When confronted about the large sums paid out to high-level administrators, boards of trustees and PR departments always say the same thing: if you want to get the "best people" for the job, you have to pay out. It seems to me that there are two problems with this logic. First, this implies that the "best people" for the job of running a university are also the kind of people who will pursue the biggest pay-day, or who at the very least wouldn't consider doing the job for less than half a million dollars a year (before bonuses and other perks). Maybe this is crazy, but I'm not sure someone looking to get rich running a non-profit really understands what non-profit work is about. The fundamental mission of the university is about service: students and faculty come together to learn and to produce new knowledge for the benefit of our local, national, and global societies. While I won't pretend to understand everything that goes into running a university, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that the "best people" for the job would have a deep understanding of and appreciation for this kind of service, and who would therefore be happy to be paid less for the opportunity to help such a beneficial institution thrive. Faculty, after all, have made just this sacrifice. We say all the time, "I didn't go into this for the money." Relative to our educations, most of us are underpaid--the majority of us radically so. But for the minority of us who are getting paid a livable wage, we think the lower salary is okay because we believe in the work we do. My goal isn't to make a lot of money, but to make a difference in the lives of my students, so as long as I make enough to live and to get some modest enjoyment out of life, I'm happy to be paid less than my "worth" to be able to do what I love. Dedication to the mission of the university should matter more than making a lot of money. That should be at least as true at the top as it is at the bottom.
But we can turn this logic around, too, and find a second problem in the "you get what you pay for" justification. I might be willing to accept the argument that universities looking for top talent to run their schools need to be willing to pay top-dollar, if that argument were also applied to the people who actually execute the mission of the university: the faculty. The faculty are the ones who teach students--which is ostensibly why tuition-paying students attend university in the first place--and we are the ones contributing to the production of knowledge in our fields. If salaries were determined by a motivation to get the best people to help the university thrive, then every institution should be in a salary-war with every other to get and retain the best faculty they can find. If you get what you pay for, and if universities are interested in providing a top-quality education to students, faculty salaries should be inflating at the same rate as administrative salaries. Instead, the opposite has happened. Among tenure-stream faculty, salaries have stagnated, with last year being the first year in the last 5 in which average faculty raises have outpaced the rate of inflation. More importantly, university administrations are paying considerably less on average per faculty member than they used to, because, instead of responding to increased student enrollments with a proportional rise in the number of tenure-track faculty lines, they have instead opted to have classes taught by part-time faculty getting paid poverty-level wages. Nowhere is this more true than at universities with the highest-paid presidents.
I am of course oversimplifying somewhat, ignoring "market realities" that drive down faculty salaries because of the large numbers of PhDs looking for faculty positions. But it's one thing to say that a university can hire an excellent professor of Latin literature at $59k per year, and another thing entirely to suppose that you can get the same quality instruction paying someone with the same credentials $3k per course, which is what happens when administrators look to free up some cash and "create flexibility" by hiring more and more part-time, contingent faculty. This is not to say that adjuncts are worse teachers than tenure-track faculty--they aren't, due to the extreme dedication and benevolence of educators--but that the university can't really expect to hire and retain "the best" faculty if they're going to pay them poverty-level wages. Yet this is what they do to half of their faculty.
So it seems like there are conflicting logics at work. On the one hand, we're told that universities need to pay upper-level administrators very large sums of money in order to attract the best people to do the work of maintaining and finding ways to improve the university. On the other, these "best people" turn around and hire faculty as cheaply as they can possibly manage. So when students come in, apparently they are getting top-rate administrators, but bargain-basement faculty. Which might be okay, if the students were coming to our institutions for the administrators. But they're not: they're coming here to get an education, which comes from the faculty. And most of our student are paying a lot of money--and going into a lot of debt--to do so. How is this model of paying administrators as much as possible and faculty as little as possible a responsible allocation of funds?
But we can turn this logic around, too, and find a second problem in the "you get what you pay for" justification. I might be willing to accept the argument that universities looking for top talent to run their schools need to be willing to pay top-dollar, if that argument were also applied to the people who actually execute the mission of the university: the faculty. The faculty are the ones who teach students--which is ostensibly why tuition-paying students attend university in the first place--and we are the ones contributing to the production of knowledge in our fields. If salaries were determined by a motivation to get the best people to help the university thrive, then every institution should be in a salary-war with every other to get and retain the best faculty they can find. If you get what you pay for, and if universities are interested in providing a top-quality education to students, faculty salaries should be inflating at the same rate as administrative salaries. Instead, the opposite has happened. Among tenure-stream faculty, salaries have stagnated, with last year being the first year in the last 5 in which average faculty raises have outpaced the rate of inflation. More importantly, university administrations are paying considerably less on average per faculty member than they used to, because, instead of responding to increased student enrollments with a proportional rise in the number of tenure-track faculty lines, they have instead opted to have classes taught by part-time faculty getting paid poverty-level wages. Nowhere is this more true than at universities with the highest-paid presidents.
I am of course oversimplifying somewhat, ignoring "market realities" that drive down faculty salaries because of the large numbers of PhDs looking for faculty positions. But it's one thing to say that a university can hire an excellent professor of Latin literature at $59k per year, and another thing entirely to suppose that you can get the same quality instruction paying someone with the same credentials $3k per course, which is what happens when administrators look to free up some cash and "create flexibility" by hiring more and more part-time, contingent faculty. This is not to say that adjuncts are worse teachers than tenure-track faculty--they aren't, due to the extreme dedication and benevolence of educators--but that the university can't really expect to hire and retain "the best" faculty if they're going to pay them poverty-level wages. Yet this is what they do to half of their faculty.
So it seems like there are conflicting logics at work. On the one hand, we're told that universities need to pay upper-level administrators very large sums of money in order to attract the best people to do the work of maintaining and finding ways to improve the university. On the other, these "best people" turn around and hire faculty as cheaply as they can possibly manage. So when students come in, apparently they are getting top-rate administrators, but bargain-basement faculty. Which might be okay, if the students were coming to our institutions for the administrators. But they're not: they're coming here to get an education, which comes from the faculty. And most of our student are paying a lot of money--and going into a lot of debt--to do so. How is this model of paying administrators as much as possible and faculty as little as possible a responsible allocation of funds?
Of course, the ones who decide how to allocate funds are themselves administrators (with a certain amount of oversight from boards of trustees--boards which too often have no faculty on them and which tend to be well-connected with administration). Since apparently we believe in hiring administrators who want to make a lot of money, it's perhaps unsurprising that administrators give themselves the largest raises. But these spending priorities aren't simply a matter of greed: they reflect the tendency among administrations to treat themselves as more important to the existence of the university than faculty. At one of the institutions I've worked at, the school once hit a "crisis" of unexpectedly low enrollments that led to a substantial budget shortfall. The administration's response was to freeze all faculty hiring, which seemed reasonable enough; but at the same time they created three or four more administrative positions to "help deal with the crisis." That institution is hardly the only university where this happens. The administrator-brain thinks that the solution to a problem of enrollment is less (comparatively inexpensive) faculty and more (comparatively expensive) administrators: this tells us what we need to know about their priorities, and what personnel they deem most important to the continued existence of the university. And therein lies the real problem.
Parents and students should be angry about this, because outrageous administrative salaries correlate with the rise in student debt. Thanks to increasing media coverage of this correlation, perhaps the anger will come, and universities will be pressured into administrative reform (at least at public institutions). But at the end of the day, the money is one symptom of a larger problem, which is that the people running our institutions of higher education don't prioritize education--quality education, not "how many kids can we get to pay to sit in one classroom and how little can we pay the instructor who stands in front of them?" When I once described to a friend outside the academy my frustration at my administration's refusal to involve faculty in important decisions, my friend connected administrative attitudes to the general tendency in the U.S. to paint educators as lazy and incompetent. "It must be hard," she said, "when your own bosses treat you like that." Well, yes, actually, it is. As faculty, we work hard to create environments in which students can learn at a high level, and to participate actively in our fields so that we are able to provide our students with cutting-edge information and insights. When our work is devalued, not just by our social world, but by our own employers, it can be difficult to find the motivation to keep working hard. We keep going because we care about our students and about our fields; it would be nice if our administrators shared that dedication with us.
Parents and students should be angry about this, because outrageous administrative salaries correlate with the rise in student debt. Thanks to increasing media coverage of this correlation, perhaps the anger will come, and universities will be pressured into administrative reform (at least at public institutions). But at the end of the day, the money is one symptom of a larger problem, which is that the people running our institutions of higher education don't prioritize education--quality education, not "how many kids can we get to pay to sit in one classroom and how little can we pay the instructor who stands in front of them?" When I once described to a friend outside the academy my frustration at my administration's refusal to involve faculty in important decisions, my friend connected administrative attitudes to the general tendency in the U.S. to paint educators as lazy and incompetent. "It must be hard," she said, "when your own bosses treat you like that." Well, yes, actually, it is. As faculty, we work hard to create environments in which students can learn at a high level, and to participate actively in our fields so that we are able to provide our students with cutting-edge information and insights. When our work is devalued, not just by our social world, but by our own employers, it can be difficult to find the motivation to keep working hard. We keep going because we care about our students and about our fields; it would be nice if our administrators shared that dedication with us.
No comments:
Post a Comment