It’s the beginning of what I guess I would refer to as “the silly season” for faculty contract negotiations, the time in the process where the language by both the faculty and the administration gets a little more shrill, a little more exasperated, a little more threatening and daring, where the idea of a strike gets mentioned. It was this season that really launched EMUTalk.org four years ago, mainly because of the discussion that went on during August and September 2006 (here, here, here, here, and here) on my old “official” blog. It’ll be interesting to look at those old posts in the next few days to see what’s similar and what’s different this time around.
One thing is for sure: I’m not making any predictions one way or the other about us being on strike– my predictions are always wrong.
Anyway, I thought I’d kick off the month of August 2010 (well, sort of– I intended to post this a few days ago, but I’ve been busy with “life” and that pesky teaching thing) here at EMUTalk with some attention to the latest blog posts from the EMU-AAUP about negotiations. There’s no way to comment on them there (which is one of the reasons why it isn’t really a “blog”), so maybe folks can make some comments here. More thoughts after the jump.
Some observations, more or less in the order they occur to me and/or they appear on the EMU-AAUP site and as they’ve come up in various email messages from Susan Moeller:
- It looks like any discussion about revising the rules for office hours are over– the EMU-AAUP blog says that both sides have agreed to the current language. Disappointing, as I was hoping we might find something more dynamic and current than this 19th century model student-teacher communication, but I suppose I can live with the current system.
- To me, the “Changes to the DEDs” section is a mixed bag. Take this sentence: “This proposal reflects the overall opinion that we have been hearing from the administration: EMU faculty don’t do enough, and we get tenure too easily.” The first part of that clause– “EMU faculty don’t do enough” –strikes me as largely false, but the second part of that clause– “we get tenure too easily” –strikes me as largely true. At least it is in my field and department. Now, in my field, the ease of tenure or promotion is not generally an issue because the search process for candidates is rigorous to the point that we only hire people we think we can tenure. That hasn’t always worked out and I have some colleagues who probably shouldn’t be tenured, but it works out mostly, and I think it works out as well here as it does at more competitive institutions.
- The discussion about the “full professor” thing is also a mixed bag for me. I don’t know if “the standards to be promoted to Full professor should ‘significantly exceed’ the standards for tenure;” I do know that it’s easy for folks to be promoted to full professor at EMU, and the fact that about half of the faculty at EMU are full professors (I believe this was the statistic that Susan Moeller sent out in an email) is an indication that being a full professor here is more about “time served” and seniority.Should this be different? Well, maybe yes, maybe no. At more prestigious institutions– at the University of Michigans of the world, for example– faculty can have an entire and successful career as a tenured associate professor and never reach the rank of full professor. But at the same time, at places like U of M the salary structure is such that someone who is an associate professor still gets raises and makes good money, certainly more than a comparable full professor at EMU. Furthermore, the “time served” model for promotion to full professor is present at lots of regional universities similar to EMU.
I personally don’t think it should necessarily be a huge hurdle to be promoted to full professor at EMU because of the way the entire structure of tenure and promotion works here. At the same time, if there is going to be some sort of system where full professors are eligible for on-going promotions and pay raises of some sort, then I have no problem with submitting various paperwork to various committees (which is what faculty have to do for tenure and promotion now), and I also have no problem with an external review requirement.
- The part about the “in-house designed” Electronic Activity Report software demonstration failing because of “network difficulties” was pretty amusing, and the idea that it was software developed along the lines of the completely shitty program review interface is actually kind of depressing. I don’t really understand why a system like this would be any more effective than having faculty submit electronic versions of the Annual Activity Report as a MS Word document or as a PDF.
- “Erosion” is complicated, and it’s a more complicated issue than “we need to hire more faculty.” The EMU-AAUP web site says “Last year we taught only 55% of the student credit hours offered at EMU. Before 2000, the faculty at EMU taught approximately 70% of the student credit hours.” This statistic more or less rings true to what I’ve seen at EMU since I came here in 1998, and I think there are two basic reasons for this, reasons that are national trends.
First, universities have been replacing full-time professors with part-time adjuncts and, at EMU, full-time (but less empowered) lecturers who teach and who do almost nothing in terms of service and scholarship. I agree completely about the union on this one– we really ought to be replacing retiring faculty with faculty.
However, the other reason for faculty teaching less is because more faculty have more “release time” to do non-teaching things, many of which should probably be handled by administrators. This too is part of a national trend in higher education called “administrative creep.” There’s release time to do what I would describe as “quasi-administrative” work as program coordinators, advisors, for special projects, etc. Then there’s release time (or just time!) to do all the dreaded internal paperwork, things like “continuous improvement,” “strategic planning” (aka “strategery”), and, the worse of all, “program review.” And then there are the increased external reviews demanded in the name of “accountability,” things like NCATE. God only knows what else is going to be coming out of the US Department of Education in the next few years.
Now, I think most of this bureaucracy is stupid, but it is what it is, and until we win the argument that all of this is an unnecessary colossal waste of time, it’s work that has to be done. If faculty are going to do this, then faculty are going to be teaching less, and that is clearly where at least some of that decreased percentage of teaching is coming from. On the other hand, if faculty teach more and do less of this administrative work, then EMU is going to have to hire more suits– e.g., full-time and “real” administrators– which is also something that the union (and most of the faculty, actually) opposes. Sort of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation.Anyway, I do think we need to hire more faculty, period. I also think that higher education as a culture has to push back a little bit on this administrative creep that doesn’t help anyone. But that push-back is a much bigger issue than what’s going on in these contract talks.
More than my 2 cents– I hope others watching the negotiations/process chime in!
I can understand that the union might oppose hiring “real” administrators because union members oppose it. But why do the faculty members who make up the union oppose this?
Well, the union members and the faculty members are one in the same, basically. In other words, while different faculty have different feelings about the union, you can’t really separate “the faculty” from “the faculty union” here at EMU.
Well, I guess I meant “the union” as in union representatives. But my question still stands: why are faculty members opposed to this idea?
Basically– and I mean this in very basic terms– I think the problem of hiring more administrators is that this would likely come at the expense of hiring more faculty, and that hiring more administrators kind of amounts to hiring more “bosses.” And it also means hiring more people who are not in any union, since they all serve “at will,” regardless of their level.
But that’s as good as I can get at something that approaches an answer….
I guess that makes a certain amount of sense, but maybe part of the problem then is the perception that bureaucrats are “bosses”, which seems entirely backward to me. And while it might be true that hiring bureaucrats could come at the expense of hiring more faculty, it would, as you pointed out, free up existing faculty to do more actual teaching.
To put it another way, faced with a choice between 10 people each spending 70% of their time teaching and 30% pushing papers around, and 7 people spending all their time teaching while 3 people do the paper pushing for them, the latter would seem to be preferable. Efficiency through specialization, and so forth.