Wednesday, April 29, 1998
Colleges trim long-term faculty
EDUCATION: Tightened budgets force schools to prioritize, assess
needs
By J. Sharon Yee
Daily Bruin Contributor
Concerned with rapidly diminishing budgets, many colleges and
universities have begun to seriously cut back on the number of
permanent faculty being hired as one way to cut costs.
The hiring of more non-tenure track faculty, or professors who
are not given the option of lifetime employment, is one way of
trimming down university budgets.
A recent study indicates a trend of universities opting to hire
more temporary faculty over tenure-track faculty. The number of
faculty nationwide on the non-tenure track has increased from 18.5
percent in 1975 to 27 percent in 1993.
"The process of hiring non-tenure track faculty is essentially
not going away," said Roger Baldwin, co-researcher and education
professor at the College of William and Mary.
The study, conducted by Baldwin and Professor Jay Chronister of
the University of Virginia, surveyed administrators and both
tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty from 12 institutions
nationwide, including UCLA. The others consisted of two urban
doctoral institutions, three master’s level programs and three
liberal arts colleges.
Chronister and Baldwin revealed only general conclusions about
their findings, which are currently being published.
"In the late 1980s and early ’90s, tight budgets forced
universities to find other ways of maintaining excellent faculty
with less resources," Baldwin said .
"I’m not surprised by the findings," said Helen Astin, associate
director of the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute. "With the
number of courses taught increasing, and federal and state funding
decreasing, universities nationwide are having to cope with the
dilemma of providing excellent education with less resources."
Astin commented that the university has traditionally tried to
find other ways to deal with shrinking budgets.
"So far, we have tried really hard to find enough resources from
endowments that it might end up at a point where we can keep
faculty for longer than one or two years," she said.
Traditionally, tenure-eligible professors endure a six-year
probationary period, where their teaching, research and service is
vigorously evaluated by fellow professors, Baldwin said.
Tenure, or lifetime employment, is then granted upon excellent
performance in these areas.
Originally created to protect professors’ academic freedom,
tenure protects professors from being fired at a whim, Astin
said.
Generally speaking, 60 to 70 percent of faculty are tenured,
Astin said.
Alternatives to hiring more temporary faculty include
encouraging senior faculty to take early retirement and increasing
registration fees.
However, other reasons for this trend extend beyond budgetary
ones.
Universities have increased the number of temporary faculty to
remain competitive and to keep up with the rapid pace of
change.
"In order to meet the educational demands of a constantly
changing student body and the world in general," Baldwin said,
"many colleges do not want to lock their faculty into certain areas
which are not necessarily beneficial to the entire
institution."
He illustrated this point by discussing the dilemma many
administrators face in deciding which fields to prioritize.
For example, given the choice between hiring a full-time
professor in Sanskrit (a largely stagnant field in terms of new
developments) or an instructor in computer science, an area which
is changing on a daily basis, a university may be more inclined to
give a tenure-track position to a person in the latter field, while
offering the Sanskrit scholar a temporary position.
"There is the assumption that senior faculty are deadwood
because they are not keeping up with what’s current," Astin
said.
"In many ways, though, they’re more connected because of their
long-term experience and visibility in the field," she
continued.
Besides providing academic protection, tenured faculty maintain
a sense of community among university faculty, said Astin.
"It’s essential for survival," she said. "If there are too many
part-time or temporary faculty, there is little hope of engaging
them in a culture, a community."
Often a sense of community helps facilitate an ideal teaching
environment from which students can benefit the most, she
added.
But as university course loads diversify, non-tenure faculty are
becoming increasingly popular.
Another reason for hiring more non-tenure track faculty is the
need to meet the demands of specialized courses.
"A lot of institutions are finding that some professors are not
meeting the needs of their students," Baldwin said, referring to
the difficulty of balancing research and teaching.
"The traditional role faculty play isn’t always the best way to
fulfill specialized needs of students," he added, citing English
composition and introduction language classes as examples of
courses that demand extra time and attention given toward
students.
As budgets continue to decrease, both Baldwin and Astin
anticipate this trend to continue into the future.
"Ideally, we don’t want to be too heavy on top, but rather have
both senior faculty and the mechanisms to bring new faculty in,"
Astin said.