May 06 2009

Lessons from the Longest Strike

Category: Post-strike Discussion (2009) — Bob Hanke @ 8:06 pm

Equity, ethics, academic freedom and the employment of contingent academics

By Linda Muzzin (excerpted from Academic Matters, May 2009)

The recent York University strike by contingent faculty has provided a focal point for discussion in my evening graduate course, “Faculty in Colleges and Universities” at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education this winter.

Among us are practising professionals, including a contingent faculty member, a college administrator, corporate lawyer, two high school teachers, and a physician, so it is not surprising that the ethics of professional practice, which I teach, are often on the table. For example, how do we reconcile the need of the administrators to be able to pick up the telephone and call a contingent faculty member to fill in for a class left suddenly without an instructor just before the class starts tomorrow with the reality that these “just in time” faculty are poorly paid and routinely treated as second-class citizens? And what are the ethics of an administrator determining which contingent faculty to recruit to teach a course?. Is the most eligible chosen, the most available or, perhaps, the admimistrator’s favourite? The increasing unionization of contingent faculty might be expected to address such inequities through a seniority system. But isn’t a seniority system incompatible with hiring the “best and the brightest”?

It helps that I recently led a research project that involved interviewing 160 administrators, as well as both tenure-stream and contingent faculty at Canadian universities and that I am currently involved in a similar study in Canadian colleges. As a feminist and anti-racist, I take every opportunity to emphasize the equity aspects of the situations we discuss, in the terminology of mainstream ethics, “social justice.” We distinguish “equality” ( based on individual rights and choices) from “equity” (that prescribes structural interventions when individuals and groups are not on a level playing field in terms of power).

For example, in the first half of the course, we review the faculty demographics that show women are not making it to the upper levels of the academic hierarchy to the extent their numbers would warrant. We also note the growth of the contingent faculty group, which contains fewer white men, proportionately, than there are in the tenured and tenure-stream groups. We deplore the failure of Statistics Canada to gather data on contingent faculty because we would like to examine this inequity. Why isn’t this data collected routinely? Is it merely an oversight? Or is there a conspiracy to hide inequities in postsecondary institutions? Or is contingent faculty just a phenomenon that we didn’t expect to be around much longer than the downsizing of the 1990s? Or is it, as at least one administrator in the class has suggested, that contingent faculty are a small, ephemeral group of people who don’t appear on any institution-wide lists because they are only around for a short time?

We know this last claim isn’t true, because contingent faculty members were a large enough a group at York University to have supported the recent strike. How large is the group? In the U.S., estimates vary, depending on who is included, but experts agree they are well over half of all faculty. Non-tenured academic positions are bewilderingly diverse, ranging from permanent affiliations (teaching stream and clinical faculty) through contractual (full-time term with or without benefits and administrative responsibilities) to sessionals or part-timers (paid by the hour for classroom time only). Arguably, these groups face similar problems with respect to job security and academic freedom, so they can be referred to collectively as “contingent.” This word denotes “of uncertain occurrence” and “incidental to,” in this case, the academic enterprise. The Oxford dictionary explains that a contingent is composed of “troops contributed to form part of an army.” This definition is particularly informative for this discussion, in that military service, distinct from other types of professional work, implies obedience to authority and a lack of autonomy that is necessary in order to function successfully.

To read the complete article, click here.

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May 04 2009

University Finance and the Financial Meltdown

Category: Book Reviews,University Finance — Bob Hanke @ 10:05 am

The Universities in Trouble (Or, Why we Need A User’s Guide to the Budget Crisis at York University like A User’s Guide to the Budget Crisis at UNC-CH)

by Andrew Delbanco (excerpted from the New York Review of Books, 56(8), May 14, 2009)

1.

Since the financial meltdown began to accelerate last summer, the world has changed utterly for colleges and universities just as it has for everyone who had not been stashing cash under the mattress. Along with failing banks, auto manufacturers, and insurance companies, universities have been making headlines—especially those whose gigantic endowments (Harvard’s was approaching $40 billion before the crash) have sharply declined. Last year, politicians and pundits were complaining about the unseemly wealth of such institutions. This year, alumni are getting e-mails from beleaguered presidents assuring them that Alma Mater will somehow ride out the storm.

The headlines tend to focus on the collapse of institutional investments, which, indeed, has been spectacular. No one quite knows how much has been lost. Led by the example of Yale’s chief investment officer, David Swensen, whose Pioneering Portfolio Management is described by the chair of the Yale investment committee as “the best book ever written on managing institutional investment portfolios,” endowment managers had been shifting large sums toward illiquid assets such as private equity partnerships, which typically require periodic infusions of fresh capital, and whose current market value is virtually impossible to assess. This and other versions of “an unconventional approach to institutional investment” (the subtitle of Swensen’s book, first published in 2000 and recently reissued in revised form) worked very well during the boom years, bringing home double-digit returns.

Today, leading universities are reporting endowment losses of 20 percent or more, but some informed observers think that the true figure, at least in some cases, may be closer to 50 percent. Actions that would never have been contemplated a year ago, such as selling severely depreciated assets in order to meet cash obligations or issuing bonds at punitive interest rates, are no longer unheard of. And in the current market, would-be sellers and borrowers are finding few buyers or lenders.[1]

To read the rest of this review, click here.

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May 02 2009

Share Your Strike Memories on TVO’s The Agenda

Category: Post-strike Discussion (2009) — Bob Hanke @ 1:40 pm

This Week’s Topic: York at Middle Age

York University is celebrating its 50th birthday this year and on Wednesday, May 6, 2009, The Agenda will be discussing the university as it enters middle age. The producers would like to read your York story or anecdote. Whether it’s about casualization and precaritization, your feelings about being legislated back to work and the new collective agreement, or how you are reworking your courses and/or commuting to work to rule so as to resist returning to a “normal” working, teaching and learning relationship with students, please share.

May 02 2009

May Day Special on Surviving the Meltdown

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 10:18 am

This special is for you to broadcast on public transport. Spread the word and check out the whole project at Interference Radio.

Apr 27 2009

Report Back from U.S. Conference of the Network for Academic Renewal

Category: News — Bob Hanke @ 5:45 pm

After the Crash, Scholars Say, Higher Education Must Refocus on Its Public Mission
By David Glenn (excerpted from the Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2009, Volume 55, Issue 32, Page A10)

The economic crisis weighed on the minds of the 200 scholars who gathered here this month for a national conference of the Network for Academic Renewal, a project of the Association of American Colleges and Universities. But even as the federal government announced that 660,000 more jobs had been lost in March, several of the speakers here saw — or perhaps grasped for — reasons for hope.

The recession, they said, might be a time for colleges to renew their implicit contract with the public, and for faculty members to reassert their standing as professionals.

Many of the assumptions of the dizzy boom years seem suddenly untenable,” said William M. Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in a lecture. “In post-crash America, there will be more intense demands for scrutiny and accountability as to the effectiveness of academe at fulfilling its public mission.”

If colleges — and their faculty members — want to maintain their autonomy in the face of such scrutiny, Mr. Sullivan said, they should demonstrate that they are committed to education as a public good. The public must be persuaded, he said, that colleges are not insular and self-absorbed, and that diplomas and academic laboratories have not been reduced “to the status of commodities.”

A similar warning was sounded by Gary Rhoades, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, during a plenary session.

Some academic institutions, Mr. Rhoades said, have abandoned their public missions as they have pursued tokens of status and wealth.

“The chasing of revenue, the chasing of students who can pay higher and higher tuition, the chasing of technology-transfer money, and the status seeking that comes from trying to recruit ‘better’ students — all of that has taken us away from the idea that education is a path for upward social mobility,” Mr. Rhoades said. “All of the evidence is that over the last 15 or 20 years, we have actually been increasing social stratification with what we’re doing in the academy.”

Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Rhoades, and several other speakers also called for a renewed idea of the professoriate as a profession. But the speakers offered a range of different ideas about what faculty professionalism actually requires.

The most austere vision came from Neil W. Hamilton, a professor at the University of Saint Thomas School of Law and director of its Thomas E. Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions. Mr. Hamilton argued that the heart of professionalism is upholding norms and policing one’s peers. Just as law students are required to take courses in professional responsibility, Mr. Hamilton said, graduate students should be required to study research ethics.

Faculty members can justify and protect their autonomy, he said, only if they have a shared understanding of what counts as good and bad behavior.

“A professional cannot defend what he or she does not understand,” Mr. Hamilton said. He said he doubted that most of his colleagues could coherently defend tenure and faculty autonomy in a five-minute conversation with a skeptical trustee or state legislator. “The profession carries an ongoing burden,” he said, “to justify academic freedom, peer review, and shared governance.”

Oddly, in all this talk of academic ethics, faculty autonomy, and external interference, no one mentioned the issue of the moment: Ward Churchill’s successful lawsuit against the University of Colorado.)

In his lecture, Mr. Rhoades, too, called for new faculty members to be more deeply socialized into the ethos of the academy. But he suggested that it is the structure of the academic work force, and not any lack of ethics training, that is the most serious barrier to faculty professionalism.

Adjuncts, Mr. Rhoades said, are almost never given the time, training, and job security that would allow them to develop professional identities at a particular college. He called for a new commitment to full-time, tenure-track jobs.

“You cannot have a fully engaged faculty if less than a third of them are in secure-track positions,” he said. “Would you want a work force in the health-care field that was just, ‘Oh, you know what? You can have part-time positions.’?”

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Op-Ed of the Week:  End of the University as We Know it by Mark C. Taylor.

Blog Post of the Week:  More Drivel From the New York Times by Marc Bousquet.

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