BY MICHAEL THADDEUS

A depressingly familiar trend in higher education has been the gradual erosion of ladder faculty positions and their replacement by positions with no prospect of tenure. The former tend to be relatively well-paid and secure; the latter, undervalued and marginal. Though it ranks among the richest American universities, my own institution, Columbia University, has not entirely resisted this trend.

Between 2010 and 2020, while the number of liberal-arts undergraduates at Columbia rose by 10 percent, and the number of ladder faculty in the Arts & Sciences at Columbia edged upward by less than 6 percent, the number of “Special Instructional Faculty” in Arts & Sciences — consisting largely of lecturers hired for five years or less — swelled dramatically, by 54 percent. In Columbia’s humanities departments, such faculty now outnumber the tenured faculty, making the term “Special” something of a misnomer.

The obvious reason administrators have preferred to hire such faculty is simply to save money. A lecturer is typically paid a fraction of a tenured professor’s salary—at Columbia, perhaps about one-third as much. Yet faculty have long suspected that power, as well as money, is at stake. Untenured faculty, being in a more precarious position, are more susceptible to pressure from administrators and more likely to do as they are told. That Columbia administrators regard this as a boon was recently confirmed by a smoking gun.

The smoking gun was revealed by journalists at the Columbia student website Bwog.com, as part of its recent release of a batch of leaked emails between top Columbia administrators. When the emails were written, the date was July 2020, and the COVID-19 pandemic was still uncontrolled, with no vaccine yet in sight. Columbia instructors had been promised they could teach online in fall 2020 if they wished, and the vast majority chose to exercise that option. Yet the Columbia administration—perhaps mindful of the situation at Harvard and Yale, where undergraduate enrollments plummeted by over 20 percent, with a corresponding loss of tuition receipts—was having second thoughts. An email from the account of President Lee Bollinger suggested that pressure might be exerted on faculty to teach in person.

A few days earlier, in a public message to the Columbia community, President Bollinger had expressed himself thus:

Faculty response to new models of teaching necessitated by the pandemic has been tremendous. We want to support faculty in every way we can…the University will not prescribe an approach for individual faculty members. Faculty will have leeway to teach in person, online, or some combination of the two, in consultation with their schools.

When writing in private to his inner circle, however, Bollinger said something strikingly different:

…the instructional faculty for the Core is largely composed of non-tenure-track individuals, which means we should have greater leeway to expect in-person instruction, if that’s what we deem best.

The appearance in both passages of the same word, “leeway,” is telling. When Bollinger uses it in public, it evokes the freedom of faculty to make their own pedagogical decisions. When he uses it in private, it means just the opposite—the right of administrators to tell faculty what to do.

It is eye-opening to observe the reactions of other top administrators to Bollinger’s message. In discussions among the university leadership, one might expect a dean of the faculty to advocate for the interests of the faculty, and to object to any abridgement of their prerogatives. Yet Columbia’s dean of the Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Amy Hungerford, did nothing of the sort. Rather, she said mildly, “I feel comfortable letting faculty know how things look…and asking them to think afresh.” She made no attempt to defend faculty authority over matters of pedagogy, nor did she rebuff Bollinger’s thuggish insinuation that untenured faculty would be more vulnerable to pressure. Only one participant in the email thread, Columbia College dean James Valentini, took strong exception to Bollinger’s words, describing them as “unethical” and adding, “My ethical concerns are only compounded by the singling out of non-tenure-track instructors.”

In the end, the administration’s bark proved worse than its bite. Dean Hungerford wrote to Arts & Sciences instructors asking them to reconsider the possibility of teaching in person, but no severe pressure was exerted, and the vast majority of undergraduate courses in fall 2020 remained entirely online. After the immense wave of COVID-19 infections and deaths that began in October 2020, everyone must have been relieved that the administrators did not get their way.

Still, the episode is instructive, for it lays bare one of the major motives behind administrators’ preference for hiring untenured faculty—namely, that they are more readily intimidated into compliance with administrators’ wishes. In the leaked email, that is precisely what President Bollinger says, in so many words.

Michael Thaddeus is professor of mathematics at Columbia University.