From the General Secretary: No University Left Alone

By Roger Bowen

Dickeson is no friend of the professoriate. As University of Northern Colorado’s president, he terminated the appointments of nearly fifty faculty members, an action that resulted in the censure of his administration by the AAUP. In his paper, which has the neutral-sounding title of “Frequently Asked Questions about College Costs,” Dickeson advises the commission that “faculty salaries are especially expensive.” He also writes that “the time-honored practice of tenure is costly” and that it has “evolved” from a mechanism to protect academic freedom into a “system to protect job security.” Dickeson also lays at the faculty’s feet the management problems of the university: “To understand the management of a college, one must understand the unique culture and extraordinary power of the faculty,” he writes. “To many faculty, they are the university.” They assume they “own all curricular decisions.” If too many are tenured, he says, the university loses “institutional flexibility.”

The AAUP’s research director, John Curtis, has analyzed the Dickeson paper and concludes that “it rehashes arguments already discredited by the Cost of Higher Education and focuses on cutting costs without regard for the consequences on the quality of education.” Curtis, who oversees the AAUP’s annual faculty compensation survey, notes that for two years running, faculty salaries have failed to keep up with inflation while growth in presidential salaries, institutional endowments, and the salaries of highly educated professionals employed outside academe have outstripped faculty salary increases.

Dickeson says, correctly, that “most institutions have shifted their teaching faculty resources from fewer full-time to more part-time instructors.” He adds that there “is a debate about whether this approach affects the quality of instructional delivery and student advising.” AAUP stalwart Ronald G. Ehrenberg, professor of labor economics at Cornell University, co-authored a study showing that as reliance on contingent faculty increases, graduation rates decline and first-year student drop-out rates increase.

Would Dickeson change his tune if he knew of the Ehrenberg study? I suspect not. Having met Charles Miller and listened to his spiel, I have to conclude that the commission chair intends to reconfigure higher education according to an ideological agenda based not on real data but on narrow, prescriptive notions. Miller insists that his goal is to make higher education “more accountable.” My read, however, is that by “accountable” he really means “less autonomous” and “more easily regulated by the federal government.” His critique of the accrediting system, for example, conjures a “solution” that replaces self-policing with federal oversight.

Like his partners in the White House, Congress, and the courts, who claim to want smaller, less intrusive government, Miller wants to increase the federal jurisdiction over higher education—what we might well call “No University Left Alone.” This program would eliminate tenure, scale back released time for  research, increase the number of students faculty teach, impose standardized testing on all colleges and universities receiving federal support, and increase reliance on contingent faculty before proudly declaring that higher education has been made more accountable and more efficient.

The AAUP assumes that the commission’s role is simply advisory. And although we have not been invited to Miller’s table, we will, once the commission releases its report, weigh in on its recommendations. Too, the AAUP will need to call on its members to educate the administrations of their campuses and their governing boards. If we are to arrest the federalization of higher education, it will be because all constituents in the academy demonstrate a willingness to work collaboratively.

Alliances are needed. We in the AAUP recognize that winning the public’s support, and that of elected representatives, in this era of federal intrusion will not be easy.  Forewarned is forearmed.

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