Thoughts on the Late Unpleasantness at the University of Virginia by Foresman

In recent week the Commonwealth of Virginia has been transfixed by the very public, very raucous, and very un-Virginia like events surrounding the firing and then rehiring of the President of the University of Virginia.

Among the criticism leveled at the Rector and Board of Visitors of the University of Virginia was a belief that the board, overwhelming composed of corporate types and influenced by the thinking of the Darden School, viewed the University as a business and not an educational institution.

I think that is a fair criticism of the University of Virginia and all Boards of Visitors all of Virginia’s Public Colleges and Universities.  Oh yes from time to time a non business person is appointed but their sway over the affairs of the particular Board they sit on is minimal.  Recently, Governor Bob McDonnell made the following appointments to various education Boards, the vast majority of them are in business.

On the whole they are not a bad lot, however the Commonwealth would be well served by having a more diverse composition on the Boards.  Here I do not refer to the racial or gender makeup, although I have doubt there should be more of both minorities and women on these boards, rather what they do with their professional lives.  We have no police chiefs, no Andy Taylor’s Sheriff of their county, a smattering of politicians, no housewives, or barbers, or small businessmen or educators.  It is important to have perspective on these boards for higher education can easily become captive to the vested interest of business or academia depending on the level of involvement by the members the board.

First and foremost Colleges and Universities are institutions of higher learning; they are not businesses.  To provide a broad based liberal education requires a broad offering of courses, of which some shall be more subscribed than others.  This does not mean they should not be efficient and have some means of measuring the ability of their instructors.

Colleges and Universities are by far very inefficient institutions of learning.  At too many universities the only measurement of how well a professor is doing by the weight and breadth of their published works in journals and manuscripts.  Unfortunately journals tend to be read only by those interested in the field, as are the manuscripts; in fact most academic journal articles and manuscripts are a more effective cure for somnambulism than conveying knowledge.

Another measure is how well a Professor teaches is often judged by their evaluations; the evaluations by their students; evaluation which can be viewed as either an objective evaluation or a popularity contest.  Unfortunately while many colleges and universities have attempted to devise a truly empirical means of measuring how well a professor teaches, most are flawed, and those touted by the administration are viewed with suspicion by the Faculty Senate and those touted by the Faculty are viewed with suspicion by the administration.  The students will let you know how well a teacher teaches by the number who sign up for their advance courses but then that is considered a beauty contest.

So which programs do you eliminate?  In the recent brouhaha at the University of Virginia part of the criticism of President Sullivan was she would not eliminate the Classics and German Departments.  While clearly they are not subscribed to the same extent as other Departments, in particular Commerce and Science and Engineering, they are a critical part of a broad based education.  

The questions for the Board of Visitors are those two departments worth it?  If solely based on business metrics neither would survive.  But if the measures is how they contributed to a broad based education an argument can be made that reading Petrarch in Latin rather than a translation allows the students to understand the nuisances of the author’s writings.  If one wants to understand the reasons for Germany’s aggression in World War One the ability to read Gephardt Ritter’s Sword and Scepter in German is a necessity.  I know you can read Ritter in English but it lacks the depth that comes from reading it in German.

But these are subjective judgments that are hard to justify unless those to whom you are making the justification are willing to accept subjective judgments.  Unfortunately that is not the case any longer, for our politicians, those who comprise the General Assembly want to see what is cost effective and reject subjective judgments.  There was a time, not many years ago, that when the then President of the University of Virginia Colgate Darden could assure the General Assembly all was well with Mr. Jefferson’s academical village and no one would question his judgment.

That has all changed and today without metrics, the General Assembly will merely reduced further their paltry contributions to the University and all other state supported institutions of higher learning.

But this is not to say that the Colleges and Universities are without sin—there are many aspects of Academia that demands attention and reform.  I shan’t go in to all of them, but are several I will touch upon:

• The rise of the academic bureaucrats—the administrators whose exalted positions demand that they receive large salaries far out of portion to what they do and their net worth to their College or University.
• The abuses of tenure; to with measuring the worth of professors not on how well they teach but rather on the heft of their publications.  There is no longer a need for tenure, or tenure as it has been structured in the past.
• Professors are hardly overworked.  On an average college campus a professor will teach two and on occasion three classes per semester.  Professors who are heads of Departments or have an endowed chair may teach only one course, most often to graduate students.  Most undergraduate teaching is left to adjunct professors or graduate assistants.

What these three items all have in common in money.  Money, that because of reduced state support to Virginia’s state supported Colleges and Universities, that must be collected from fees charged to the students.  From a legislators point of view why should state support to College or University X be increased when they have bloated and expensive bureaucracy, they have professors who do little or no teaching yet collect good salaries each month, and have other professors who have plenty of time to surf the web looking at porn (always in the name of academic research), playing golf, or sleeping with their office door closed because they teach so few classes and are available to their students for one hour on the fifth Wednesday of each month.

There is plenty of room for reform in Virginia’s public Colleges and Universities.  Here are some suggestions:

Categorize Virginia’s Public Colleges and Universities as being State Financed, States Supported, or State Flag Ship Universities.  Each of these would carry a different level of financial support for the Commonwealth:

• State Financed would receive more than 60% of their operating budget from the Commonwealth of Virginia and would be primarily focused on teaching and not research.  (Virginia State, University of Virginia at Wise, Virginia Military Institute, Christopher Newport, Richard Bland College, Community College System)
• State Supported would receive between 30 and 50% of their operating budget from the Commonwealth and whose mission would be undergraduate, graduate education and research.  (JMU, GMU, Longwood, Norfolk State, Radford University, University of Mary Washington, Virginia Institute of Marine Science, VT Extension, VSU Extension)
• State Flag Ship Universities would be affiliated with the Commonwealth of Virginia, would receive not more that 20% of its operating budget from the Commonwealth, and would be free of direct oversight from the Commonwealth.  (University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Old Dominion University, College of William and Mary, Virginia Commonwealth University)

• Reform the appointment process for the Boards of Visitors by reducing the power of Alumni and wealthy donors to garner seats on the Board of Visitors. 
  • Allow the Speaker of the House to appoint one member of the House of Delegates who is not a graduate of a particular College or University to the Board of Visitors. 
  • Allow the President of the Senate to appoint one member of the Senate who is not a graduate of a particular College or University to the Board of Visitors.  
  • Lastly mandate greater diversity gender and occupational background on the Boards of Visitors of each College and University.
• Reduce the layers of administrators by 20% and establish guidelines on the number and salaries of administrators. 
  • As a general rule no administrator’s salary should be greater than that of the Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. 
• Require that all faculty members teach a minimum of three course per semester; except those whose appointments are as a visiting professor, research or graduate professor, who course load would be determined by the Boards of Visitors.

None of these suggestions are panaceas; you will note I did not address the question of Tenure.  While clearly an area that requires reform, as Sun Tzu implied fight those battles you can win now; fight other battles when you can win.  Let’s get some reforms now and then go after tenure later.

It is time that the Commonwealth of Virginia demand that it’s Colleges and Universities be affordable institution of learning to its citizens.  Colleges and Universities are not businesses in the classic sense; they are in the business of education.  Like all businesses they should be efficient, free of bloat, and provide the best to their customers the students and their parents, but unlike classic businesses there are good reasons for allowing inefficiency in the pursuit of education.  A Classics department with four professors and four undergraduates a year may not be efficient but it adds to the breadth and depth of the educational experience.

Balance not purely a business approach is required.  It is time for balance not only in the governance of our public Colleges and Universities; but also in the quality of the education provided the students—ultimately how well that is accomplished will be how each College or University is judged.

Post Script:  While I have focused on the University of Virginia; the same underlying debate has occurred at my own Alma Mater, the Virginia Military Institute, where as I understand it from a Chronicle of Higher Education article the Dean of the Faculty has proposed limiting the numbers of individuals who may enroll in popular majors; eliminating the Physics, German Department as degree granting Departments; and changing the focus of the English Department from Literature to Rhetoric.  As I am in no way associated with the University of Virginia, I have chosen to focus on its recent problems.  When I have the appropriate information I may choose, if Colonel Lang will so permit, to comment on our Alma Mater.  Hank Foresman

 

Comments

[turcopolier]

Hank

I will be pleased to publish such an article. pl

[jerseycityjoan]

I liked this article, which was written in connection with what happened at UVA.

"A few weeks ago our president, Teresa A. Sullivan, was summarily dismissed and then summarily reinstated by the university’s board of visitors. One reason for her dismissal was the perception that she was not moving forward fast enough on Internet learning. ...

But can online education ever be education of the very best sort?

It’s here that the notion of students teaching teachers is illuminating. As a friend and fellow professor said to me: “You don’t just teach students, you have to learn ’em too.” It took a minute — it sounded like he was channeling Huck Finn — but I figured it out.

With every class we teach, we need to learn who the people in front of us are. We need to know where they are intellectually, who they are as people and what we can do to help them grow. Teaching, even when you have a group of a hundred students on hand, is a matter of dialogue."

I would think the author is right about online courses: there's no substitute for a real class, with a particular group of students being taught by an knowledgeable individual who's right with them in the classroom or lecture hall.

I certainly don't think online degrees are acceptable substitutes for real degrees. They can serve a useful role for continuing education and noncredit purposes.

I wish all the expensive lobbiests and cost-conscious people who praise all these expensive for profit schools and useless online degrees would be forced to tell us their real opinion of them. Of course virtually none of these people or their friends and relatives would have anything to do with such things themselves.

Education on the cheap is always meant for thee, not me.

[Cieran]

Hank, I applaud your work in preparing this article, and as someone who has spent half my long professional career in the faculty ranks of Research-I universities, I am impressed by how well you have presented the salient details of what is going wrong with public higher education.

But I do have to point out one whopper of an assumption you are making, and that is the assertion that faculty should teach three or more courses at a time. That might work at a purely-teaching institution, but as leading-edge research universities (e.g., what UVa is attempting to become), it would quickly prove impossible, and especially in those programs where extramural funding is needed to support graduate students, e.g., all the STEM fields.

There is a presumption that teaching is simple, and that the time involved is merely the time spent in front of a classroom. That presumption is easy to believe if you've never taught a university course, but it's dead wrong. For every hour I've spent in front of a class of students, there have been at least four or more hours spent in preparation, in office hours, in grading, and in staying current with the material so that students are learning up-to-date content.

So three classes = around ten hours per week in the classroom, which turns out to require a full-time job just on the teaching front. And since teaching constitutes less than half of a faculty member's responsibilities in a high-quality university (research and service are the rest), your proposal implies that faculty should work at least 80 hours per week if they want to do a good job in their work (and most do... deadwood is easy to find in academia, but it's a lot harder to find in top-tier universities).

And while some of this problem can be ameliorated with some help from the university, e.g., good teaching assistants, homework graders, etc., those sources of funding have been steadily decreasing for years as public education gets less "public" every day. Many TA's get their funding from the skim universities collect from external R&D funding, but if faculty are spending their entire work-week just covering their courses, they won't be successful at gaining R&D funding, so that's not a sustainable solution, either.

The root cause of these problems is that public education just isn't supported by the public all that much anymore. Top-tier public universities obtain a minority of their operating funds from state sources, and that fraction is steadily decreasing over time. So university administrators increasingly depend on overhead obtained from R&D grants (which is why STEM faculty spend so much time doing externally-funded R&D), or on donations from wealthy alumni, which all-too-often come with oft-unpleasant strings attached.

If we want high-quality public education in this nation, we need to be willing to pay for it, and our citizenry has decided not to provide such funding. All the rest follows until we reach the unfortunate situation we have today.

But for anybody who thinks that teaching in a university is easy work, then all I can say is "try it yourself and then we'll talk".

And parenthetically, I'll note that I don't do it anymore. Who needs 80-hour work weeks during the academic year, and three months of unemployment every summer?

[Hank Foresman]

I have taught at the collegiate level; both as a Teaching Assistant and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of History at James Madison University and Maryville College. You are absolutely right about the amount of time it requires to get ready for a one hour class--three to four hours of prep. If you examine closely I distinguished between professors, and I quote, "Require that all faculty members teach a minimum of three course per semester; except those whose appointments are as a visiting professor, research or graduate professor, who course load would be determined by the Boards of Visitors." In a backhanded way I was suggesting that we ought to return our Colleges and Universities to their core mission education by having master professors. I am the first to admit there will be differences between Science, Engineering, which require Professors to teach Labs in addition to their Classroom teaching; and the Social Sciences and Liberal Arts.

[David Habakkuk]

Colonel Foresman,

A point about the idea of a 'liberal arts education'.

In recent years, the United States, with my own country, Britain, in tow, has been successfully suckered into a war in Iraq, as a result of ignorance of history -- and ended up acting as Hessians for the Iranians. Again with my own country in tow, the United States is in the process of losing a war in Afghanistan -- as a result of setting war aims which anyone with any knowledge of the relevant history would have known were unachievable.

At the moment, we are happily engaged in trying to topple the regime in Syria, blithely oblivious to the possibility that what we end up with may be materially worse than what we have now -- again, through ignorance of history.

The study of politics, as the English philosopher-historian R.G. Collingwood argued in his Autobiography, published in 1939, ought, by its very nature, to have history at its centre. Moreover, as technical military considerations are commonly more significant both in making sense of contemporary politics, and of history, than is generally recognised, military history should be an important part of a correctly conceived political science.

Military history is a study best pursued by military men and civilians in collaboration -- a belief which was central to the creation by General William Richardson, then Commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, of the Soviet Army Studies Office in 1986. Its first director was a civilian, Dr Bruce Menning, and its first head of research, subsequently director, was your fellow VMI alumni Colonel David Glantz -- a, if not the, preeminent Western expert on the war in the East in 1941-5.

How anyone expects seriously to study military history without linguistic knowledge defeats me. For VMI to marginalise German would seem a stupid thing to do.

If these historical researches seem irrelevant to current concerns, this is not so. At the time when Gorbachev introduced the so-called 'new thinking' into Soviet security policy, almost all the Western intelligence and security studies community was at sea. One of the few places where they had an accurate idea of what was going on was SASO.

An interesting account by Jacob W. Kipp of the creation of the organisation -- which later became the Foreign Military Studies Office -- is available in the October-December 2005 issue of Military Intelligence.

(See http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/army/mipb/2005_04.pdf )

[turcopolier]

David Habakkuk, Hank F. et al

One of the great beauties of VMI as it has been was the insistence on solid core curriculum designed to provide "leavening" for young minds soaked in engineering, science and a spartan military life. Such a system produced many exceptional graduates. George Marshall, Leonard Gerow, and Sun li-Jen are examples. Without a solid Humanities component in the curriculum what can we expect to see in the future? BTW, I knew Dave Glantz well and I agree with your assessment of him. pl

[Chairman Miao]

At the risk of pushing the limits of PL's tolerance:

One: I have come to believe that the vast public does not want a University any more. It wants a Trade School. There is not much support for the idea of a small-l liberal education any more, especially now that most of the jobs which the liberally educated middle class might aspire to have been sent to the 3rd World or eliminated by technology.

Two: I suspect that Universities are coming under withering attack because they are the last centers of opposition to corporation control. The private-sector unions are now irrelevant and the public unions' backs are to the wall.

My background is as support staff at a flagship state university.

[Cieran]

CM:

Since you use the term "trade school" in your comment, would you care to define what you mean by that? In a previous thread on the UVa mess, I found myself uninterested in commenting because I often couldn't figure out what people meant, hence my question here.

Is a business school a trade school? Nursing? A university that awards degrees in K-12 education? A college of engineering? A creative writing program?

The term "trade school" to me implies a very narrow focus, e.g., learning to become a diesel mechanic. I don't think of this term in any pejorative sense, because the world needs plenty of good diesel mechanics, and nurses, K-12 teachers, etc, etc.,

Hence my curiosity about particulars of meaning. Thanks in advance for your consideration.

[Cieran]

Colonel:

The curriculum you describe sounds like heaven to me.

I've long believed that the world doesn't need better technology as much as it needs better humanity, and I don't see a way towards the latter without a deep and rich appreciation for the humanities. Here's hoping that it's still possible to gain the kind of quality education you earned at VMI.

[Chairman Miao]

to Cieran:

Trade school vs. University: What I observe is that the goal, of both the students and the higher ed institutions, is revolving more and more around immediate employability after graduation. (This ties in with the rise of the just-in-time work force: employers don't want to develop their staff any more, they want plug-in parts.) Some states are even talking of tying state funding to evaluations like these.

The classical ideas of education -- learning how to think and learn, how to write, how to debate, how to lead a good life, learning a basic background across all science and history, and having a good grounding in one's own civilization and the ability to look at the civilizations of others -- all that is getting shoved aside, at least at the public institutions.

I've shared laments with a few others whose undergraduate days were 35-45 years ago: college, for us, was an intellectual adventure. (I did a technical degree in computer science, but I also learned about the craft of writing, about literature, about economics and politics, about the arts, and I started on a decades-long journey of amateur study of history.) But from what we read in the voices of contemporary students on the net, most students see college as a set of hoops to jump through to get a credential, preferably while partying all the time.

[Cieran]

CM:

I guess I'm more sanguine than you about the possibility of gaining a higher education with depth and breadth. Universities don't always make it easy, but generally speaking, curriculum requirements for graduation are a floor, not a ceiling, i.e., students can take more courses and add more diversity to their intellectual efforts. The most important constraints are time and money, but youth have plenty of time.

Many of my most well-educated students have taken as much as 50% more course credits than what is required for graduation -- they viewed their education as an investment for their futures, and acted accordingly.

And as far as the money side of the question, the view that the goal of higher education should be immediate employment is not a problem that it limited to universities -- it's merely the projection into academia of the emerging notion in the west that the marketplace should constitute the basis for our beliefs and our morals. That's an ugly worldview, but it isn't confined to academia, and in a period of economic retrenchment, parents sending kids through college are entirely justified in wanting a return on investment as soon as possible.