Academia

“Do not pass go, do not collect $200,” the harsh cliché made ubiquitous by Monopoly, is essentially what the Internal Revenue Service told a group of universities recently. A special report from the IRS found several institutions had inflated their Baltic Avenue social statuses to Boardwalk for the purpose of setting executive compensation. Roughly 20 percent of the private, nonprofit subset of colleges and universities that were selected for inclusion in the report have been told they are not in compliance with statutes governing executive pay in charitable organizations. One result is that “the IRS plans to […] ensure, through education and examinations, that tax-exempt organizations are aware of the importance of using appropriate comparability data when setting compensation.” This statement constitutes a clear shot across the bow of universities locked into the never-ending game of reputational enhancement—often sacrificing important work for visible work and attempting to become cool-by-association (e.g., rank, “tier,” membership in exclusive groups). The implications for proliferation of the IRS-approved measures of comparability extend well beyond executive pay, and the potential for new precedent in reducing competitive perversities among universities is enormous.

Yesterday, my colleague Rachel Fishman released a new policy paper, entitled State U Online. Besides synthesizing a progression of steps for building and sophisticating a public online education model,the paper provides a compelling look back at distance education in the U.S. as a nearly 300-year-old phenomenon, not a 20-year-old blip. This historic perspective strongly suggests the answer to a question skeptics of online education continue to pose: Is technology-based education yet another passing fad? While State U Online shows technology-based education is here to stay, one reason the question has persisted may be that faculty themselves are reticent to face the pursuant question, which is whether there will be a place for them in the academic workforce of the future. The answer is that it depends on the structure of faculty work and, in public institutions, what the state hopes to gain from it.

A new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and Education Sector, “Selling Students Short: Declining Teaching Loads at Colleges and Universities,” assigns tenure-line university faculty a remarkable amount of blame for the high price of college. As the report states, bemoaning faculty labor costs is common practice among critics of the academy, who frequently assume the single largest university budget category (usually faculty compensation) holds the most fat. To his credit, author Andrew Gillen moves beyond that simplistic assumption and seeks evidence of ineffective faculty spending. In doing so, he tells a compelling and concerning narrative about university products and faculty priorities: the instructional mission of American higher education is being short-changed, particularly for students and taxpayers. Unfortunately, the report’s conclusions ultimately overreach and overshadow its main value—generating greater policy discussion around the costs and products associated with faculty work.

Gillen uses federal data to demonstrate reductions in tenured and tenure-track (TT) teaching loads across institution types, between academic years 1987-1988 and 2003-2004. He provides a cohesive synthesis of factors widely thought to contribute to this outcome, with some emphasis on Massy and Zemsky’s concept of “the academic ratchet.” The academic ratchet explains that as faculty seek reputational prestige and career mobility through increased attention to their research responsibilities, they must, and readily do, decrease attention to instruction and other responsibilities. The report neglects to mention the other half of this framework, (“the administrative lattice”), which explains how administrators enable faculty to restructure their work: they expand their ranks, also at added cost. Data show administrative growth, both in terms of expenditure and added employees, has been prodigious in recent years.

“Do more with less.” Many universities could emblazon their crests with this motto to reflect their 21^st century operational—if not inspirational—ethos. With not one but two recessions to begin the new millennium, the economic environment has not exactly been conducive to rapid expansion. Yet, that is exactly what has taken place for colleges and universities across the United States. Between 2000 and 2010 degree production increased across most institutional types; likewise, spending increased even as subsidies from state and local governments decreased (students footed the bill). During roughly the same time period, the number of postsecondary instructional staff grew over 30% (by about 380,000 instructors). The lion’s share of these new instructor positions have taken the form of part-time and graduate appointments, which command far less compensation for their work than full-time faculty and are virtually all ineligible for tenure. This development of an underclass of university faculty is quickly approaching a boiling point, and the implications for effective faculty governance are troubling.

Starting in 2014, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) mandates that employers with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance to those working more than 30 hours per week. To prevent having to give their employees proper benefits, Papa John’s Pizza voiced intent to cut the hours of employees to fall just below the 30 hour threshold.  Customers expressed reprehension at the prospect of the pizza giant further limiting the earnings of its lowest income employees in the name of corporate revenue. The public backlash was so powerful that Papa John’s founder and CEO, John Schnatter walked back his loophole planning, but it remains to be seen whether universities—American cultural bastions of fairness and opportunity—will fare differently. The government has hedged on behalf of adjuncts, but the question of whether and to what degree universities will ultimately be allowed to implement similar plans to fudge compliance with the ACA remains unresolved.

In 1969, tenure track faculty constituted 78 percent of the academic workforce. Today, less than 25 percent of the academy is on the tenure track (TT). This means that in about forty years, faculty labor has turned completely upside down. Non-tenure track (NTT), contract-contingent faculty—otherwise known by the anesthetized (often pejorative) term adjuncts—now account for the vast majority of faculty appointments in the United States. Further, a recent survey of provosts affirmed that we have every reason to believe this reliance on adjuncts will continue its upward trajectory. While a good deal is known about the growth in NTT labor, very few people seem to realize that the traditional conception of a tenure-track faculty does not, by and large, apply to the modern academy.

Here’s some background on the status of adjunct labor. The community college sector accounted for the lion’s share of NTT growth between 1969 and 1998. Adjunct appointments in two-year colleges grew by more than 800 percent over that span. In the years that followed, data show that although community colleges still accounted for the greatest growth in real numbers, the most dynamic rate of growth in adjunct labor occurred at public and private, nonprofit comprehensive universities (four-year schools providing education through the master’s level). In addition, NTT appointments account for disproportionately high numbers of women and faculty of color.