

University labour strife underscores cost of tenured academics - ilamont
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/education/university-labour-strife-underscores-job-security-plight-of-contract-faculty/article23276935/

======
mazelife
This reads like a press release written by York University administrators, or
pretty much college administrators everywhere. Some facts that offer a useful
corrective:

1\. Rising college costs have massively outpaced inflation in the last 2
decades [0]

2\. Salaries for tenured professors have not seen anything even close to that
kind of growth in the same time period [1]

3\. Most institutions actually employ _fewer_ full-time faculty than they did
20 or 30 years ago, shifting more and more to part-timers and adjuncts who get
paid a pittance [2]

So...college is massively more expensive than it's ever been, but full-time
professor salaries have not risen significantly and there are actually fewer
of them overall. So where has the money gone?

In the US, I don't know that there is a complete answer on that, but there are
definitely some suspects:

* offsets to deal with slashed state funding (although federal funding has risen significantly in the same time period)

* university endowments

* university administrators [3]

* building sprees and tons of shiny new facilities

[0] [http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-
tu...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-13/college-tuition-in-
the-u-s-again-rises-faster-than-inflation)

[1]
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_316.10.asp)

[2]
[http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.as...](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_315.10.asp)

[3]
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-14/bureaucrat...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-
paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs)

~~~
smeyer
Thanks for the useful information, but do you have a source for the university
endowments claim? Are their schools where tuition funds go towards expanding
the endowment? At my alma mater it was the other way around (endowment made
billions a year and paid some of that out to operate the school) and I thought
it was similar at most schools with sizable endowments.

~~~
glesica
> at most schools with sizable endowments.

Well there's your problem, most schools don't _have_ sizable endowments.
Endowments for rich schools have performed fairly well over the last couple
decades, not so much for those with smaller endowments. So if you use tuition
and fee money on things that might have previously been funded through
endowments while you attempt to build (or re-build), it's really the same
thing.

~~~
brudgers
The tuition and fees are being used for things that _have traditionally been
funded by endowments_ rather than for things that _have been previously funded
by endowments_. Schools with small endowments are expanding via fees in areas
where other schools have used endowments to expand in the past.

For example, Ben Hill Griffin gave money to the University of Florida [endowed
school] to expand their football stadium. Down the road in Orlando, University
of Central Florida used student fees to build an on-campus football stadium.
It did not have one previously -- nor a football team to fill it until
relatively recently (the DI team was also built largely based on student
fees).

All that construction requires fundraising and together generate lots of
administrative positions, and that's where rising fees and tuition go.

------
nraynaud
I very often want to call BS on the research at universities, there is
absolutely no link between having new insight and being a good explainer. I
would gladly create teaching places without any research like there exist
research labs that do absolutely no teaching. And then judge the teachers
exclusively in their ability to get the students to improve their skills. No
grants proposal, no publish or perish, no negotiation over authorship order,
no peer review game, only how to explain stuff, how students learn, what's the
best way to convey a concept.

~~~
VLM
If you see teaching as a kind of persuasion, a prof with no ability to
persuade will not be bringing in the grant money, and no grant money means no
work, no work means no publish, and publish or perish means you get no grad
students, no possible administrator or chair post, no cool presentations
leading to awards, no job offers from a better (higher paid) school... its
just not looking good.

Another way to look at it is you get lots of prestige by leading the field,
and you lead the field by teaching people at conference presentations.
Admittedly the people being taught are fellow academics not freshmen, but
still...

Finally you could survive in a tenured job with no motivation to be leaders,
but given the overproduction of PHDs ranges from merely 10x to as much as
1000x as many as necessary in some liberal arts, the odds of a slacker being
hired when only the top 1% can get a tenure track prof job are extremely low,
so there is that selection bias against slackers indicating very few profs
will be slackers.

~~~
holyguacamole
I'm surprised that you seem to think that "slacker"/"non-slacker" is an
intrinsic immutable property of a person rather than a situational response to
incentives. I think most critics of tenure would argue that granting life long
job security can and does cause "non-slackers" to adopt "slacker" behavior
since they no longer have to compete for their job. The fact that someone
worked hard to get tenure does not imply that they will continue to be
productive when they have no competition.

~~~
Fomite
It should also be noted that tenure does not guarantee funding. A tenured
faculty member who adopts "slacker" behavior will likely see their lab/group
eviscerated, more "service" obligations heaped on them, and their job
progressively becoming less fun.

Additionally, "tenured"/"non-tenured" is not a single binary switch in terms
of prestige. Even with tenure there's things to be striving for.

------
alricb
Note that all cited universities are located in Southern Ontario (Toronto and
Hamilton). Tuition has gone up in Canada, but not as high as it has in the
States, not by a long run, and it has stayed quite low in Quebec, at least for
residents ($2750/year).

I know that at the University of Montreal adjuncts have been unionized for a
long time, and they have a bit of job security; there are no multi-year
contracts for a given course, but they get priority on courses they've already
taught.

One issue is that adjuncts used to be mainly professionals who'd teach one
course per semester on the side. That was fairly common at my engineering
school back in the early 2000s. Since it was secondary income, they did not
see much point to unionize or fight for job security.

But now you have a lot of people who end up trying to make a primary living
through adjunct teaching, and that old model or part-time teaching doesn't
really work for them.

------
Fomite
Two things should be noted:

1\. The research funding system in Canada is very different. In the U.S., a
number of research-focused faculty can be expected to be bringing money _into_
the university, especially those outside the humanities.

2\. For some reason, "make a teaching-focused tenure track" never gets brought
up, which makes me skeptical that this is merely those pesky tenured
professors and their research gumming up the works.

~~~
_of
_1\. The research funding system in Canada is very different. In the U.S., a
number of research-focused faculty can be expected to be bringing money into
the university, especially those outside the humanities._

Isn't this the case in Canada too?

~~~
tjl
It's true in the sense that at least some of the faculty members will be
bringing in a lot of money into the department. In my department, I know that
there's a few professors who either from large funding grants or contracts
bring in the majority of research funds. The university (and consequently the
faculty and department) gets a percentage of that funding for its own budget.
The rest of the faculty in the department combined don't bring in nearly as
much money as those few with large research grants.

------
mc32
I think this divide is only going to get worse with the adoption of edex and
the like. First tier universities will continue to attract faculty and
students, meanwhile second and third tier institutions will see a
deterioration in their fortunes as students migrate to online education. It's
not there yet by the stage is getting set. Any reprieve for adjunct faculty
will likely be short lived.

So strong institutions will be on stronger and the weaker ones will lose out.
Not sure what that means for the balance of hard sciences vs humanities, by my
guess is that the less bankable humanities will lose out in money and
influence.

------
drpgq
Here's the latest sunshine list data for York University:

[http://surlyhamiltonian.blogspot.ca/2014/04/york-
university-...](http://surlyhamiltonian.blogspot.ca/2014/04/york-
university-2013-sunshine-list.html)

Shoukri is at C$478K

------
jessaustin
More on adjuncts:

[http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-
late...](http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-
latest/2014/2/6/adjuncts-fight-foralivingwage.html)

------
enupten
Does anyone know how bad this is in fields other than the humanities ?

