New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Adjunctification (again) and How (not) to Fix It (again)

There’s a new piece up at The Atlantic by Elizabeth Segran on the adjunct crisis in U.S. Higher Ed and the growing movement to contest the situation. The piece has a number of helpful aspects, including providing a summary of some of the most recent research on the effects of adjunctification on faculty, students, and the overall shape of the institution of U.S. Higher Education. Especially welcome is the recognition that, aside from its obvious economic consequences and its effects on student outcomes, faculty precarity has significantly eroded academic freedom, scholarly production, and done a great deal to compromise the university as an institution of learning and critical thought.  This makes it all the more disappointing that the solutions the author seems most inclined to accept would only improve the economic situation of contingent faculty while doing nothing to make them less precarious or offer more support for research and scholarship.

 

In what follows, I’ll explain the above in a bit more detail.

Revenue at Any Cost: Institutional Debt and the Crisis of U.S. Higher Education

As Protevi likes to keep reminding everyone on Facebook, it's been awhile now since I first started arguing that we haven't been paying sufficient attention to the role of institutional debt as a driver of the increasingly alarming developments in U.S. universities, especially those in the public sector.  I've gestured in this direction before on NewAPPS, but the appearance of a new piece on the subject by Josh Freedman on Forbes.com provides a perfect opportunity to develop the point a bit more.  

Let me begin, then, by making a fairly bold claim. Taking the problem of institutional debt seriously makes it possible to provide a consistent account of many of the major problematic trends in U. S. higher education: rapidly accelerating tuition costs; significant declines in financial aid coverage; cuts to or elimination of low-enrollment departments and programs, experiments with mass-market distance learning and online education, and a general move toward 'Responsibility Centered Managment' (RCM) administrative models; dramatically increasing pressure on faculty at the level of compensation, workload, job security and working conditions; the outsourcing of many university functions to private contractors; building booms, especially those aimed at increasing campus amenities or leveraging university owned real estate for commercial purposes; and finally, continuing increases in administrative spending, especially in development offices and other areas concerned with financial management and business operations.

All of this, which may otherwise seem contradictory and difficult to make sense of, can consistently be referred back to the urgent pressure that rising institutional debt imposes upon university operations: the need to maintain a sufficiently robust revenue stream to satisfy credit rating agencies and thus keep borrowing costs, and the costs of servicing existing debt, from exploding. Freedman provides, especially in the later parts of his article, an excellent discussion of how this works. 

Philosophy, its Color Line, and its Culture of Justification

Over at Times Higher Education, Nathaniel Adam Tobias Coleman has written an important piece calling the discipline on the carpet for its overall failure to critically engage its own whiteness.*

There is a lot of remarkable stuff in the piece, which is organized around the paired questions of "who 'gets to do' philosophy?" and "who 'gets done' in philosophy?." It should be read in its entirety. As a teaser, however, let me just reproduce the following paragraph, which I'll discuss a bit below:  

In a 2012 blog posting titled “What could leave philosophy?”, Brian Weatherson, professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, argues that “[f]or a few areas [of philosophy], it is easy to imagine them being in other departments, because they already overlap so substantially with work done in other departments”. Thus, instead of seeing overlap as an opportunity to collaborate across disciplinary boundaries, Weatherson sees overlap as an opportunity to police, enforce and constrict the boundary around philosophy. This narrow-mindedness is an example of what Kristie Dotson, assistant professor of philosophy at Michigan State University, has called philosophy’s “culture of justification” – not the legitimate demand that one justify the conclusion of one’s arguments, no, but the illegitimate demand that one justify that what one is doing counts as “philosophy”.

Supplemental discussion thread for the "Please do NOT revise your tone" post

We got the following request at comment 102 on the other thread. It seems worthwhile, so we're opening this for narrowly focused discussion of the substantive -- as opposed to illustrative -- points of the "Please do NOT revise your tone" post:

As someone who might have something to say about Leigh and Edward's post, it might be useful to have a kind of reboot thread more narrowly focused on their ideas and suggestions. I signed the petition for a code of ethics so I'm thinking as carefully as I can about what [they] took such time and care to craft. If I think I can contribute usefully to that, I guess I'd prefer it to be a different thread than this discussion, as lively and productive as it may be. 

Please do NOT revise your tone

[Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian]

We trust it won’t come as a surprise to NewAPPS readers that the reputation of professional Philosophy has been taking a well-deserved beating in the public sphere.  The really bad press started two years ago with the Vincent Hendricks scandal, gained momentum a year later with the Colin McGinn scandal, and has unleashed its full fury this year with the triplet of scandals at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Northwestern University and Oxford University.  Given the severity—and, in some cases, alleged criminality—of the behaviors reported in these scandals, what IS surprising to us is the turn that recent intra-disciplinary conversations about them has taken.  As two non-tenured professional philosophers, we’re particularly concerned with the new enthusiasm for policing “collegiality” that seems to be emerging in and from these conversations, which in almost every case promotes a norm that we fear only serves to make the vulnerable among us even more vulnerable.

An exemplary instance of how “collegiality” standards can backfire is found in Brian Leiter’s quasi-authoritative “please revise your tone” comment (and more general attitudinal disposition) in this discussion on the Feminist Philosophers blog, followed by his longer a fortiori post  (which he removed from his blog within hours, but which has been preserved here) on the “increasingly ugly cyber-dynamics” of conversations about sexual harassment in the profession. (For the record, we want to note that the sexual harassment problems in our profession are far uglier than the conversational cyber-dynamics in our profession, though it’s really a lose-lose in that determination.)  It is important to take note of the dynamics on display in these threads, which demonstrate more than a little bit of our "climate" problem. Leiter invoked “tone” in reprimanding critics of his position on the issues under discussion and he directed his opprobrium at, among others, a graduate student speaking to the vulnerability she and many of her colleagues feel in a profession with an increasingly well-documented hostile climate for women. Many of the other commenters in the thread, including the post’s author, argued explicitly against attempts to police matters of tone (see comments 10 and 16).

To be precise, we're troubled that insistences on a certain set of normative standards for “collegiality” are regularly being forwarded on behalf of people like us—i.e., colleagues from underrepresented groups in the profession, those with provisional employment, and/or those whose status as stakeholders in the profession is undervalued—presumably in the interest of making the space of professional (philosophical) disagreement friendlier and “safer” for us.  What seems to go largely unacknowledged, if not intentionally ignored, is the manner in which the right to police norms of professional collegiality is a privilege that attends only those for whom running afoul of those standards has no real consequences.  And so, to those attempting to police these standards of collgiality, we want to say: Thanks, but no thanks.

The Effects of Ratings Systems

There's a worrying piece over at Inside Higher Ed quoting the president of "a mildly selective private nonprofit institution that is tuition-dependent" saying that the institution has begun to reject some applicants that it would previously have admitted because of worries about meeting outcomes targets in the ratings system proposed by President Obama in his Higher Education Plan last year. Not surprisingly, the effect of this shift has disproportionately affected applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds — and while this is only one case,* it seems to neatly exemplify what many have feared will be the effect of the proposals. 

I've written before — and I plan to write more — about the effects of prestige races on the state of higher education in the U.S. Until now, these races have been fostered primarily by the proliferation of ranking systems (US News and World Report, etc.) as structuring elements of the enviornment in which institutions are operating.  It is not difficult to link competition for prestige to the sorts of spending and other institutional policy decisions that have led to rising costs of attendence and increased institutional debt loads** — all of which has also created pressure on institutions that traditionally serve less advantaged populations to abandon or de-emphasize those missions. The Obama proposals, as the article shows, seem to have already added to that pressure without even having been put into effect. 

*There are definitely reasons to think carefully about what type of institution is being disucssed here, which may not be typical of those doing the most to serve students from disadvantaged populations.

**See, for instance, this New York Times piece from 2012

Critical Reasoning Materials with a Dialectical Focus

Over on Facebook, Bijan Parsia asked a really great question.  

[... are there] any critical reasoning courses/textbooks out there that focus at the dialectical (or beyond) level rather than at the argument level. My recollection is that they are very focused at the individual argument level with an unhealthy focus on fallacies rather than thinking very much about overall cognitive strategies (esp. in group settings) or other goals than the cognitive. I recall getting a lot of that from phil of science classes and pedagogy and (interestingly) online dissuasion analysis (see the "poisonous people" video floating about, or even troll bestiaries), but not so much from critical reasoning (which often was shoehorned into a symbolic logic class).

While I haven't taught critical reasoning in a few years, I also can't recall having run across anything like what Bijan is looking for here. But I don't think it's difficult to see why materials of the sort would be of great value. In fact, I can see how they would be very helpful not just in the 'critical reasoning' context, but more broadly as part of the kind of instruction might give in philosophical process in a lot of our classes. 

And with that, I throw the question out to the rest of you. Do you know of materials of this sort? Have you developed something of your own that you'd like to share?

Annals of obfuscation, volume 4501

This is how you obfuscate, ladies and gentlemen: "There's a good reason for that, says Rex Ramsier, vice provost at the University of Akron, where Gallagher is teaching one class. "Institutions have to be very mindful that if we simply tried to staff every course with full-time faculty that have full benefits, the cost of higher education at any institution would go up 30 to 40 percent potentially," he says. "The public's not going to accept that."

Notice the conflation of instructional labor costs and total costs (including admin salaries, fixed costs (building construction and upkeep, etc), which go to the bottom line of the school, and "cost" to "the public."

There's another equivocation there, between the public qua set of individual consumers (in which case we're talking about "price" to them -- tuition and fees) and public qua set of individual taxpayers. 

Why is this important? A public uni could recoup its increased labor costs by two means. 

If I worked at The University of Kansas, this post might get me fired

Why? Well, because this post is about the Kansas Regents' decision to pass a new social media policy, which states that:

the chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media.

Improper use means making a communication that:

— Directly incites violence or other immediate breach of the peace;

— Is made pursuant to the employee’s official duties and is contrary to the best interests of the university;

— Discloses confidential student information, protected health care information, personnel records, personal financial information, or confidential research data; or

— Impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers, has a detrimental impact on close working relationships, impedes the performance of the speaker’s official duties, interferes with the regular operation of the university, or otherwise adversely affects the university’s ability to efficiently provide services.

Reading this, I'd feel compelled to say that it 1) seemed like an effort to stifle criticism of the University, 2) veered periliously close to making it impossible for colleagues to disagree publicly, especially over matters of instiutional practice, policy, or pedagogy, and 3) similarly put anyone considering discussing his or her experience with, say, discrimination or harassment on notice that doing so could be harmful to his or her carreer.  Even better, this transparent attempt to initmidate and constrain faculty speech in public fora was imposed by fiat without prior consultation with the faculty, though--in a clear effort to satisfy some of Protevi's likely objections--faculty were told that "the board would welcome input over the next several months."

Presumably, this input shouldn't be on social media, however, especially if it were critical or the process by which this policy were imposed, or its content.

Update: Scott Jaschik now has a story up at Inside Higher Ed that adds a few new details, including comments from the chair of the AAUP's Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. 

Update 2: KU Law and Economics Professor Bill Black has written an analysis of the policy here, and been interviewed by the Kansas City Pitch here [h/t William Pannapacker]. Black pretty much confirms (and even extends) the worst case scenario interpretations of this policy that have been floating around. 

Should Departments Be Promoting From Within?

In the discussion that followed Anca Gheaus' guest post on the gender situation in the German academy, there was some mention of the fact that in many European job-markets, faculty searches are not truly 'open,' so that internal candidates are strongly preferred to those from outside the hiring institution. Clearly, when taken to an extreme—institutions becoming highly resistant to hiring anyone but their own PhDs and/or post-docs—such a practice can be very detrimental to any process of diversification within the academy. But I wonder if there might not be other situations in which an over-emphasis on 'open' searches is actually detrimental. 

I'm thinking of the situation in the U.S. academy, where the norm is very strongly against not only hiring a department's own PhDs, but also hiring any currently employed non-tenure track faculty into tenure lines, or even adjuncts into full-time NTT lines.  Given that the galloping precaritization of the professoriate as a whole is fast becoming a structural crisis, I wonder if it is not time to examine the possible merits of encouraging departments to commit to making at least a certain percentage of their full-time and TT hires from within the ranks of their current part-time and NTT faculty. 

Prestige Races, Debt-financed Construction, and the Kitchen Sink

This story about La Salle University's (Philadelphia) plans for a new business school really has it all: a manufactured sense of urgency, the decision to spend endowment funds and take on debt to finance construction of a luxury facility, the sense that the race for prestige trumps all other considerations. 

Because of the steep competition, the university has chosen to pay for the building from endowment funds, a 2012 bond issue, and $15 million in alumni donations - 57 percent of which have been secured.

"We made the decision to do it that way rather than conduct a seven-year capital campaign," said Brother Michael J. McGinniss, La Salle president. "We wanted to get the business school up. It was more of a competitive and tactical decision."

It's almost like the Rosetta Stone...

'...must show evidence of teaching excellence...'

There is a growing body of evidence that student evaluations not only 1) do not measure teaching effectiveness, and may well be negatively correlated with it, but also 2) that women and other visible minorities fare worse across the board on them. In other words, they're ineffective at measuring what they are frequently seen to measure and highly discriminatory in what they do measure.

The current state of the research is nicely summarized by Philip Stark in this post at The Berkeley Blog, which should be read in its entirety. Even having previously known about much of what Stark discusses, I was particularly stunned by the following:

• students’ ratings of instructors can be predicted from the students’ reaction to 30 seconds of silent video of the instructor: first impressions may dictate end-of-course evaluation scores, and physical attractiveness matters

• the genders and ethnicities of the instructor and student matter, as does the age of the instructor

It's enough to make one wonder how we have allowed the practice of conducting these evaluations to go on for so long and why anyone takes them seriously at all.

CUNY, Adjuncts and Faculty Unions

One remarkable dimension of the story making the rounds about  CUNY failing to pay some of its adjuncts is that these faculty are represented by a union. Approximately 400 faculty missed one paycheck, and 100 more than one. None of these faculty have yet been given their full back pay, nor will they until the end of the term. And their union representatives have, at very least, proven incapable of forcing the university to treat the adjuncts in a fairer and more reasonable manner.  

It's worth dwelling on this for a moment. If ever there was a clear cut case for a strong union push, including for a union supported walkout, this is surely it. And yet, nothing. Not even an effective demand that the university absorb whatever supplemental costs may be involved in paying some of their most economically precarious faculty what they are owed in a timely fashion. 

This situation is evocative of some of the ways that existing unions have failed adjunct faculty, and it raises some questions about how—or whether—things might improve in this regard.

When You Sow Confusion, Confusion You Shall Reap

In my piece over at Inside Higher Ed, I argued that the Figlio, et al working paper recently published by the NBER “does a great deal to sow confusion" regarding the fact that the pedagogically effective NTT cohort studied were not badly paid, part-time, semester-to semester 'adjuncts.'

One key effect of this confusion is to obscure how the study, when its results are fully published, will likely contribute further evidence for a positive correlation of faculty pay and working conditions to a range of student outcomes.

Lest we doubt the effectiveness of confusing this issue, consider this piece by Cedar Riener that apeared today on The Atlantic's website. Misconstruing the Northwestern study as showing that adjuncts are better teachers than tenure-line faculty, the author argues that we should stop studying “university salaries or labor practices” or trying to argue that pay correlates to performance. Rather, he claims, we need to make a purely moral argument for paying adjunct faculty better.

In other words, Riener is asking us to throw out some of the strongest arguments we have for de-adjunctification in favor of one that is unlikely to move any administrator or policy maker—let alone to advance the cause of college faculty of any description in the larger political arena.

Kazarian on how NBER Economists Misleadingly Frame Their Results

Our very own Ed Kazarian writes in Inside Higher Ed here. (Congrats Ed!) He nicely summarizes our earlier discussion here at NewAPPS (here, here, here), and shows with patience how the NBER economists used very misleading rhetoric in their piece. Kazarian calls attention to why their bogus rhetoric (tenure vs non-tenure) matters. I quote his concluding remarks:

[T]here is nothing about teaching-intensive faculty that is incompatible with their being eligible for tenure — especially if one fully intends to build long-term relationships with them and keep them around.

Why, one is led to ask, can we not have "efficiency" and tenure? The answer, if there is one, must have to do with other ways in which non-tenured faculty differ from those with tenure. The authors mention academic freedom — an important consideration.

But they otherwise ignore the degree to which non-tenured faculty lack a secure position from which to question, criticize, or oppose the actions of university administrators.

And here, indeed, is another sense of "efficiency" that administrators at many institutions might well wish to cultivate, allowing them to enjoy a pedagogically effective, but largely vulnerable, and therefore easily controlled faculty.

Figlio responds to Criticism

I wrote the lead-author, David Figlio, of the piece that Ed and I have critically discussed. He responded promptly and helpfully to my questions (and piece). In particular, he emphasized that "by universal agreement, I was the only person to ever handle raw data, so Morty [Schapiro--ES] could never see individual student or faculty member names, or even departments." I quote the rest of his response in full:

We haven't yet controlled for class size, but I am certain, given the Northwestern circumstance, that what you propose won't be the driving force here. An initial view of the distribution of class sizes between long-term lecturers and tenure-track faculty showed that they have a high degree of overlap. We are in the process of trying a variety of additional sample splits; however, I can assure you that every specification we attempted yielded the same fundamental conclusion.

A question about that Northwestern teaching quality study

Prompted by Ed's excellent piece, I looked at the NBER working paper that undoubtedly will be used to undermine tenure at a variety of universities. It is worth noting that one of the authors of the piece is the current President of Northwestern University; undoubtedly this helped with gaining access to the data. But it also makes one wonder if, perhaps, there wasn't a directed search in the data. After all, one can get a bit too close to the subject studied. It would be nice if some independent statistician can obtain access to the raw data.

How To Avoid Studying Faculty Working Conditions

Monday, Inside Higher Ed published an article breathlessly reporting that a "major new study" [summary, pdf] conducted by three Northwestern professors for the National Bureau of Economic Research had shown that "new students at Northwestern University learn more when their instructors are adjuncts than when they are tenure-track professors." Unfortunately, the uptake by IHE and others ignores the one salient fact about Northwestern's 'adjunct' pool that the authors let creep into one of their footnotes: "[a]lmost all classes taught by non-tenure track faculty at Northwestern are taught by those with a longer-term relationship with the university" (p. 9n8 my emphasis).

The study itself is flawed in other ways: 1) the narrow basis upon which these claims are grounded; 2) the authors' failure to consider specific factors about the faculty being studied, their relationship to the courses being taught, or the contracts under they were hired; and 3) the generalizability of the results being presented. Indeed, the authors' provide very little reason to think that 'non-tenure track' faculty at Northwestern are comparable to a similarly named group of faculty at other institutions. As such, the study provides a poor rejoinder to the large body of research that suggests that adjunctification is as bad for students as it demonstrably has been for faculty.