The Faculty Lounges

One of the main reason MOOCs made so much noise in the popular press is that they seemed like a potential solution to a problem everyone loves to complain about: the skyrocketing cost of going to college.

As it turned out, even those who complain the loudest about the price of school don’t seem ready to use the latest crop of technology tools as a substitute for expensive brick-and-mortarboard. But the use of MOOCs as a battering ram against perceived excesses in higher education provided an excuse for some interesting dialog and soul searching regarding why college costs what it does.

Over the last few months, I’ve looked at what one is actually buying when one pays for college (a combination of things, of which education is just a component). But the fact that the price of higher ed can be broken down in such a manner does not explain why that total price has reached such sky-high levels, or why pricing for this particular product has grown (and continues to grow) faster than any other.

A list of books related to this subject makes up my summer reading list. And I’d like to kick off a review of those arguments with a title that points a finger at the professorate called (somewhat snarkily) The Faculty Lounges.

This book was written by former Wall Street Journal editor Naomi Schaefer Riley and I need to point out that the main bone she has to pick with the faculty has to do not with dollars but with the system of tenure which she feels has long outlived its usefulness.

Arguments for and against tenure should be familiar to most people who keep up with debates over education at any level.

For tenure advocates, a virtual lifetime employment contract is a suitable reward to someone who has devoted a decade or more to training for a socially important role (educating the young). Tenure provides those talented (and lucky) enough to earn it the protection they need to explore new and potentially risky areas of research (a protection commonly referred to as “academic freedom”). And tenure, as a highly desirable perk, actually helps keep costs down since – absent a reward as valuable as lifetime employment – schools would have to compete for talent based on something more costly (like salary and benefits).

For critics, lifetime employment allows incompetent professors to avoid the type of accountability that employees in every other industry must endure. And, as for academic freedom, critics claim that a system created to protect people pursuing challenging questions within their field of expertise has morphed into a blast shield protecting professors who spout off about subjects outside their discipline (usually politics), sometimes within the classroom.

Riley provides a number of examples of both incompetence and irresponsibility within the academy. But given that these examples include many of the same names that come up again and again in heated “Culture War” debates on higher ed, I suspect that the true number of dolts and charlatans protected by the tenure system is not big enough to warrant trashing that system entirely.

Nor does Riley, who marshals more compelling arguments regarding the many ways tenure distorts the most important components of the academy designed to educate younger (i.e., undergraduate-age) students.

The fact that publication of new and original research counts far more in tenure decisions than does commitment to teaching (particularly undergraduates) is well known. But Riley points out how the endless churning out of unread books and journal articles can also motivate tenured professors to turn the classroom into a place where their own novel ideas can get a hearing (sometimes at the expense of the subject being taught).

Having watched able academic friends subject themselves to years of fruitless (and humiliating) questing for a tenure-track position, and seen others denied this grand prize (which can often act as a blackball in competitive hiring decisions at other institutions), I sympathize with Riley’s arguments about how tenure decisions (made by the lucky few who have this exulted status) are often petty, discriminatory and politically motivated. But even those lucky enough to grab this brass ring can find themselves (and their families) living in a part of the country they’d never consider calling home absent the inability to say no to any tenure position offered them.

For the many PhDs who fall off (or never get on) the tenure track, poorly paid adjunct teaching becomes one of the few ways to stay connected with the academy, which has created a system whereby the lucky few (those with tenure) can outsource teaching (especially of large undergraduate classes) to underpaid adjuncts, giving the tenured more time for research and teaching smaller sections of advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

However, while maintaining tenure at the expense of adjuncts contributes to decreasing the quality of instruction (not to mention being grossly unfair), it cannot be blamed for the hyper-inflation of college costs for the simple reason that such a two-tiered system pushes the cost of instruction down (or at least balances the high dollars paid to tenured professors with the paltry amounts paid to adjuncts).

Riley is completely upfront about the fact that a college system for which she advocates, one that does away with tenure entirely, would be more, rather than less, expensive (at least with regard to the total cost of paying instructors). For – as mentioned previously – schools that had to compete for the best professors would have to do so based on thing like salary and benefits, given that lifetime employment would no longer be on the table.

For Riley, this would be a price worth paying, especially since it would bring colleges and universities into line with the employment practices used by every other large institution. But given that my own arguments are targeted at how to bring the cost of higher education down, I’d have to put Riley’s campaign for the elimination of tenure on a separate track from the campaign to bring the price of college in line with what mere mortals can afford.

But one of the things her analysis points out, the existence of an army of trained academics ready to work for the ridiculously low sums paid to adjuncts, highlights the availability of a potential workforce that might be available to work alongside some of the technology solutions being proposed as an alternative to higher education. And if such human + computer-based solutions create jobs that pay a living wage (even without guarantees of lifetime employment) that would mean the people needed to make new forms of education viable might be available now.