BY JUDITH GRANT

With thanks and solidarity to the many faculty who gave me comments on drafts of this paper.

Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, is in the midst of the latest iteration of a decades-long series of budget cuts which, faculty fear, will result in the “non-renewal” (i.e., the firing) of dozens if not hundreds of our non-tenure track colleagues (referred to at OU as “instructional faculty”). It is also likely to lead to higher workloads for tenure track faculty, diminished course offerings, and possible cuts to entire programs, not to mention low morale, all of which will no doubt negatively impact the student experience at OU. Why has this happened and how can we shift the direction of the university so that the firing of faculty and the dismantling of programs becomes its very last resort instead of its first? A positive, forward looking vision is needed.

There are historical reasons for the predicament in which we now find ourselves, and these must be avoided as we go forward.

During the fall semester of academic year 2019-2020, Ohio University faculty and staff were told in a variety of forums, emails and announcements, that the university was in a serious budget crisis. By mid-January, we were told that we were not currently in a budget crisis, but that we would be soon. Since then, communications from various deans and higher-level administrators have been internally contradictory, with some deans communicating almost nothing at all to their faculty about this crisis, and mixed messages coming from all levels. At the same time, executive proposals designed to meet the shortfall have been arriving with alarming rapidity. These have ranged from plans for the termination of a large percentage of instructional faculty, to raised teaching loads for many tenure track faculty, to possible program elimination and the reorganization of departments into schools.

We need an alternate starting place for our university’s future health. The claim I am making here is not that fiscal challenges do not exist. There is no question that the university needs money. But we should all question how that money is attained and what goals those funds service. The suggestion is rather that in reframing the underlying goals of the university to concretely prioritize teaching and research, a different set of fiscal priorities emerges. The current budget cut proposals and fiscal expenditures are embedded in a vision of the university that prioritizes things such as management, bureaucratic infrastructure, and marketing over and above the key components of teaching and research. In short, under the current thinking, the university is conceptualized as a business. Grappling with corporate influence on higher education is not new. In fact, was being discussed as far back as the early 20^th century, though it has resurfaced with renewed vigor and in a new global form since the 1980s.¹ In this current model, budget shortfalls are systematically mitigated by slicing into the very heart of the university by cutting faculty. This includes the additional problem of faculty members’ time. An example of this is the way in which is increasingly taken up with gathering data for ever- changing business models. When one reframes the values that form the basis for the discussion of the overall health of the university to the idea that higher education is a public good, a very different and clearly identifiable mission emerges. It is not the mission that we see being defended and codified in current university practices. Indeed, cutting faculty lines and programs should be the absolute last thing to go. Not the first.

A Brief History of the Business Model at OU

Understanding the university as a business has completely reversed the priorities of higher education, and this is no less true at OU than it is at other public universities. While there continues to be lip service to the missions of teaching and service, actions speak louder than words. We can see what values are privileged over others in the ways that these values are embedded in budgets, conversations about budgets, fund-raising goals, the hiring of expensive outside consultants, the repeated invocation of online education as a revenue panacea, and a whole host of other strategies employed by the university. The fact that the university’s response to budget woes is to hire more executives and more consultants while cutting faculty, raising tuition, and expanding online education, demonstrates the true values being concretely supported by the university despite any verbiage to the contrary. These actions are not suggestive of a vision that puts teaching and research first. In fact, it further entrenches a misplaced private sector model that wrongly supplants a public goods model by prioritizing executive salaries and buildings over people and ideas. The accompanying calls for ever more and better marketing strategies forget that these come at the expense of the very thing that universities have to offer: quality education and the production of knowledge.

If this argument against the business model is not compelling so far, consider the fact that business models for public education fail even on their own terms. They are not able to solve the very problems they have identified. From the point of view of the institution, business models are not mitigating any of the major pressure points faced by universities in the 21^st century such as the high cost of tuition or the seemingly perpetual financial crises faced by all but a very few (most often large public flagship) universities. Ohio University has arguably faced more years with budget cuts than without for close to two decades. From the point of view of faculty and student, the framing of the university as a business is an outright disaster. One of many examples of this is the shrinking of the tenured workforce. Data published in 2018 shows that the proportion of non-tenure track hovered between 30-50% of all faculty at R1 and MA granting universities.² The enormous expansion of non-tenure track faculty has been a national trend for some time, and it is directly tied to the business model of the modern university. So too is the problem of shrinking enrollment. Students and their parents have been persuaded that a university education is no more than job training. As tuitions rise while at the same time the value of education is normatively devalued in the national consciousness, it is no wonder that students and parents find higher education an expensive waste of scarce family resources.

“What the Market Will Bear”

 Clearly those principally affected by the rise of an untenured labor force are the non- tenured faculty or “instructional” faculty. They are often paid extremely low wages for high teaching loads offered to them via year-to-year contracts, if they get contracts at all. In economic terms, they cost less than they produce. They are easily fired should cash-poor universities need revenue. Ultimately the reliance on these workers affects all faculty and will change the character of the university writ large. If the logic of the university-as-business continues to play out, the increasing proportion of non-tenured faculty is a precursor to the end of tenure itself, and along with it, the end of academic freedom. The appeal of a low paid but highly skilled workforce that can be expanded or retracted at will according to financial “need” rather than educational mission emanates directly from the business model. Recently, Tulane University law school made national headlines for posting a job for a “volunteer adjunct” who would not be paid at all. Similarly, in 2018, Southern Illinois University sought to fill a “zero-time volunteer adjunct” position in the social sciences. While this volunteerism is not yet a widespread trend, universities appear to be testing the waters to see just how little they can pay people to teach. In the language of the market, teaching means nothing if teaching costs nothing. This is the situation that is created when the sole variable considered is financial cost. If “what the market will bear” is treated as a normative standard, it is only a matter of time before tenure can only be viewed as an impediment to a sound fiscal policy of low wages and higher output.

Executive administrators, on the other hand, have enjoyed unprecedented salary increases while offering few demonstrable success stories. In fact, executive expenses are one of the few places in the entire university where we see these kinds of flush budgets. Indeed, rising from faculty ranks to the administration is one of the few ways to get a meaningful raise in academia. High executive salaries are justified by the false logic that we are paying executives “what the market will bear.” This argument obfuscates the fact that these bubbles of prosperity have been created by those very executives themselves, insofar as they, along with boards of trustees, are the ones who control the compensation pools. By giving themselves the lion’s share of raises, executives have in fact created the highly inflated micro-economies in which executive salaries have become dramatically higher than those of faculty, which are then cited as the “market” which in turn governs the salaries of executives. The attempt to explain the disparity as a value- neutral effect of the market hides the fact that the market has a driver, and that driver is the executives and the boards of trustees. In short, the gross inflation of executive salaries is a result of their systematic valuation of their own work as more important than the work of teaching and research.

Neither has the business model been able to curtail rising tuition costs. States have abdicated their financial responsibilities to public higher education following the private sector logic that universities should be self-sustaining. And university executives, possibly related to the fact that they are reaping vast material benefits from this system, have failed to push back hard enough against this political idea. The University of Cincinnati, for example, receives state support to the tune of only 17 percent, relying instead on tuition dollars for a whopping 37% of their operating budget. At University of South Carolina, 50 percent of the budget comes from tuition.³ Tuition covers 39.7% of Ohio U’s total budget for 2018-19. Tuition, Room and Board covers 50.9% of Ohio U’s total budget, while the state’s share of instruction covers only 22.6% of its budget.⁴ Similar percentages have become the national norm. State disinvestment in public education forces universities to look elsewhere for funding. At schools like Ohio University, the solution has been to recruit more students who pay higher tuition. While Ohio University has touted “The Ohio Guarantee” as a lock on tuition for 12 semesters for students who commit to attend, it has not prohibited the university from continuing to raise tuition yearly. That is, while it protects some students, it does not address the overall problem of rising tuition costs and in fact may exacerbate it, a point made extremely well in a series of student protests in 2014.⁵

Faculty salaries can be among the convenient scapegoats used to explain the rising cost of tuition, because the financial reality of state disinvestment from public institutions is not widely known outside of academia. This partly explains why freezing or offering minimal raises, not replacing retired faculty, relying on relatively lower cost contingent labor, and passing things like the costs of healthcare and parking onto faculty can be accepted as solutions to budget deficits. All but 27% of Americans erroneously believe that state spending for public universities and colleges has increased or held steady over the past decade. In fact, in the aggregate, states have cut funding to public higher education by some $9 billion, when adjusted for inflation.⁶

Of course, unlike the general public, administrators know this reality. The question they face is where necessary cuts should come to make up for revenue shortfalls due to state disinvestment. And they are not wrong to think that the biggest slice of any university’s budget is instructional personnel costs.

This three-part article continues in Part 2 and Part 3.

Judith Grant is a professor of political science at Ohio University and a member of the AAUP chapter there. 

Endnotes:

[1] Rudy H. Fichtenbaum, “What’s New About Today’s Corporate University?,” Academe (September–October 2015); see also Jennifer Washburn, “Academic Freedom and the Corporate University.” Academe (January–February 2011).

[2] AAUP, “Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed.”

[3] John Warner, “Budgets Are a Reflection of Values,” Inside Higher Ed (December 1, 2019) and Leigh Claire LaBerge, “From Low Wage to No Wage,” Chronicle of Higher Ed (November 8, 2019).

[4] OU-AAUP White Paper, Fall 2019-2020, “Ohio University’s Budget Crisis”

[5] “College Matters: Trustees Dismiss Student Concerns About Tuition Model,” The Post, January 26, 2014.

[6] John Marcus, “Most Americans Don’t Realize State Funding for Higher Ed Fell by Billions,” PBS.org (February 26, 2019).