Category Archives: Economics

In a nutshell, here’s how we got to the point where most faculty members are non-tenure track or adjunct… One year, at any-university-you-choose, say, in 1980, there’s a student enrollment spike and the administration decides that it’s fine to expand the student body just a bit. Out goes the call to a handful of department chairs: you are hereby authorized to hire one or two adjunct teachers to handle the temporary influx of new students.

Now the department has the capacity to handle more students, or to cut down class sizes. So if the population spike goes away, no chair will willingly fire the new adjuncts. Fast forward a few decades. Over time these population spikes– or professors on extended sick leave or sabbatical or…– have happened more than a few times. Now the department has more adjunct faculty teaching so-called service courses than full-time professors. It’s established practice.

It’s almost impossible to imagine a dean, or a provost, much less a faculty chair, announcing that the (now) long-established practice of using adjuncts to teach many if not most undergraduate general education courses will be rolled back. That would mean that the university, always in dire straits financially, would have to hire lots of full-time faculty. There are plenty of people with Ph.D.’s who would love to have a job, of course (the university keeps churning out Ph.D.’s), but never mind.

Adjuncts, of course, can be great teachers, given training and support. But the slow, steady erosion of a university education system founded in tenured, full-time faculty has all sorts of ill effects. If you are an adjunct, can you keep up with your field? Can you conduct research or write? If you keep this background in mind, you’ll have the right historical context in mind when you read, “Universities Turn to Graduate Instructors to Clear Course Bottlenecks.”

I hate this idea that we are all always either happy or sad, positive or negative. Moods and emotions are moving targets. On the other hand I do think that it’s easy to get, well, crabby about the current state of education, or the state and education. The most narrow-minded technocrats seemed to have won a decisive victory. (One of the themes of my book is the way literature and writing were seen as correctives to the objective passions of an over-confident science.)

Don’t get me wrong. Technocrats are cool: they are the ones who figured out the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and my personal computer, to list only a few of my favorites. But an overly technocratic view of education tends to believe that something as intangible as learning can be measured as fully and as precisely as, say, rainfall. They don’t recognize the limits of objectivity, in other words. The current political Zeitgeist seems wholly trapped by this idea, determined to swamp us all in standardize testing and measures of all sorts.

A technocrat emphasizes administration over teachers, seeing the school as a factory, and the classroom as a machine designed to deliver education to the student, that is, to the consumer. The more I look for this sort of thinking, the more I find it, and the more intellectually bitchy I get. That’s why reading, “Author, innovator shares vision,” about Milton Chen, was so refreshing. Chen’s idea– to paraphrase very roughly– is that learning should occur in a big messy organic network, the very opposite of the well-oiled machine.

Chen might be too optimistic– I am not sure that finding and then using an IPhone application is a good measure of technological sophistication–but he is trying to use the potentials of technology to resurrect a very traditional notion of a liberal education as a life long endeavor (“K to Gray”). I just wish that writers like Chen showed at least some awareness of our current conditions, especially in the ways that class impacts technological access. His vision can’t happen if the gap between the rich and the poor keeps growing…