BY HANK REICHMAN

As the academic year comes to a close all eyes are now turned toward the Fall.  Will campuses be able to open up again?  Will all teaching remain remote or will it become hybrid?  And, heck, what about college football?  But there are even larger long-term questions.  The economic crisis engendered by the pandemic has laid bare what most faculty members have known for some time: higher education — at all levels — is not in good shape.  Now in the wake of the virus people are girding themselves for the prospect that more than a few institutions may not survive and at those which do “belt-tightening” measures will be painful.  Yet, at the same time, it will be difficult to simply continue with the same disastrous policies — endless tuition hikes; adjunctification; administrative bloat, etc. — that brought us to this precipice.  There is a growing sense that we are at a turning point, but it isn’t yet clear in which direction we will turn.

I don’t have answers to the many questions we all have about the pandemic, higher education, and our future.  But others are taking stabs at it.  So in lieu of writing something of my own, I offer a reading list of pieces that I have found helpful, mostly because they point generally in a good direction but in a few cases because, well, they illustrate starkly the kind of flawed thinking we should avoid.  So here is my list.  Note that some articles may, alas, be behind paywalls.

1) A good place to start would be UCLA historian and academic senate chair Michael Meranze’s piece, “The University in a Moment of Intersecting Crises,” written just a couple of weeks into the lockdown on the blog that he and Chris Newfield run (the piece was also reposted to the Academe blog).  Meranze, a member of AAUP’s Committee A, concludes with the big question posed by the crisis: “are colleges and universities–and those who work in them–going to continue to see who can triumph in the struggle for private prestige?  Or are they going to work to help produce a revitalized, and international, public good?”

2) On the same blog Newfield has been publishing a series on “Our Converging Crises,” with four entries so far, that while focused to some extent on the University of California, is well worth reading by everyone — as is almost everything Chris writes.  I especially liked the third entry, “For the Recovery, We Need to Spend Like Our Lives Depended On It” (also reposted to the Academe blog), but the others are worth reading too — here, here, and here.  In addition, Newfield’s April 9 piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Only Free College Can Save Us From This Crisis,” makes the strongest argument I’ve read yet for that solution, situating it in the context of the current pandemic.

3) Corey Robin’s brilliant piece of May 7 in The New Yorker, “The Pandemic Is the Time to Resurrect the Public University” should not be missed.  Robin focuses on the City University of New York, where he teaches, and dedicates his piece to the memory of the 23 CUNY students, faculty and staff so far known to have died in the pandemic (he names them at the end).  His final paragraph is worth including here:

Public spending, for public universities, is a bequest of permanence from one generation to the next.  It is a promise to the future that it will enjoy the learning of the present and the literature of the past.  It is what we need, more than ever, today.  Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a pandemic, simply because colleges and universities need the cash, is a statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could ever tally.

Also focusing on CUNY, Matt Brim, who teaches at the College of Staten Island, wrote a terrific op-ed piece that echoes Robin’s points well.  In “Not a Novel Crisis at CUNY” he writes:

Before the urgency of the health crisis ends, let tuition at CUNY end.  Before COVID-19 kills more of our faculty, let CUNY commit to doubling its full-time, tenure-track faculty and to providing our well-qualified adjuncts clear routes to those new jobs.  Before COVID-19 becomes a normalized health disaster, let us disrupt New York’s educational disaster by calling it by that very name.  For as CUNY’s 275,000 students and 45,000 instructional faculty and staff know, our crisis is anything but novel.

4) The Chronicle of Higher Education is not always one of my favorite publications but they have been publishing a number of good articles on the crisis in the Chronicle Review, which includes longer-form pieces.  I’ve already mentioned Newfield’s piece on free college.  Several others have now been collected in an e-booklet, Labor and Academe in the Time of COVID-19, available for download (only for subscribers? I don’t know).  Among the more helpful pieces included are “After Coronavirus, the Deluge,” by Jacques Berlinerblau, professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University (the subtitle says it all: “Administrators have been waiting for the opportunity to finish what they started. Watch out.”) and “Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine,” by Anna Kornbluh, associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  The collection also includes several excellent, if at times painful to read, articles on the straitened circumstances of graduate students and contingent faculty, now exacerbated by the pandemic.  In “How the Coronavirus Will — or Should — Transform Graduate Education,” two Brown University grad students argue that “given the multiple crises confronting higher education, the only way to save graduate education in anything like its current form is to alter the structures of university governance.”  They continue,

Only a university restructured along radically democratic lines, along with robust state investment in both research and public education, has any chance of fixing the related problems of high tuition, mounting
student debt, and exploitative employment.  Yet we cannot expect that administrations will voluntarily cede the authority they have painstakingly accumulated: Winning a democratic university will require concerted cross-institutional, cross-rank, solidaristic organizing.

Two contingent faculty members at University of California at Santa Cruz, where for months before the pandemic graduate student instructors were waging a wildcat strike demanding housing support (see Michael Meranze’s March 7 blog post for a fine analysis), argue that “Now — Yes, Now — Is the Time for Contingent Faculty to Organize.”  Amen to that!

5) At Santa Cruz, Associate Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning and Professor of Literature Jody Greene has been “Imagining the Post-Pandemic University.”  She notes that “There’s plenty of predictions of what the university might look like on the other side of the pandemic rupture, and nearly all of them fall somewhere on the spectrum from dire to dystopian.”  But she sees that “The pandemic has required every educator in the world, with very few exceptions, to focus attention not only on what but on how we teach.”  As a result many are “trying techniques that experts have long advocated but that many instructors have hesitated to try due to pressing workloads, the ongoing demands of research and service, or a desire not to be told what to do in our teaching by experts”  Hence she finds reason to hope that “If the post-pandemic university incorporates even some of these long-known and well-researched techniques for better supporting students and their learning, something will have been salvaged from this unprecedentedly disastrous time.”  Elsewhere in the University of California system officers of the Berkeley Faculty Association this week offered a set of principles for that campus (and others) going forward.

6) Not included in the Chronicle collection is a piece published in that journal this week by Francois Furstenberg, an historian at Johns Hopkins University.  “University Leaders Are Failing” is a powerful cri de coeur that, while focused on Hopkins, will resonate with faculty at most other research institutions and many non-research ones as well.  This is truly a must-read.  Take these key passages:

The crisis should serve as a moment of clarity.  Even as they continue enriching themselves, university executives have revealed themselves ineffective in one of the most basic corporate responsibilities: managing financial risk.  In a few short weeks, astonishingly wealthy institutions across the country were reduced to slash-and-burn strategies to maintain their solvency.  Having consolidated power in their hands over the last generation, leaders of America’s wealthiest universities lacked financial reserves — while also squandering the reserves of their communities’ trust and goodwill.

A research university’s central mission is teaching and research and the production of knowledge.  As faculty, students, and other essential constituencies have become sidelined, so have academic values and priorities. . . .

As the financial tsunami washes over the landscape of higher education, we urgently need to ask whether we have the right leaders in place.  Are university presidents, their cabinets, and their hand-picked boards of trustees — all of them so detached from the day-to-day work of teaching and research — in a position to confront the hard choices that lie ahead with wisdom and prudence?  Can they act with their eye to the long term?  Can they resist using the current crisis to enact further assaults on the university’s central mission and its norms of governance?

If not, are we prepared to advocate for a change?

See also “Colleges ought to furlough administration, not teaching,” by the professors who wrote the recent book How College Affects Students.  They conclude: “Assuming student learning is the ultimate goal of higher education, we believe there has been a lack of attention on the empirical evidence when considering the financial decisions institutions are making in light of COVID-19.”  Ya think?

7) But the “realists” are having their say too.  The Chronicle describes Paul Friga as a clinical associate professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who “leads numerous strategic-planning initiatives and co-founded ABC Insights, a consortium of universities working to make higher education more efficient and effective.”  He has now published several post-virus pieces, of which “How to Address the Elephant in the Room: Academic Costs” may be taken as typical.  Rather than offering the kind of bold approaches advocated by Newfield, Robin, and others, Friga calls on us to “make strategic shifts.”  While acknowledging (somewhat) administrative bloat, he advocates cuts to the academy’s core mission, as if this were somehow something new and not yet tried in, say, Wisconsin.  Yesterday, Colorado law professor Paul Campos used Friga’s piece as something of a foil in a brief blog post entitled “The corporatization of American higher education and the looming financial crisis.”  In his piece Friga wrote,

Once hard decisions have been made about academic offerings, high-level estimates of required faculty can be calculated with existing load levels, class sizes, and student-to-faculty ratios.  Each of these items should next be analyzed as part of the second key question: How productive can our faculty be?

The question about fair loads for faculty members has been much debated.  Many argue that the traditional professorial model of tenure, lighter teaching loads, long vacations, and sabbaticals was formed when salaries were lower in higher ed but has been maintained even though salaries have risen.

Campos understandably calls this gobbledy-gook and responds:

Um, about that:

Average salary for all full-time faculty, in 2019 dollars:

1970-71: $81,030

2018-19: $88,703

That 9.5% increase can be contrasted with the 33.3% increase in the average salary of American workers over the same time — and of course the wages of American workers have stagnated radically in comparison to corporate profits.

But that’s not the full story in regard to faculty salaries, not by a damn sight.

Note that the figures above are for full-time faculty. (Note as well that there are fewer full-time faculty now in American higher education, relative to the total enrollment, than there were in 1970).  The percentage of faculty who are part time increased from 24% to 40% over roughly this same time frame (1975-2015), and of course part-time faculty are paid peanuts in comparison to their full-time colleagues. In other words, it’s fairly certain that the average salaries of the people who teach in American colleges and universities have actually declined in real terms over the last half century.

Some other people are doing OK though:

Mean college president salary in 1983-1984: $152,380, in 2017 dollars.  The highest salary of any college president in 1983-1984 was less than $300,000, again in 2017 dollars.

Meanwhile, in 2017 81 college presidents were getting more than $1,000,000 per year in compensation.  Median compensation for 585 private college presidents was $437,000, while for 278 public university presidents it was $489,000.

So over roughly the same time frame during which the salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education have declined, those in what I believe is referred to in corporate American as the “c-suite” have more than tripled, more or less.

Sounds like it’s time to fire some adjuncts and food service workers.

In case you missed it, that last sentence is ironic.

8) An administrator with a more sober and sensible approach is Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College, a small HBCU in Dallas.  His recent piece for The Atlantic, “Colleges are Deluding Themselves,” is a welcome relief from the bottom-line is everything mind-set of too many of our educational “leaders.”  A few years ago I heard Sorrell speak on a panel.  I was impressed.  I still am.

9) At the University of Chicago a faculty member offered “practical” advice in the pages of the campus newspaper to those “Preparing for the Academic Job Market in an Economic Recession.”  Her recommendations to “buck up, buckle down, and get to work” were soon skewered in a response by a graduate student as “condescending at best.”  He wrote:

The overwhelming trend in American academia since the 1970’s has been the devaluation of academia as such, with university administrators pursuing policies to consolidate or discontinue a plethora of programs and departments while enacting draconian budget cuts that never seem to affect their salaries. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of academics occupy the academy only very precariously. Beyond general distortions are those that have always been part of it: only five universities had a black faculty of at least five percent in 2007. The consequences are, naturally, regressive: faculty, adjuncts, and overworked grad students are hence expected to navigate a publish-or-perish environment while simultaneously being burdened with increasing teaching and administrative responsibilities. . . .

The kicker is that all of this has occurred at the same time as undergraduate tuition rates and administrators’ salaries skyrocketed all over the country. . . .  Vanishing funds and opportunities for departments, graduate students, and early career scholars have been appropriated to line the pockets of a vestigial university bureaucracy sustaining itself on this underpaid labor and the exorbitant tuition undergraduates pay for it. The stratospheric rise in administrator pay tracks perfectly with the casualization of academic labor: the new model is to pay adjuncts and grad students a pittance to teach what tenured faculty used to. When some universities cite economic reasons while cutting only humanities departments, and others receive $130 million donations to their economics departments, we need to realize it was never actually about economics, but instead enriching a select few while kicking down the ladder for the rest. . . .

We cannot afford to let universities weaponize this crisis to justify further academic shock therapy.  This advice, then, is that you should work harder and expect less.  A tenured professor like Hoang need not worry, much less an elite university administrator.  COVID-19 is merely highlighting the structural failings of the American academy that the rest of us knew all along.

10) Three articles in the (London) Times Higher Education caught my attention.  “US publics face survival battle and reconnection with local mission” points to the challenges public institutions, especially non-flagships, face, although the solutions suggested by an Ohio State University professor in the piece seem a bit questionable.  More interesting was “Is this the crisis higher education needs to have?” authored by two Australian scholars, which demonstrates that the kinds of problems we face in the US can be found, albeit in slightly different form, in other English-speaking countries.  “Like it or not,” they write, “universities are in for some major renovations. The big question is whether their senior managers and governance committees will be up to the task.”  Maybe not, since in Australia and the UK “most public universities look more like bloated conglomerates than focused intellectual-capital and information-dissemination institutions that can help the economy and society navigate the future. The typical university needs as many administrative as academic staff to deliver an ever-greater array of courses and social programmes, let alone satisfy government demands for closer and closer alignment to politically motivated compliance structures.”  Moreover, “What is clear now is that the strategies developed by most universities to deal with the environmental pressures they have been facing were expedient, short term and based on marginal, incremental adjustments.  Over time, these short-term fixes have exacerbated long-term structural problems”.(sound familiar?).

On a different topic, Paul Basken worries that in the present context “Trump drags US universities into virus battle with China.”  Here’s the lede: “The Trump administration is pulling US universities into its coronavirus-driven excoriation of China, warning of Chinese attempts to steal research findings that could help the country reap the political reward of being first to find a vaccine.”  Exaggerated government concerns with Chinese espionage threatened academic freedom well before Trump was elected, as the AAUP’s 2017 report “National Security, the Assault on Science, and Academic Freedom” demonstrated.  But the efforts intensified last year, prompting 21 scholarly organizations, including the AAUP, to sign a statement of concern about the ethnic profiling of Chinese scholars issued by PEN America.  Now the pandemic — and Trump’s sordidly pathetic effort to pin the blame for his manifest incompetence on the Chinese — is exacerbating the problem.

11) Of course, the attacks on science and expert knowledge more broadly that prompted the AAUP’s January statement In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education continue unabated during the pandemic.  Indeed, the Trump administration and its Congressional allies are, if anything, escalating their often absurd rejection of science.  Hydroxychloroquine, anyone?  In April, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson highlighted “The Dangerous Conservative Campaign Against Expertise.”  Another Post op-ed, however, argued, “One upside of the pandemic? Americans are listening to experts again.”  Similarly the director of the UK’s Science Information Centre believes that “Science will withstand the coronavirus lockdown backlash.”  I hope they’re right, but I have my fears.

12) Finally, I would be terribly remiss not to acknowledge, first, the absolutely essential “Coronavirus Resource Page” on the AAUP website, which is a constantly updating source of useful information and practical guidance for faculty, and, second, the many terrific posts on this blog dealing with the COVID-19 crisis, especially Aaron Barlow‘s continually thoughtful pieces, especially on the challenges posed by the shutdown for teaching and learning.  These are must-reads.