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From the General Secretary: Cramming the Dorms
By Mary A. Burgan
The news this fall is that record numbers of first-year students are jamming into the dorms at colleges and universities around the country. Here in the nation’s capital, George Washington and Howard Universities have leased hotel rooms for the new class. At the University of Maryland, among others, residence-hall managers have had to commandeer the student lounges for the overflow—even after they’ve turned double rooms into triples. Dartmouth has gone so far as to offer a premium to students who postpone their enrollment to next fall.
As for the reactions of their parents, some take it all with good humor, lugging the fan and the fridge up to the fourth floor and gently annexing a dresser or chair for their offspring. But other parents may be less gracious. They wonder why university administrations didn’t foretell and prepare for the situation. "They’re charging enough, God knows."
As for the faculty, they are reassured by the evidence that real, live students continue to want to come to a real, live college. In recent years, faculty have been threatened by expert predictions that many students would prefer to check in by e-mail and down-load their classes from home. As it turns out, people don’t want to read books on the Net; they don’t want to buy pet food on the Net; and although they’ll take a course or two, most of them don’t want a bachelor’s degree for their children from the Net. Actually, they want their children out of the house. Given this fall’s signal evidence of that fact, the faculty will probably make do with extra students in their classrooms as well—with cheer or grumpiness as each temperament dictates.
But the faculty also has the right to ask why administrations didn’t foretell and prepare for this year’s crowd of students. After all, for the past ten years, we’ve known about the demographic bulge lying in wait for us. And we’ve always known that enrollments increase in times of economic slow-down: the college classroom is a prime refuge from joblessness. In an era in which managers are supposed to be preternaturally wise about such things, why are the college administrations caught without enough dorm space? More important, how do they intend to find enough faculty to handle the crush of now and the future?
As a former English department chair, I think I know. While the president appears on the local evening news to brag and complain about the bumper crop, the registrar is frantically calling the dean to report that all the sections of first-year comp have closed and to demand the creation of at least another dozen more. And the dean is calling the chair promising money enough to open ten sections. And the chair is asking how much money. And the dean is saying she can go up to $2,000 per section. And the chair is then asking the director of comp where he can find three part-time faculty members to teach four courses each for the term. And when the comp director complains that there’s no time to recruit and train, the chair says, "There must be some people around who can use the money. Find them."
Meanwhile, and through the coming year, the bulldozers and big shovels will groan away, laying foundations for a new dorm building to house this year’s class, and to be ready for next year’s. A college can’t expect students to accept more than one term in improvised, makeshift spaces. But the dean will not send in an army of builders to help the chair prepare for the future; instead, she may grudgingly offer one new faculty line. The chair will argue, but he will finally deliver the bad news to the hiring committee that "projections for excellence" require reallocation of permanent faculty lines to the new program in biotechnology.
Accordingly, the hiring committee will decide to hire a biotechnological literary theorist. Or maybe it will decide, this one time, to hire someone to train and manage the part-timers. By next fall, the results will be evident. A new dorm, a new student union, a new graduate program, and three part-time faculty members hoping for reappointment. Building facilities is easy; building the faculty takes foresight. Without sufficient full-time faculty, there can be no true college or university, no matter how fine the dorms, up to date the equipment, or cutting edge the programs.
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