking at their commencement but without retaliation from the Calvin administration.

In her concluding paragraph, Mary Burgan expresses optimism that faculty "with their skill, cunning, and idealism," will act together in the future to defend academia from its enemies without and within. What Ever Happened to the Faculty? provides analysis, strategy, and optimism for that defense.

Although Mary Burgan would not describe herself as a radical, What Ever Happened to the Faculty? is an important book for progressive teachers to read to understand how much higher education has moved to the right. Faculty are fast becoming employees in the new market-driven, corporate university with only governance and collective bargaining to stem the conservative tide.

Notes

(1) The crises at Bennington College and the University of Minnesota occurred under Mary Burgan's tenure as Secretary General of the AAUP. Declaring a new mission for Bennington College, the Board of Trustees fired 26 of the 79 professors and replaced Bennington's system of tenure with multiyear contracts. Misconduct by two superstar faculty at the University of Minnesota resulted in the Board of Regents' unsuccessful attempt to renegotiate tenure rather than addressing the abuses (141).

(2) Howard Mancing, "Teaching. Research, Service: The Concept of Faculty Workload," ADFL Bulletin 22, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 47, quoted in Burgan, p. 33.