Flexibility, the Alton Brown Principle, and the Teacher-Scholar-Admin

To justify the use of poorly paid, contingent faculty, administrators often sing a chorus about the need for flexibility: in these uncertain times, the refrain goes, schools need to be able to adjust quickly to ebbs and flows in enrollment, and to changes in the job markets into which we send our students. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out, where "flexibility" means making it "easier to hire and fire people," it's "just another standard technique of control and domination"; after all, he notes, no one ever says that we need the flexibility to hire and fire administrators in the same way as faculty. This doesn't mean, however, the "flexibility," construed in a different way, isn't a good thing. Chomsky notes the case of course reassignments: if a class under-enrolls, the faculty member assigned to that course gets reassigned to teach something where there is greater student demand. We can do that, because all of us are capable of teaching more than one thing. We might also look at curricular development for an example of "good" flexibility. It's normal to retool curricula, both at the university level and within different departments, at regular intervals to deal with the fact that our disciplines change and the needs of our students change. This requires faculty to be flexible in the kinds of classes we offer, and to be willing to learn new ways of doing things to be able to address changes in our fields and in the world around us. While we can probably all think of examples of colleagues that aren't as "flexible" in this way as we'd like, the fact is that most of us have had to learn new things and make changes in our classrooms and research, and we've risen to the occasion. Just look at how much English or Modern Language departments and curricula have changed in the last 30 years, and you see how flexible we can be.

In pretty much any job, the ability to do more than one thing is an asset. I'll call this "the Alton Brown principle." On his show Good Eats, he frequently preached that, except in very rare circumstances, it's wasteful and inefficient to buy kitchen implements that you will only use for one thing. Multi-purpose tools are better because it means that you will require fewer tools overall, which is both cost-effective and creates less clutter (and thus less inefficiency) in the kitchen. For universities looking to increase their flexibility while simultaneously trimming down to cut expenses (and thereby keep tuition prices lower), this might be a good principle. Creating positions for people who can fill one role and one role only in the university is going to create inefficiencies and inflexibility. Following the Alton Brown principle, hires should be multi-purpose, capable of moving into whatever areas need the most attention at the moment, and capable of being reassigned when need change.

For example: maybe we hire people to study enrollment trends and help us get our enrollments up. But if those people are successful and enrollment goes up to the maximum sustainable level, that's going to create less of a need for their position and more of a need for faculty to teach these larger incoming classes. Traditionally, universities deal with surges in student enrollment by hiring off the tenure-track, either bringing in faculty part-time for poverty-level wages or for short-term, full-time contingent positions. The ability to fire these faculty easily is what administrators call "flexibility," but this approach is bad for students and bad for faculty morale, creating a two-tiered system that benefits absolutely no one. In addition, hiring temporary faculty doesn't address the fact that the people hired to work on bringing up enrollments don't have much to do when enrollments are high. Firing these administrators when they've accomplished their missions seems like a bad idea: enrollments may dip again in another decade, and hiring new people later on down the line to reinvent the wheel is wasteful, both in terms of the time lost in getting new people up to speed and in terms of the resources lost in searching for and hiring new people. But keeping them on the payroll when there's not much for them to do is also a waste of money. The best case scenario—the one which demonstrates the most flexibility and creates the least inefficiency—is one in which those people working on enrollment can transition into the classroom once enrollment ceases to be a problem, and can transition back if the problem recurs.

Or, to turn the problem around somewhat, we might imagine a scenario in which a school responds to an enrollment problem by transitioning some of the faculty out of the classroom to work on the issue, and then back into the classroom once the problem is solved (and back again if it recurs). The fact is that universities are already, without doing any outside hiring, chock-full of experts in a wide variety of fields that are relevant to the administrative challenges universities face. Sociologists, statisticians, accounting experts, communication experts, multi-media experts, computer scientists, to name just a few--not to mention the huge number of people across all disciplines highly trained in complex problem solving: the university employs faculty whose expertise equips them to deal with everything from budgets and enrollment problems to internal communication channels and information technology. So why, when problems arise, does a school need to hire administrators to find a solution, when, without hiring anyone new, they could draw on the expertise of their own faculty to fix the problem? 

So here's a proposal (that is by no means a new idea): follow the lead of Iowa State University in paring down the administrative ranks and pouring that money into faculty lines (which, as it turns out, does not in fact lead to armageddon). When problems arise that mean fewer students at the school, faculty expert in the relevant disciplines can leave the classroom for a while—since there are fewer students to teach—and instead allocate those hours to administrative work focused on solving the problems at hand. When enrollments go back up, the full-time faculty are already there to teach the increased number of students. No one loses a job. No one is superfluous. People move around to deal with the needs of the institution. This is real flexibility. (I think this is also what used to be called "faculty governance.")

It may be that some faculty might object to having to re-allocate more time to administrative work, rather than focusing exclusively on the work that usually gets us into the profession in the first place—research and (in some cases, "or") teaching. But, as I argued in a previous post, we can't hope to make the university the place it should be—a place where students can learn and a site for the production of knowledge—if we don't take an active role in the shaping and running of our institutions. Expanding the concept of faculty from a "teacher-scholar" model to one that encompasses all aspects of our job—that is, to a "teacher-scholar-admin" model—would give faculty back control over the university. At the same time, it would reduce the need for single-function, highly-paid administrators, freeing up money to expand the faculty (and stop relying on poorly-paid contingent positions that undermine the value-for-money our universities supposedly provide). 

This is not to say that all faculty should be able to do all things: we have our unique skill-sets and specializations that make us better suited for some tasks than for others. (I am probably not someone you want to bring in on a budget problem, for instance; but if you need someone who can conduct research into how people read university websites and rewrite copy for our own site, I can do that.) But, following the Alton Brown principle, we should look to hire faculty who show promise at multiple kinds of tasks across all three parts of the job—teaching, scholarship, and service/admin. And we should recognize that most of the faculty at our universities (including—perhaps especially—contingent faculty) already fit this profile, that we are capable of taking on a lot of the problems for which our universities currently hire out. Having a faculty that can move in and out of the classroom, research responsibilities, and administrative responsibilities as need dictates would be more cost-effective and reduce "clutter" in the university. It would provide tremendous flexibility without the ridiculous inefficiency of the cycle of hiring-and-firing. And it would mean that administrative decisions would be made by those who carry out the mission of the university: the faculty.