POSTED BY MARTIN KICH

The title of this post comes from an op-ed written by Michael A. MacDowell, President Emeritus of Misericordia University and managing director of the Calvin K. Kazanjian Foundation, for the March 18 edition of the Naples News in Florida. The foundation was created in 1947 by the founder of the candy company that introduced the Mounds and Almond Joy candy bars, and its mission is to promote economic literacy.

In a January 2016 op-ed for PA Live, MacDowell linked the need to universities to be more transparent about their costs and the need for them to be less concerned about political correctness and more concerned about public perception.

Much the same approach is evident in this more recent op-ed in which he links the Nassar scandal at Michigan State with the shift at land-grant institutions from teaching to research.

I am immediately skeptical of any discussion of lost missions that starts with what tenured faculty are doing—not just because I am a tenured faculty member but because there are fewer and fewer of us, especially at public colleges and universities that are not flagship institutions, and because whatever we are doing and costing actually has a relatively small impact on institutional budgets and priorities. Our ongoing contract campaign at Wright State has focused on the fact that as our administration and board were failing to address a largely self-created budget crisis, the total cost of base salaries and benefits for all full-time teaching faculty, tenure-eligible and not, has been between 13.5% and 17.5% of the university budget. Likewise, John McNay, the president of the Ohio Conference, recently testified before the State Senate and showed with statistics that the reason that freshman and sophomores don’t see a lot of tenured professors is that there simply aren’t enough of them anymore and, furthermore, that since full-time teaching faculty are such a small percentage of institutional costs statewide, it would not be extremely expensive to convert a significant percentage of adjunct positions to full-time and even tenure-eligible positions—if doing so were actually an institutional priority.

MacDowell writes: “MSU has followed the path of many other land grant institutions focusing upon activities designed to raise its national standing by stressing research and athletic prowess instead of teaching. Research is an essential part of any university’s function, but in the inevitable tradeoffs between resources spent on research as opposed to teaching, research almost always wins. In the past 30 years, average teaching loads have decreased 50 percent while since 1993 college enrollments increased 50 percent. To fill the gap left by professors engaged in research, adjunct instructors and graduate students are hired to replace full-time faculty. This impacts the quality of instruction.”

First, if teaching loads have decreased by 50% at Michigan State, it has been in selected departments and not across all departments. (All one has to do is look at the current teaching loads in the humanities and social sciences to know that it’s very unlikely that they were ever double what they are now.) Second, whatever has occurred at Michigan State has not necessarily occurred at institutions in the second, third, and fourth tiers. And, lastly, MacDowell does not indicate at all that there may be legitimate reasons for emphasizing research at the expense of teaching or if there are other reasons for why teaching loads have been reduced. For instance, a great deal of corporate research and development is now being done at universities—providing not only a public subsidy of one sort or another to U.S. corporations but also an additional revenue stream for universities whose state-ellocated per-student subsidies keep declining. Perhaps it’s the state governments, as much as the institutions themselves, who have been de-emphasizing the value of teaching. Furthermore, most faculty research does involve students and teaching—and, increasingly, not just graduate students but upper-level undergraduates.

Likewise, despite the ballooning of administrative bloat (one of the few things that has ballooned even faster than my waist line), faculty are being asked to do more departmental, college, university, professional, and community—and this load has been assumed disproportionately by female faculty and faculty of color because “fair representation” means that in departments in which they are underrepresented, their service is in especially high demand. In fact, some of this research, especially in the social sciences, the humanities, the arts, and nursing and health sciences is linked directly to community and professional service.

MacDowell continues: “These issues are hardly unique to MSU or other land grant universities. It’s apparent in many other state-owned and private institutions. The ‘normal schools’ or teacher colleges that became multipurpose universities have mostly placed faculty research above teaching, thereby abandoning their prime mission of instruction while at the same time raising tuition to cover additional costs.” This, to me, is the major, often-repeated fallacy about rising tuition costs. The cost-cutting on faculty is not primarily due to reduced teaching loads but, instead, due to misplaced priorities and out-of-control spending in other areas.

MacDowell does get to some of the major “other areas,” but after giving over most of the op-ed to faculty who no longer teach as much as they used to, he summarizes the actual culprits in a single, very compressed paragraph: “Faculty expenditures are hardly the only reason college costs have grown rapidly. Administrative expenses increased more quickly than faculty costs. Further regulations on colleges have increased expenditures. New facilities and campus amenities built in response to the desire to enroll more and better students raised costs considerably. Athletics is often cited as a money-maker, but in only about 20 of the 228 Division I NCAA universities does the income from athletics equal or exceed operating costs.”

If administrative expenses have increased faster than faculty costs, then why are they not the focus of the op-ed—why are they not highlighted as the major factor in the institutional loss of mission? And, by the way, “further regulations” is another commonly cited fallacy intended largely to deflect criticism of administrative bloat.

One might also ask why institutions keep building while not adequately maintaining the buildings that they already have? Or why more buildings are even needed if college-age population is flat or even declining and a larger and larger percentage of courses are being offered online, especially to non-traditional students? Or why universities are constantly searching for new “revenue streams” (Wright State invested in a bunch of “semi-autonomous entities,” none of which has made money and most of which have been “money pits”), instead of focusing on their core missions—on curriculum development, teaching, and research–and improving that “revenue stream” that still produces almost all of their revenue? One answer is that as university administration has become more corporatized and transient, long-term growth is less and less a means to enhancing one’s resume.

Moreover, why is it that the institutions that embrace corporatization the most aggressively often are exposed for being the most misguided, if not corrupt? And why would administrators who are too inept to manage growth in the institution’s core mission be anything but inept in managing other enterprises?

When the university is treated like a private enterprise, rather than a public good, then it loses its sense of mission. And nothing that faculty do to earn their paychecks is going to restore a proper sense of mission because in most institutions, shared governance has been eroded by the erosion of tenured positions.

MacDowell’s complete op-ed can be found at: naplesnews.com/story/opinion/2018/03/18/commentary-losing-your-mission-means-losing-your-way/419496002.