http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/272660
‘The Center for College Affordability and Productivity has recently come out with a study on Texas showing that, at the public universities, 20 percent of the professors are doing 80 percent of the work. And a lot of the professors aren’t doing any of the work,” Naomi Schaefer Riley points out in an interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.
Where is your college tuition money going? And is your college-age child getting the best education he could be? Riley is author of The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Pay For. She talks about the perniciousness of tenure and what’s best for quality higher education, families, and conservative professors. She even includes a top five check-list for high-school students and their parents currently on the college search.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: My smart but naïve daughter is going off to college in the fall. Will I be terrified by your book?
Naomi Schaefer Riley: Terrified, no. But hopefully somewhat more enlightened about higher education. The most important thing to understand, I think, in picking a college, is that professors can do many different things with their time. Some of those will benefit your education, some of them will be irrelevant. You need to find a place where the faculty’s interests and incentives are aligned with your own.
Lopez: You write: “Many schools would have parents and students believe that the value of an education relies entirely upon how much the student makes of the opportunities that universities and colleges provide. This type of rhetoric is sprinkled throughout university brochures, but the idea that we should expect 17-year-olds to figure out how to get a proper education — how to spend their time and money wisely in the vast maze of academe — is worse than ridiculous. It’s a con game made to suit the interests of the tenured faculty who would prefer to write obscure tomes rather than teach broad introductory classes to freshmen.” But isn’t all of life about making the best of opportunities? Surely schools with expensive libraries and equipment and master teachers have some opportunities to offer to paying customers?
Riley: The thing about college students is that, to borrow a phrase, they don’t know what they don’t know. So asking them to craft the foundations of their own education doesn’t seem to me to be fair to them. In one semester you might randomly pick an introduction to animal behavior, a course on women in Victorian literature, and a history of the Ming dynasty. Is it any wonder that students have no idea what they’re doing in college? A liberal education was supposed to be giving students a broad introduction to important subjects. Too much specialization early on makes it all incoherent.
There are all sorts of things that will bring a college prestige (and thereby customers), but a lot of them have nothing to do with education.
Lopez: Why does tenure matter so much to students?
Riley: Tenure matters for three reasons. First, it encourages professors to spend their time doing research instead of teaching. A 2005 study showed that for each additional hour a professor spends in the classroom, he will get paid less. It also matters because it encourages intellectual uniformity. Studies show that professors simply vote clones of themselves into their department and give them permanent positions. Third, it puts all the control over universities into the hands of faculty. Every battle in higher education now, whether it’s over the curriculum or the money or the politics, is a battle of attrition, and the faculty, thanks to tenure, will always win. They will outlast any president, any governor, any trustee, any regent, any parent, and any student. And they are why reform is not possible.
Lopez: What can be done about it?
Riley: Not much for the professors who already have it, alas. There’s a contract in place, and it would be near impossible to get rid of. State legislatures can get rid of it going forward. Utah debated such a bill, though unfortunately it didn’t make it out of committee. At private universities it will have to be more of an issue brought up by parents, students, and trustees. Some private universities are realizing on their own that teaching has been undervalued. Duke, for instance, has hired a number of professors of practice, whose job is to teach, not do research. They are hired on multi-year renewable contracts, with evaluation based on their teaching. I think this is the ideal.
Lopez: Would this throw conservative professors to the wolves at most universities?
Riley: In the immediate future, that’s a definite possibility. But I think there are so few of them that the whole system needs to be shaken up in order to bring any kind of real intellectual diversity to campus.
Lopez: What role do unions play in all of this? You mention an AFT public-university push?
Riley: With the loss of blue-collar jobs in America, unions are realizing that white-collar public-sector employees are the best targets. And higher education unions are some of the fastest growing ones. Also, they are taking advantage of the growth of adjunct faculty — people who are brought in to make up for the fact that tenured professors don’t want to teach. These folks really are at the bottom of the ladder. They can get paid as little as $2,000 a course. They have no offices. They sometimes don’t find out if they have a job until the week before the semester begins. Unions are offering them protection. But of course, they are also offering what unions always offer: Rewards for seniority and not much concern for merit.
Lopez: Does it really take eleven years to get a doctorate in English? Is some of that about balancing family life, and only to be expected?
Riley: That’s the median time. But people have always had other things going on in their lives, so what’s the difference now? It’s the research again. As Louis Menand pointed out in a 2009 article for Harvard Magazine, “people are uncertain just what research in the humanities is supposed to constitute, and graduate students therefore spend an inordinate amount of time trying to come up with a novel theoretical twist on canonical texts or an unusual contextualization.” With thousands of Ph.D.s being minted every year, topics are drying up by the minute.
Lopez: “Remember the young Alvy Singer in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall?,” you ask. “Upon finding out that the universe will eventually come to an end, he decides to stop doing his homework. In similar fashion, students today, who are hectored about the hyper-changing world they live in, and professors, who are always looking for the next thing coming down the pike, may decide that there is no point in traditional learning since the future will be so very different.” Is this where The Faculty Lounges and Manning Up meet in some common cause?
Riley: The only reasonable course of action is to spend your time playing video games.
Lopez: Should there be a campaign theme here? The next tea party?
Riley: The theme should definitely be: Where are our higher education dollars going? The Center for College Affordability and Productivity has recently come out with a study on Texas showing that, at the public universities, 20 percent of the professors are doing 80 percent of the work. And a lot of the professors aren’t doing any of the work!
Lopez: Is the takeaway from your book that our entire view of higher-ed needs an overhaul?
Riley: When I talked to economists and other higher-education experts about what would happen if you eliminate tenure, I got a mix of reactions. Perhaps the most insightful comment came from Ed Larson, who served as associate counsel for the House Committee on Education and Labor. “Tenure affects the very nature of higher education,” says Larson. “Removing it would be like changing the pitching mound or the distance to the bases.” To which I would say, Great! Higher education is so broken right now that it’s time to change the pitching mound and the distance to the bases — not to mention the strike zone, the number of players on each team, and the cost of hot dogs and beer.
Lopez: Will it happen before your children get there?
Riley: My fingers are crossed. I’ve got 14 years, I figure.
Lopez: Do we really have the luxury to care right now though? The economy what it is? A time of war? Other priorities?
Riley: College debt is about to reach a trillion dollars in this country. I think we can find time for this debate.
Lopez: Whose idea were the cartoons in your book breaking up the chapters?
Riley: Mine. Pictures always make a book more readable.
Lopez: What’s so special about the Olin Experiment?
Riley: I visited a school in Massachusetts called Olin College that doesn’t have tenure. It’s not the only one, by the way. Military academies, many religious colleges, and a couple of avowedly liberal schools (like Hampshire College and Bennington) also don’t have tenure.
Olin is an engineering school, and it has a very entrepreneurial spirit. As the president told me, having tenure is like being placed in “golden handcuffs. There are more important things than permanent employment” — like offering students a fulfilling education.
Mark Somerville left a tenure-track position in the physics department at Vassar to teach at Olin. “It was not a hard decision to make,” he says. Mr. Somerville says he has found that the lack of tenure has changed his teaching and research interests for the better. “When one is on the tenure track,” he says, “the clock is ticking. There is a certain day on which you will have to produce a stack of papers.” He’s no longer worried about publishing a certain amount by a particular date. Instead, he’s free to pursue research he finds interesting — something Mr. Somerville says has been “liberating.”
Lopez: What would you like professors to take from your book? Do you think they are reading it?
Riley: I think some of them are reading it. Many of them are reading my blog posts on the Chronicle of Higher Education and my other pieces related to the book. The reaction is usually just circling the wagons, asking why they should listen to someone who doesn’t have a Ph.D., for instance. In some ways I think professors are just responding to the incentives out there, and who can blame them for that? But I do wish younger professors, the people who can’t get jobs yet because so many tenured professors are waiting for their 401(k)s to get just a little bigger, would reconsider the system. I think administrators are in a position to respond to some of these problems. It would take some courage to say that they are going to get out of the research rat race and focus more on undergraduate education, to evaluate teachers completely, to figure out what students are really learning. But I think the market would respond eventually.
Lopez: What would you like parents to do? Students?
Riley: I wish they would be wiser consumers. Here are five questions I recommend students ask before picking a college:
1) How big is the average class that freshmen take? Colleges are often happy to share their average class size, but freshmen are often placed in enormous introductory lectures. Some students can learn well in a lecture hall with 600 students, but try before you buy. Sit in on one of those huge classes. If an introductory lecture with that many students can’t keep you engaged when you’re a junior or senior in high school, nothing is going to change in the next year.
2) What percentages of classes are taught by graduate students or part-time lecturers? It’s not automatically the case that such teachers are worse. But they generally have less experience in the classroom and less time to spend with students because they have so many other responsibilities. Part-time lecturers may have teaching duties at other schools. Graduate students have their own coursework to worry about. Schools like to brag about their Nobel Prize–winning faculty, but if undergraduates have almost no contact with them, what difference does it make?
3) How are good teachers rewarded? It may seem like an internal policy issue, but the question of how a professor earns tenure at a university is what drives how professors spend their time. If research is the primary way that senior faculty gets ahead at a university, you can bet that undergraduate education is not their primary focus.
4) Is there a core curriculum? Students will often try to avoid colleges where they feel that they don’t have enough freedom to choose their own classes. This is an area where parents need to step in. Core curricula may not seem fun now, but when a college’s faculty has given some thought to how its different departments and subject areas relate to one another, a student will reap the benefits. Ten years from now, if a student has just taken a random selection of classes that happen to sound interesting on registration day, their college education will seem fragmented and incoherent. Take a look at the course requirements. Do they make sense to you? Do they seem to be related to one another?
5) How likely am I to get into the classes I want to — and the classes I need to graduate in a timely manner? Because many faculty only want to come to campus on certain days of the week and at certain times of the day, a lot of classes tend to be offered at the same times (Tuesday, Thursday, 11:30-1:00 sound familiar?). But if all the classes you want are offered at the same time, you won’t be able to take the ones you need to finish school. Also, many students find themselves shut out of classes they have to take for their major or for a general-education requirement. Ask students how frequently this happens to them.
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