Let me reiterate! Campus Housing is an auxiliary service because it is not central to our teaching mission and it is offered on a fee-for-service basis. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In 2014, The Washington Post ran an article that reported that “there were 87 colleges across the country that require full-time students to live on campus their first year of college.” Interestingly, The Post did not indicate their source of information. I checked the catalogs of 86 of the 87 institutions. I couldn’t check the catalog of one of the institutions because it closed in 2016 due to low enrollment and lack of funds. It no longer maintains a website. What I discovered about the other 86 institutions was quite informative.
This photograph was taken May 18, 2005, showing Damage Controlmen aboard USS Belleau Wood (LHA 3) instructing U.S. Naval Academy Midshipmen on proper firefighting techniques in Belleau Wood’s Well Deck. The Midshipmen spent two weeks aboard Belleau Wood as part of their summer training program. Official U.S. Navy photograph by JO2(SW/AW) Chad A. Bricks. The image has been released into the public domain by the U.S. Navy. Image courtesy of JO2 Bricks, U.S. Navy, and Wikimedia Commons.
In their catalogs, all 86 of the remaining institutions stated that they required all full-time, first-year students to reside on campus. However, 56 of the institutions indicated that students could petition for an exception to this rule. The 30 institutions that did not indicate any policies for exceptions included two experimental colleges, the five federal-military academies, seven Catholic, male religious-vocational colleges or seminaries, and 16 Orthodox Jewish rabbinical yeshivas or seminaries. Students at the military academies are considered members of the armed services and are on-call 24/7/365 in case of an emergency. Their training must take that into account. Catholic religious-vocational institutions duplicate the living conditions that their graduates must undertake in their church service, i.e., a celibate, monastic life. Orthodox Jewish Collegiate Yeshivas and Seminaries are restricted to young, unmarried males, who must dedicate themselves solely to their studies. Older or married Jewish students desiring to be rabbis attend a Kollel. The 56 institutions that permitted petitions for exceptions included one Tribal college, three public colleges, three state-related military academies, and 49 private institutions.
The Best College Editions of the 2017 U.S. News and World Report indicated that 13 colleges self-reported 100% of full-time, first-year students lived on campus. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In 2017, U.S. News and World Report published an article with self-reported institutional information that the magazine had gathered for their annual Best College Report. One item in the report was the percentage of full-time, first-year students who reside on campus. In 2017, they listed only 13 colleges which reported 100% of first-year students living in college housing. All but one of these 13 institutions were from The Washington Post list. When I checked the catalog of the one college that wasn’t included by The Post, I discovered that they require married students to live off-campus. Apparently, they either had no first-year married students or they misrepresented their data to the U.S. News and World Report.
The other 12 institutions were divided into two groups of six colleges each. The first group consisted of the five federal military academies and one experimental college which, accordingly to its catalog, did not accept petitions for waiver of the residency requirement. The second group of six colleges consisted of five private institutions and one state-related military academy. All of these six accepted petitions for waiver of the residency requirement, including the state-related military academy. Is it possible that they had no waiver petitions for 2017, or that they didn’t grant any that they did receive? I think “not.” Could the 100% figure be due to round-off error? How likely is that?
Although campus housing has many benefits for students, the biggest benefit may be the fact that for years, it was almost always a moneymaker for colleges. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
As I stated in my previous post, the research is overwhelming. Students who reside on campus tend to do better on average and get a more complete educational experience than students who reside off-campus. Is there any other reason why colleges would want students to reside on campus? Prior to the year 2000, there was a very simple explanation. Many schools could make money on residence halls. This is why campus-housing outsourcing firms lined up at the doors of colleges to offer their services. There was money to be made in campus housing. As Mark Twain said in his 1892 novel The American Claimant, “there’s gold in them thar hills.”
For many years, residence halls were the easiest and cheapest buildings to construct on campuses. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
For many years, residence halls were among the easiest and cheapest campus structures to build. The designs were fairly standard and construction was straight forward, not like specialized academic spaces. Once built, major modifications were not as frequent as updates to other campus structures. All of my full-time employment experience in the academy was prior to 2009. During the decades leading up to Y2K, a college with a good credit rating could fund construction costs for residence halls through low-interest bonds.
The floor of campus housing has cracked under American higher education and is threatening to swallow it whole. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
If you have been reading my posts about the 21st-century crises facing American higher education, you know that I believe, as a whole, it is in a state of turmoil and chaos. However, working on this post has made me realize that the once-solid ground under campus housing has cracked wide open. How deep into the resulting fissure have colleges fallen in the past decade? For the four decades, I was intimately involved in the planning aspects of campus housing and in the oversight of campus housing managers. During that time, if campus housing was handled properly, the institution did not lose money in this area.
A graph of the Median Cost per Bed in thousand $ from 1999 to 2015. The data is taken from the magazine College Planning & Management. Graph created by the author of this post using Libre Office spreadsheet.
This is no longer the case. In my research for this post, I discovered the Annual College Housing Reportpublished by the Magazine College Planning & Management. Paul Abramson was in charge of the collection and analysis of the data for the report. In his 2008 report, he concluded that the “…cost of residence hall construction is rising and rising rapidly.” In the same report, he continued by stating that the median residence hall built in 2008 would cost almost $26M.
In subsequent reports, by 2013, the median cost of a new residence hall had risen to more than $39M. In 2019, it is estimated that the median cost of a residence hall will be close to $56M. Those numbers blow what we were doing in the 20th century and the very early years of the 21st century right out of the water.
In 2020, it is estimated that the median cost of a bed in a new college residence hall will exceed $100,000. Is a scene similar to this worth $100,000? Is it economically viable for the institution? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
The last residence hall construction project which I helped plan was completed in 2006, two years after I left that institution. The planning process began in 2003. This residence was designed to house 192 students. The total cost was $3.1M. Our cost of $16,146 per bed was less than half of the median cost per bed of all new residence halls during the period 2003 to 2006.
According to Abramson’s data, our residence hall should have cost us approximately $11.5M. We built it for $3.1M. How could we build our residence hall for less than one-third of what other colleges were spending? There were two primary reasons.
The first was the fact that our whole institution had come together and adopted a Facilities Philosophy. Three of the main tenets of this philosophy were the following:
We guarded our available resources tightly. All financial expenditures supported the mission of the institution. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Enlightened frugality: [Our] University operates within a world of limited resources. All financial expenditures for the physical plant must support the mission of the institution. This requires that all solutions to physical planning be comprehensive, with nothing considered in isolation. Issues of building placement, traffic, and parking, engineering systems, natural systems, and aesthetics must be woven together to form a tapestry of buildings and spaces that foster a university culture. Buildings can and should be attractive, but not ostentatious. They should be functional, and not pretentious. They should be designed and built to last, but should not look or feel austere. Buildings and outdoor spaces should exhibit grace, dignity and elegant simplicity.
Form follows function! All campus spaces must be designed and constructed with an express purpose in mind. Planning comes before design or construction. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Form follows function: This expression is an architectural maxim that connotes the idea that all spaces, indoor or outdoor, should be designed and constructed with an express purpose in mind. Learning spaces should be designed and built-in terms of the learning that will occur in those spaces. Community spaces should be designed and built with community in mind. This tenet places the priority on the planning and the delineation of intended uses or purposes for given spaces. Planning comes before the design and construction of the space.
The campus should have a common architectural language that can be expressed differently in different venues. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Common language: [Our] University should have a common architectural language that should be readily seen throughout the campus. Although there should be common themes, these ideas may be expressed differently in different venues. Each new venue should tie into the existing campus vocabulary, but at the same time should be encouraged to bring in new expressions.
Building off these common tenets kept us on the same track and reduced the possibility of wild deviations in designs across campus.
We developed solid working relationships with vendors that understood us and worked with us. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
The second reason we were able to hold construction costs in check was that we had developed solid working relationships with two architectural firms, three construction firms, and numerous vendors who understood us and worked with us.
The story of the 192-bed residence hall exemplifies how the tenets of our facility philosophy and working relationships helped us. This new residence hall intended for juniors and seniors was a deviation in design from our typical residence hall. Instead of central hallways with two- or four-person suites on either side, the interior was based on a new design. The exterior of the facility fit in with all of our other buildings on campus. The new vocabulary introduced was a series of balcony hallways overlooking central lounges. Six-person suites were accessed from the balcony hallways. This design answered the desire of our juniors and seniors for more communal, gathering spaces.
We budgeted not only for the initial costs of buildings but for the ongoing costs of operating them. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In addition to construction costs, we normally budgeted annual maintenance, housekeeping, and utility (MHU) costs of 10% of total construction costs, or $310,000 in this example. Since this residence hall cost $3.1M, financing it with a 2% bond meant that we could pay off the entire initial cost plus accrued interest in eight years with annual payments of $450,000. We could also pay off half of the entire MHU costs for those eight years. By maintaining an occupancy rate of 95%, in another four years, we paid off the entire MHU for all 12 years. From that point on we were making more than $400,000 annual profit from this building.
Since we normally assumed a life expectancy on residence halls of 20 years before a major renovation was required, this profit accumulated for eight years. At the point we needed a major renovation, we would reset the clock and start the process over again. In my 40+ years in the academy, I only saw two residence halls decommissioned. One was converted to faculty offices and the other was condemned and demolished to make room for a completely new residence hall.
This photograph is a picture of the Niagara River, upstream from the falls. It is almost at the point of no return. The river is picking up speed as it flows toward the falls. The rapids start around the bend in the background. The photograph was taken by Yinan Chen on May 3, 2013, and distributed on www.goodfreephotos.com. This image has been released explicitly into the public domain by its author, using the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication. Image courtesy of Yinan Chen, goodfreephotos.com and Wikimedia Commons.
American higher education as a whole is speeding toward more white water ahead. The current is running too fast for anchors to work. Some colleges are “up the creek without a paddle” and heading for the giant waterfall. Other colleges have supercharged engines onboard that can possibly keep them out of harm’s way if the captain applies the engines at the appropriate time and turns the rudder in the correct direction.
It’s happened again. I’ve run out of time and space to finish my discussion of outsourcing, auxiliary enterprises, and the sale of institutional assets. I willcontinue my discussion of auxiliaryenterprises next week in my post, The Commercialization of American Higher Education – Part IV.
Only a few, chosen ones, the best of the best may enter into Nirvana. Enter faculty and enjoy your rewards on your terms. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In a previous post A New Millennium – The Same Old Story, Part I, I introduced the topic of Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities as one of the current crises in the academy. In the short note about these problems, I referenced an article written in 2001 with the intriguing title Paradise Lost: How the academy converts enthusiastic recruits into early-career doubters. In the almost two decades since that article appeared there have been hundreds of articles lamenting the doleful and declining conditions in the academy for all faculty, not just the early recruits, but even the seasoned veterans.
Paradise Lost. Adam and Eve expelled from Eden. An etching by Gustave Dore from a Dutch Bible. As a faithful reproduction of a two-dimensional work of art in the public domain, this image is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Jan Arkesteijn and Wikimedia Commons.
My first reaction to the article’s title was one of affirmation. I thought I understand the authors’ frustration with the impression that faculty as a whole had lost access to the Garden of Eden, the Land of Milk and Honey. However, the more I reread Milton’s tragic epic the more confused I became. The allegoric allusions between the Biblical creation story and the plight of modern university faculty made less sense to me.
A 16770 line engraving of John Milton by William Faithorne. As a faithful reproduction of a two-dimension work of art in the public domain, it is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Jfhuston and Wikimedia Commons.
In his 1674 version, Milton begins Paradise Lost – Book I with a verse that is often referenced and quoted:
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat, Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime. And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark Illumin, what is low raise and support; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men.
Where did that truck come from? I was minding my own business and it just knocked me down and ran me over. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Having read the Trower, Austin, and Sorcinelli article many times, I don’t get any sense that they are attempting to “justify the ways of God to men.” On the contrary, they are blaming fate and the evil administrations of universities for taking away the riches of which they had dreamed and for which they had worked so hard. I find no sense of contrition or admission of wrongdoing on the part of the faculty that have been expelled from paradise.
The gates to paradise have been closed to all faculty. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
I selected this article to introduce the topic for a number of reasons. The first reason was very personal. The article was based on the authors’ presentation at the 2001 Conference on Faculty Roles & Rewards, held February 1–4, 2001, in Tampa, Florida. The three authors of the article, Cathy A. Trower, Ann E. Austin, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, were invited by Gene Rice, director of the American Association of Higher Education Forum on Faculty Roles & Rewards to make a combined panel presentation at the Forum’s annual meeting.
A divided opinion within the audience with faculty cheering it, while administrators and trustees panned it. Image courtesy of Presenter Media
I was at that Forum and I remember their presentation and the mixed response it received from the audience. The faculty side of the crowd loved and cheered the presentation and its conclusions. The administrators in the audience viewed the presentation with semi-veiled skepticism. A couple of trustees with whom I spoke after the presentation expressed undisguised disdain for any thought that faculty had an unalienable right to Nirvana and that trustees were in any way or form complicit in destroying paradise.
The day the AAHE folded was the day the music died. Higher education lost a great resource. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
I think I missed only one of the dozen Forums on Faculty Roles & Rewards sponsored by the AAHE before it folded in 2005 due to lack of support from the higher education community. In my mind that was a sad day for American higher education.
The American Association of Higher Education was the only membership organization in higher education that was fully open to everyone involved in higher education. It embraced graduate students, faculty, student affairs professionals, administrators, trustees, the staff of higher education organizations, government officials, journalists, higher education commentators, and funding sources.
The AAHE was a forum for airing disagreements. Sometimes those disagreements became heated. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In the end, its diversity was probably the prime reason for its downfall. It wasn’t specialized enough. Many faculty thought student affairs professionals and administrators had nothing to offer them. Student affairs professionals and academic administrators used different languages. Trustees became quickly frustrated with the bickering between the groups. Graduate students were only interested in finishing their degrees and getting jobs. The government officials felt belittled and badgered for more money for education. Commentators and journalists found cheaper ways to get the stories they needed for their articles. The funding sources only heard cries for more funds and saw little appreciation for their prior gifts.
In spite of its obvious problems, I still believe the AAHE was the best higher education association of the 20th Century. It was a one-stop shop for the most recent research on higher education topics and practical solutions to higher education’s most troublesome problems which had been tested in the crucible of real applications.
I had a soft spot in my heart for the AAHE. It was a great organization. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I had a soft spot in my heart for the AAHE which impacted my choice of the introductory article. I was privileged to make presentations at ten AAHE conferences: one Annual Meeting; two Technology Conferences; two Faculty Roles & Rewards Forums; and five Assessment Forums. I was invited to make one presentation at a Faculty Roles & Reward Forum and one at an Assessment Forum. For that Assessment Forum, my presentation was designated the principal offering of a given time slot and I had my picture in the conference program. I felt honored to have the opportunity to present an assessment research project design to an audience of over 2,000 higher education professionals at one time. The other eight AAHE presentations went through the normal vetting process by which conference presentation proposals were judged.
I was privileged to serve on two panels reacting to presentations by keynote speaker Gene Rice. Image courtesy of Presenter Media
The invitation to present at the Faculty Roles & Rewards Forum came from Gene Rice. Six months after the AAHE conference where Trower, Austin, and Sorcinelli presented their research findings, Gene Rice was the keynote speaker at a Faculty Development Conference sponsored by the Council For Christian Colleges (CCC). This organization was the predecessor to the Coalition for Christian College & Universities (CCCU). In that intimate setting of approximately 80 faculty members and administrators from 50 Christian colleges, Gene made three plenary presentations over the three-day conference. The format for the conference called for a structured panel response and an audience free Q&A sessions after each of Gene’s talks. I was scheduled to be on one of those panels. However, when at the last minute a panel member for another talk had to withdraw, I was asked to sub on that panel also. Thus, I had the opportunity to comment on Gene’s work twice during the conference, in addition to a presentation that I made on some research that I did on faculty salary models and scales within the CCC.
This conference was not the first time that I had met Gene Rice. Due to his close association and work with Ernie Boyer, Gene spoke once at Messiah College. Ernie was an alumnus and a long-time trustee of Messiah College. However, whatever I said at the CCC Faculty Development Conference must have impressed him. He sought me out at the luncheon on the closing day of the conference and invited me to present at the next Faculty Roles & Rewards Forum. I told him I would think about it, and 30 seconds later I agreed to do it.
As early as 1970, discussions were beginning about where faculty allegiance and hearts were. Were faculty more likely to be loyal to their institution or more committed to their discipline? The answer wasn’t even close. The overwhelming majority of faculty felt more loyalty to their discipline than to their institution.
There are several reasons for this. The first is the discipline was their first passion. They have spent years immersed in the discipline, training and straining to reach its heights. They see the institution as a means to the end. It is a necessary evil to achieve their goal of climbing to the summit of the discipline.
I raise a glass to toast and honor my discipline. It has nurtured and sustained me when others have deserted me. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
The second is expressed by James Dixon (pseudonym of a professor in the humanities at a college in the South) in the Chronicle of Higher Education December 2015 article Loyalty, Schmoyalty: What do you do when your devotion to your institution is not reciprocrated?. Dixon in a vindictive diatribe decries the “corporatist administrators”, “bitter colleagues”, and the “faceless abstractions like departments and colleges” that inhabit higher educational institutions. [Italics mine]
No more! I finished with those things. From now on, I will only do what is absolutely required by my contract or benefits me or the people that I care most about. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Dixon summarizes the main points of the article, in the middle of it with the following paragraph:
“But at this point in my career, my priorities have changed. I simply decline to do anything for my department or institution that: (a) interferes with my family life, (b) isn’t strictly required by my contract, or (c) does nothing to benefit me or the people I care about most.”
Senior faculty should leave the grunt work of spinning the mouse cage wheels to the junior faculty. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Dixon goes on to state that senior, tenured faculty should concentrate on the things that can reward them with love and respect: their family, their discipline, congenial colleagues, and the process of teaching. Leave all the grunt work like committees [Italic emphasis, mine] to the junior, non-tenured faculty so that they can reach the point in their careers where they can concentrate on the really important things. [Italic emphasis, mine]
Faculty work hard the meager pittance that they receive from their institutions.
As a means to an end, institutions do provide faculty with monetary rewards in order to “make a living for oneself and one’s family.” Over the past half-century, there has been much discussion about this. Returning to Gene Rice and why he asked me to present at the Faculty Roles and Rewards Forum, my presentation at the CCC conference was on some research that I had done on faculty pay.
At this time, as a group, the 80+ CCC institutions were fairly uniform. They were generally small. The average enrollment was about 1,200 students. They averaged just under 100 full-time faculty members. Although a few of them were experimenting with non-traditional education and graduate education, most were almost exclusively traditional, residential, liberal arts and sciences, undergraduate colleges.
Traditional faculty ranking system: Top step – Full Professor; second place – Associate Professor; third place – Assistant Professor; not on the podium – Instructor. Image courtesy of Presenter Media
In one way that the CCC institutions resembled the rest of higher education was the fact that more than 97% had a traditional ranking system for faculty: Instructor, Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor. Only two institutions in the organization did not have faculty ranks.
With the exception of All 4-Year Publics and 2-Year Privates, the CCC institutions mirrored the IPEDS data for Institutions with Tenure Systems. Image from NCES Data and Data collected by this blog’s author. The graph was created on Libre Office Software by blog’s author.
There were small differences between the CCC institutions and higher education in general related to the question of faculty tenure. In 1995, according to AAUP statistics, approximately 35% of all faculty were tenured or on tenure-track, while 33% were part-time faculty and almost 20% were graduate students. However, the AAUP statistics also indicated that 65% of all full-time faculty were tenured or on tenure-track. College Board data indicates that 92% of public four-year institutions had tenure systems, while 66% of private four-year institutions offered tenured.
The 1995 picture at CCC institutions was slightly different. The percentage of all faculty that were part-time was just over 40%. Since very few of the CCC institutions offered graduate programs, less than 1% of faculty were graduate students. Just over 37% of CCC institutions did not offer tenure at all, mirroring the College Board data for private four-year institutions. At the CCC institutions, just over 50% of all full-time faculty were tenured or on tenure-track, which is less than the percentage for all institutions from the AAUP data.
Annual negotiations over salary may carry the connotation of begging for more from the boss. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
One key aspect of my research was the question of whether institutions used a faculty pay scale or relied on annual negotiations or a negotiated starting salary and fixed annual increases. Similar data is not readily available for all four-year institutions. For the CCC institutions in my data set, 97% had fixed salary scales of some sort. Only 2% relied on a negotiated starting salary with fixed annual increases, with the other 1% resorting to annual negotiations.
In my survey, I found that 80% of CCC institutions claimed they had no disciplinary differentials in their salary scales. This egalitarian approach seems to be much different from the general higher education approach. Most likely it is an expression of the faith-based, Biblical ideal of equality and reverence for everyone, and the common service for the Kingdom.
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians 3:28, KJV)
The results of the annual College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR) salary survey show significant differences by discipline in salaries for faculty with the same rank and experience across all of higher education. Salaries for business and finance faculty average twice the salaries for humanities and social science faculty. Overall, the salaries at CCC institutions ranged from 30 to 70% of the salaries listed in the AAUP or CUPA-HR surveys. CCC faculty saw their teaching as a ministry to which they were called.
For all of the institutions that indicated that they had a fixed salary scale, they described it in terms of ladders or sets of stairs. They all began with one uniform base salary. The differences occurred in what institutions used to determine an initial salary and annual increments.
In my survey, I asked about items that went into determining a faculty member’s initial salary. Every institution indicated that a faculty member’s academic experience, academic degrees and credentials, and starting rank were included as factors in starting salaries. Only 25% of institutions included a factor for professional experience outside the academy. As noted earlier, 20% of CCC institutions factored an individual’s discipline into the salary equation. In all such cases, this factor was positive for a few in-demand disciplines, while there were no subtractions for the many disciplines with lesser demand.
Even in good economic times, a quarter of the CCC institutions had some economic trouble, and another quarter was very strained. Data collected by blog’s author, with graph created on Libre Office software.
I next asked about annual increases. In the decade from 1985 to 1995, the national economy was generally good and inflation had cooled off after the flame up of the 1970s. There was only one downturn around 1992. Therefore, I asked during the decade 1985 to 1994, how many times were salary increases given. Within my survey universe of CCC institutions, 50% gave increases every year, 25% withheld salary increases once, 15% withheld salary increases twice, and 10% withheld increases 2 or more times.
The next set of questions dealt with the factors that went into determining the amount of the increases when they were given. Every institution indicated that they gave an increase for the extra year of service and any promotion in rank that occurred during the preceding year. In addition, 60% of the institutions said that they gave credit for being awarded tenure.
One of the hot buttons in faculty salary and reward circles of this period was the question of merit pay. Of the CCC institutions, 50% said that they rewarded meritorious service with a monetary award. Most of these (42% of all CCC institutions) offered these rewards as one-time bonuses, while the remainder (8% of all CCC institutions) gave the faculty member a step reward, which in effect carried over to succeeding years.
The final set of questions in my survey dealt with whether institutions took inflation into account in salary increases and, if so, how did they handle it. Of the 90% of CCC institutions that regularly gave annual increases (7 or more times in the decade 1985 to 1995), a significant majority (70%) treated the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) as an adjustment to the previous year’s salary, which meant it carried over from year to year. The remaining institutions (30%) credited the COLA as an adjustment to the base salary only. Over the years, this had a negative effect on faculty salaries in keeping up with the cost of living.
The final question returned to the question of the compressed nature of CCC faculty scales in light of the tendency toward egalitarianism. As a Chief Academic Officer, I can guarantee that it was much easier for me to hire an entry-level faculty member rather than a senior faculty member. This was particularly true if the senior faculty member was coming from a public or non-sectarian four-year institution. Our entry level salaries compared much more favorably to other institutions than did our senior-level salaries. The last question asked whether annual increases were applied equally across the board, or were adjustments made by rank. Not surprisingly, egalitarianism won out. More than 80% said increases were always equal percentage-wise across the board. Only 20% said that occasionally adjustments were made by rank, in order to honor senior faculty.
It might not have been as dramatic as God speaking to Moses via the burning bush, but still, God calls faculty to CCC institutions. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
After presenting this data, my colleagues from public and non-sectarian institutions expressed surprise and pity. They could not understand how CCC institutions could attract quality faculty under these conditions. My answer was that we couldn’t attract them. They had to have a sense of calling from God, and that His Spirit did the convincing.
The next crisis facing American higher education with which I will attempt to deal is The Commercialization of Higher Education.
The topic of “Adjunctification of the Faculty” has turned out to be a giant can of worms. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Really, I didn’t plan this! When, I saw that the first topic of my series of problems in American higher education turned out to be the “Adjunctification of the Faculty“, I knew it going to be complicated and involved. It wasn’t until I started writing this post did I realized how really complicated and involved it was, and how difficult it was going to be to write this post. It has turned out to be a gigantic can of worms.
Junctification: So much has been written – So much to read – So much work to do – So little time to do it!. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Where does one begin? In mathematics, we were taught that there were two places to begin to address a problem. The first was to find what others had done and written concerning the problem. In terms of the idea of adjunctification of the faculty, I found the first usage of the term only dated back to the 1980s. However, since its introduction to educational jargonese, much has been written about it. I had a great deal of reading and study to do on the subject.
Adjunctification: Too new and too specialized to be included in the dictionary. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Returning to my mathematical roots, the second place to begin trying to address problems was to define our terms. To understand the concept of “adjunctification of the faculty” let’s start with a definition. Since the term “adjunctification” is a very recent addition to educational jargon, I didn’t find one dictionary which included it.
Thus, we should probably start by looking at the definition of adjunct, the root word of adjunctification. The term adjunct has been used in the English language since the 16th century. It is derived from the Latin word adiungō, which means to “to join”.
An adjunct faculty member often feels like a homeless, second-class citizen in the academy, living out of a cardboard box. Image courtesy of Presenter Media
In many dictionaries, the word adjunct means “something adjoined or added to the essentials, usually as a supplement or subordinate.” In common usage, it often carries the dismissive or disparaging connotation of something that is less important or not essential.
If we were to rely on this common dictionary definition, an adjunct faculty member is someone who is added to the teaching staff of a college in a temporary or subordinate capacity. Unfortunately, as is often the case, higher education experts have added extra terminology to the discussion, which only confuses the matter more. One such term is contingent faculty.
AAUP definition of Contingent Faculty: Any individual who is non-tenure track faculty. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
The word contingent is also a word which is loaded with negative connotations. One of its primary meanings is “occurring only if certain unpredictable conditions exist.” One of the premier higher educational organization, The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), has stepped forward and planted its flag on the following definition of contingent faculty: “non-tenure track faculty, in all their various forms.”
AAUP has set itself up as the organization to certify quality higher education in America. Image courtesy of Presenter Media
Since its founding in 1915, The AAUP has laid claim to the role of the standard bearer for academic freedom, shared governance, and quality in American higher education. In its mission statement, it sets itself up as the primary organizations which defines the fundamental professional values and standards of higher education, in order to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.
The AAUP also functions as a labor union pressing for faculty rights. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In its mission statement, it also puts on a labor union hat. It asserts its duty and responsibility to the job of promoting the economic security of faculty, academic professionals, graduate students, post‐doctoral fellows, and all those engaged in teaching and research in higher education.
There are two bodies of research. The first establishes the fact that many part-time faculty are conscientious and are excellent instructors. The second establishes the fact that for some students alternative modes of instruction such as online education can be as, if not more, effective than the face-to-face mode.
It is a given that Face-2-Face instruction is the BEST! We can ignore other research because it’s wrong. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Much of this research is discounted or ignored by higher education commentators. Most of the articles on contingent faculty are written from the presumptive position that the best education is provided by full-time, tenure-track faculty in a face-to-face setting.
Given this starting position, it is natural to argue that it is in the best interest of everyone to increase the number of full-time, tenure track faculty and the availability of face-to-face contact between students and these full-time, tenure track faculty. Even if this statement is true, that does not prove or guarantee that its inverse is true. Thus we can’t assume that decreasing the number of contingent faculty and eliminating alternative modes of education will provide the best education possible for all students.
The collection of educational data in the United States has a spotted history. One of the few specific responsibilities given the federal Department of Education at its founding in 1867 was the collection of annual higher education statistics related to the number of approved colleges or universities offering degrees, along with the total number of enrolled students, graduates, and faculty. Prior to WWII, there were few organized attempts to count or track the number of faculty members employed by American institutions of higher education by classification. Since the end of WWII, the AAUP has been at the forefront of the effort to count and classify instructional staff at American institutions of higher education. More recently the U.S. Department of Education has reentered the fray with its annual surveys associated with the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES). The federal efforts are now coordinated through the efforts of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the statistical, research and evaluation arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
Data from the AAUP. Graph constructed by the blog’s author using an Excel Spreadsheet.
Since the late 1960s, the AAUP has been tracking and decrying the increasing reliance on contingent faculty in American higher education. For example, the AAUP released a copy of the graph to the right, representing the changes in the headcount of tenure-line (full-time tenured and tenure track faculty) and contingent faculty (all other instructors).
Although I am convinced the information presented in the graph is accurate, it is potentially none the less extremely misleading. A quick glance at the graph could leave one to believe that in 2015, only 30% of the classes taken by American college students were being taught by tenured or tenure-track faculty, while 70% were being taught by contingent faculty.
First of all, we don’t have that data. No one is collecting the data nationally on who is teaching whom. In the early 1980s, I was collecting that data for one particular college. That college was a small, baccalaureate-level, liberal arts college with no graduate programs. It offered tenure to faculty with the rank of Assistant Professor or above. Using AAUP definitions, of the 103 individuals who taught classes, 46% were tenure-line and 54% were contingent.
With this data, one might be tempted to say that it was more likely for a student to be taught by a contingent faculty than one on the tenure-line. There is more to the picture. As a baccalaureate-level, liberal arts college, the faculty’s primary responsibility was instruction. For full-time faculty, the minimum teaching load was 12 credits per semester. Since course sections carried anywhere from 0 to 4 credits per sections, the average section load for tenure-line faculty was 4.3 sections per semester. Since there were only 4 full-time instructors who were not on the tenure-line, the average number of sections taught by contingent faculty was 1.5 sections per semester.
In addition to the fact that the average number of sections taught by faculty were heavily weighted toward the tenure-line faculty, the average enrollment per section was heavily weighted toward them also. It was also the case that the tenure-line faculty were more likely to teach the 3 and 4 credit sections, while the contingent faculty taught more of the 0 (science labs) to 2 credit sections.
1980 Faculty Data for a given liberal arts college. Data compiled by the blog’s author and graph constructed using an Excel Spreadsheet.
The graph to the left indicates the percentage differences between tenure-line and contingent faculty, if we were to look at faculty headcount, the number of sections taught, student section enrollments, and student credits generated. This graph paints a very different picture of how likely a student would end up with a tenure-line faculty versus a contingent faculty, even in a college where the contingent faculty outnumber the tenure-line faculty.
The AAUP as a faculty organization explicitly approaches situations from the faculty point of view. That point of view generally presupposes that a full-time, tenure-line faculty member is better than a contingent faculty member. One of the reasons given by an advertisement from the 1960 AAUP Bulletin for why faculty should join and support the AAUP indicates that the organization…”Tries to find common ground with administrators and trustees, for the establishment and observance of professional principles.”
Those professional principles were established from the faculty point of view. In my experience, this has meant that an institution’s first step should be to hire full-time, tenure-track faculty. For an institution that is operating a department of music, and not a conservatory, this is fiscally impossible and makes no sense for the institution. In this case, the AAUP response is to pay a private lesson instructor or ensemble conductor at the equivalent rate to a full-time, tenure-track individual doing that same duty. The absurdity of this idea is obvious when one tries to calculate equivalencies.
A full-time, tenure-track faculty member is doing much more than just giving private lessons. He or she should be involved in scholarly and service activities. The AAUP response is to involve the contingent faculty in equivalent scholarly and service activities. Firstly, most private lesson instructors are doing this as a side gig and can’t find the time to engage in such activities.
Secondly, an institution couldn’t afford to hire full-time faculty for each instrument that students might desire to learn. A small to medium sized music department would be fortunate to have one or two student harpists. The harp is such a specialized instrument that a school would also have to be fortunate to find a harp instructor, who could also handle other string instruments. A good music student would want and seek out an institution that has an excellent specialist in his or her instrument.
Thirdly, in terms of equivalent service, particularly to the department, it has been my experience that the “regular full-time faculty” do not want “outsiders interfering with departmental business.”
Similar situations occur in other disciplines such as art, theater, physical education, and health sciences.
One final concern in looking at everything from the faculty point of view is that it is easy to lose track of the students’ points of view. In forty plus years of experience in attempting to schedule classes to fit the needs of faculty and students, I have seen many impasses. At one institution where I served, the student body was almost 60% commuters and more than 25% were working more than 20 hours per week. The full-time, tenure-track faculty was similar in makeup to the faculty from the example presented above. The students kept asking for evening classes to accommodate their personal and family situations. However, the full-time faculty refused and insisted on offering classes only between the hours of 8 AM and 4 PM. Needless to say, this institution had a serious retention problem. As word spread in the community of the inability of students to get classes when they wanted them, it also turned into a serious student recruitment problem.
There is no doubt that faculty are a necessity to the success of a college. However, for most colleges students are even more of a necessity. With the exception of a few elite colleges, the concerns of both groups must be carefully balanced.
This has been a difficult and gut-wrenching post to write. I couldn’t have planned it worse if I tried. The next higher education trainwreck post on my schedule is on Faculty Rewards and Priorities. I need a short break from these difficult topics, so I am going to take a week’s reprise from tackling that subject. My next post will return to an easier subject for me. It will be about the crazy mathematician Archimedes.
Many in American Higher Education were looking forward to the 21st Century, hoping it would bring back the good old days. Unfortunately, after the cork was popped, the new drink fizzled. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
In spite of the high hopes and great expectations of many in American Higher Education, the end of the 20th century and the beginning of a new millennium brought little relief to the beleaguered systems of AHE. In my previous post The First Age of Disruption in American Higher Educationwe left American higher education in a precarious situation. It was buried under numerous train wrecks brought on by many training storms or crises. Unfortunately, the incessant crises have not stopped during the first two decades of the 21st century. Not only have they continue unabated, but the frequency of their occurrences has also increased.
The future outlook for American Higher Education is dire! Another scandal rocks AHE! The image is the author’s interpretation of current events in AHE. Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Instead of the period of recovery hoped for by the academy, the new millennium brought an unrelenting season of storms and turmoil to American Higher Education. A cursory examination of the reports and articles out of the general public and higher education media outlets during these first two decades of the 21st century yields an abundance of fuel for the argument that American Higher Education remains in deep trouble.
Just what I need – another project! Image courtesy of Presenter Media
The following list highlights some of the various crises that have made headlines in the 21st century. I have labeled many of them using academic code words. The task of explaining all the academic jargon associated with these code words would fill a book which I may write (Just what I need another writing project! – Is there anyone out who wants to help me?). In the meantime, to bring the project within manageable limits for this blog, I will provide a reasonably short synopsis of my take on each crisis and its immediate effects on AHE in separate posts which will follow.
The crises hit AHE repeatedly and rapidly. There was no time to rest. Image courtesy of Presenter Media
For those too anxious to wait for my follow up, I am providing an example of a commentator or the media’s interpretation of the crisis. The list is in chronological order according to the appearance of the media article that I reference. I have chosen to list the topics in this manner to show the rapidity and pervasiveness of crises in higher education which were occurring during these two decades.
I will have more to say on this topic later when I have time to reflect on the matter. Image courtesy of Presenter Media
The particular article I have selected may not necessarily be the first time the topic is addressed in public. However, I believe the articles selected are repesentative examples of the treatment which the topic has received. In some cases, the article referenced reflects my views on the topic. In other cases, it doesn’t. I will reserve my comments until I have the time and space to more fully explicate them.
Adjunctification of the faculty threatens academic quality across all of AHE is a theme that began appearing in higher education circles in the 1980s. It has exploded with much force in the new millennium. Gabriela Montell begins her December 15, 2000 article A Forecast of the Job Market in English in The Chronicle of Higher Education with the conflicting statement: “It would be an overstatement to say the job market for faculty members in English is booming, but scholars have reason to be mildly optimistic…” Later in the article, defining the term adjunctification, she notes that “Many professors also say they are concerned about universities’ reliance on part-time and temporary faculty members…the great worry…is adjunctification, which could keep students from getting the proper tenure-track jobs they clearly deserve.”
Faculty Reward Systems and Faculty Priorities are subjects of internal and external heated debates. Three researchers, Cathy A. Trower, Ann E. Austin, and Mary Deane Sorcinelli, collaborated in the study Paradise Lost: How the academy converts enthusiastic recruits into early-career doubters. This paper “captures the sense of dreams deferred as well as the tension between ideals and reality that young scholars face as they move through graduate school and into faculty posts … if they move into faculty posts.” It appears in the May 2001 issue of the AAHE Bulletin.
The Academic Lattice is the seemingly constant expansion of administrative support structure to handle tasks and duties seen by many as not directly related to teaching and learning. It is very frequently blamed for unneeded increased costs. This phenomenon is often derogatorily called “administrative bloat”. The study The Cost of Prestige: Do New Research I Universities Incur Higher Administrative Costs?by Christopher C. Morphew and Bruce D. Baker seems to say it does apply to some institutions. However, it leaves the question open for others. The paper appeared in the Spring 2004 issue of Review of Higher Education, Volume 27, Number 3.
Basic questions concerning College Admissions which have been around for hundreds of years remain tauntingly unanswered: “Who should go to college?” “How should a college decide to whom they offer admission?” Ross Douthat addresses one particularly sticky question in his article Does Meritocracy Work?His article concerns the fierce competition among prospective students to gain entrance into elite institutions, and the extensive pressure on elite institutions to enroll a more diverse student population. The article appears in the November 2005 issue of The Atlantic.
Since the Reagan tax revolution, many public higher education officials and commentators have debated the issue of whether the privatization of the academy threatens public higher education. In 2005 Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute, published the white paperThe Perfect Storm and the Privatization of Public Higher Education, a version of which appeared in the November 2005 issue of Change Magazine. Ehrenberg argued that the privatization of public higher education and the shrinkage of public support threatened to do irreparable damage to public higher education. In a November 2009 blog post Reality Check: The Privatization of Public Higher Education, Travis Reindl partially rebuffs the Ehrenberg arguments. In the decade since Reindl’s post, public support of public higher education in terms of government funds have continued to decline. So where are we?
Sweeping demographic changes are altering the face of AHE. These changes began in the last half of the 20th century with the entrance of women and some minority students into our colleges and universities. However, they have picked up steam heading into the new millennium. Rob Jenkins sketched the new “traditional student” in his October 2012 article The New ‘Traditional Student’ in The Chronicle of Higher Education. This new student is married, living at home, and working. Within a few years, the majority of students will be over 25 years of age and a person of color.
Scandal after scandal rocks AHE and drags its reputation through the mud.Prior to the dawn of the new millennium, AHE was not immune from scandalous activities. However, as social media access has accelerated the news cycle, information about scandals has become more available, more quickly. A Google search for “college scandals” took less than 1 second to produce over 75 million results. One of those results was a Harvard Business School Working Paper The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications, which was published in 2016. The abstract of this study by Michael Luca, Patrick Rooney, and Jonathan Smith begins with the provocative statement: “In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape.” In their paper, the authors attempted to answer the question “With so much information regarding a college’s academic and non-academic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect their applications?” The authors looked at the top 100 American universities ranked in the 2015 U.S. News and World Report, “BestColleges.” They then constructed a database of reported scandals on these campuses between 2001 and 2013. They found that during these dozen years, 75% of the top American universities reported at least one major incident. Since their databased cut off in 2013, they didn’t include recent major scandals including the Michigan State gymnastics incident (2014), the Baylor football scandal (2016), University of North Caroline cheating scandal (2017), the fraternity hazing death of Timothy Piazza at Penn State (2017), the Ohio State sexual abuse scandal (2019), and the Varsity Blues Admissions fiasco (2019). It also doesn’t include the Louisville basketball scandal (2017), Temple falsification of USNWR data (2018), or the implosion and collapse of ITT (2016) since these schools were not in the top 100 universities on the USNWR rankings.
Are athletics taking over the academy? Many including Richard Vedder, the director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, think so. He presents some ammunition for his opinion in the op-ed piece Athletic arms race hurts academics, which appeared in the December 31, 2013, edition of the Omaha World-Herald.
The Academic Ratchet tightens its grip on AHE. The automatic response of many within the academy to solve every budget or enrollment deficit is to seek new students via the addition of new programs and faculty, or an increased effort by the admission, recruitment, and fundraising offices. “To solve our problems all we need to do is rachet up our efforts, programming or personnel.” The obvious problem with this solution is that for most institutions it just doesn’t work. There aren’t enough funds, faculty, and students to satisfy all of AHE. In addition, institutional personnel doesn’t have the time nor expertise to do all of the necessary work. To help alleviate the academic rachet problem, in the late 1990s Robert C. Dickeson developed a process he called Program Prioritization. He outlined it in a 1994 book which was later updated in 2010. It is titled Prioritizing Academic Programs and Services: Reallocating Resources to Achieve Strategic Balance, 2nd edition. Over the next 25 years since Dickeson’s process was first released, more than 500 institutions attempted program prioritization. Some were successful in achieving a strategic balance. Many were not. In January 2014, Alex Usher, a consultant with Higher Education Strategy Associates, wrote a blog post Better Thinking About Program Prioritization critiquing the Dickeson plan.
The question: “Is virtual teaching a replacement for the traditional classroom?“has perplexed higher education since the University of Illinois created an Intranet for its students in 1960. It was a system of linked computer terminals where students could access course materials as well as listen to recorded lectures. It evolved in the PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) system which at its height was operating on thousands of computers all over the world. By the time we entered the new millennium, millions of students were not only using computer-aided instruction for supplemental course work, but they were also taking entire courses and even degree programs online. Faculty members and universities were asking the question of whether these students were getting a quality education. Along the way, faculty began to worry about whether they were becoming viewed as superfluous. Universities became concerned about whether their brick-and-mortar palaces would be ghost towns replaced by a new costly virtual infrastructure. In a June 23, 2018, blog posted on the eLearning Industry website, Allistair Gross asked the direct question Is Virtual Teaching A Major Threat To Teachers?
For the past two decades, have educators been running from crisis to crisis trying to save American higher education? Image courtesy of Presenter Media.
Having reached 10 crises and running out of room in this post, I have decided to save another 10 crises for a Part II of A New Millennium – Same Old Story. Tune in next week for more troubles, calamities, cataclysms, emergencies, and disasters in 21st century American higher education.
Some historians of American Higher Education call the era between the American Civil War and WWII the Gilded Age of American Higher Education. When I look at it, I see a period of unparalleled expansion, confusing disruptions, and bewildering rearrangements. It is also a period rife with widespread uncertainties and inescapable paradoxes. It is a period of unprecedented diversification.
A schematic view of the American Higher Education Family Tree, with the four main branches (University, College, Institute, and Faith-Based Schools), and their many intertwined connections. This schematic was created by the blog’s author using ClickChart Software.
During the Civil War, much of American higher education shut down. Many colleges were forced to cease operations due to a lack of students. In both the North and the South, many young men of military age either enlisted or were drafted. Since this group formed the overwhelming majority of college students, the potential student population was almost completely depleted.
Photograph of Rev. John M.P. Atkinson, 10th President of Hampden-Sydney College, and Captain of the Hampden-Sydney boys, part of the Virginia Militia. Image is in the Public Domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image courtesy of Alfred Morrison, Hampden-Sydney College, and Wikimedia Commons
The stories of what four institutions. Hampden-Sydney (with its sister school Union Theological Seminary), the United States Military Academy at West Point, and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, went through during the Civil War Period are so interesting I will address them in a separate, future post.
Since much of the actual fighting in the Civil War occurred in the territory of the Confederacy, a large number of colleges in the South found themselves in battle zones. A few colleges in the North, like Pennsylvania College (since 1921, known as Gettysburg College) and its sister institution Lutheran Theological Seminary, were also put in dangerous situations. This placed students and faculty at severe risk. Travel was treacherous at best. Students from the Confederate States who were studying in the Union States, and vice versa, were prohibited from crossing territorial or battlelines and were forced to withdraw from their colleges.
During the eight decades between the Civil War and WWII, the current structure of American higher education began to take shape. Prior to the Revolutionary War, all colonial colleges were begun with a religious emphasis by individual clergy or denominations. These schools were founded to provide an educated clergy for the church. Studying the early days of these institutions, we also see that they were not in the business of changing the social stratification of the colonies.
Most of the colleges established between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars were built to maintain the status quo. They only enrolled white, males. They were expensive, residential institutions, which meant that the “lower class” families could not afford the luxury of doing without the income supplied by the family sons. Entrance requirements of many were rigorous and only within the reach of the wealthy few who had the advantage of a demanding secondary education.
The few female colleges were also expensive, residential colleges that trained girls to be “ladies”. These schools were beyond the reach of most families and didn’t fit the long-term goals of most girls in America.
Prior to the Civil War, there were very few coed colleges. There were also very few female applicants who could meet the admissions requirements. There were only a handful of colleges open to African-Americans. Colleges prior to the Civil War were the great sustainers of an elite hierarchy with white males at the top of the ladder. Many obstacles were placed in the paths of others trying to ascend the ladder of social mobility.
The cover of the catalog of Pennsylvania Female College (now known as Chatham University) in 1886. Since it was published before 1924, it is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Chatham University and Wikimedia Commons.
Immediately after the Civil War, the dams of restrictive access were leaking a little, before they finally burst. In those early post-war days, a number of changes occurred. It became more acceptable for women to attend college. More women colleges were opened, and more colleges permitted men and women to sit in the same classrooms.
A second new stream of students consisted of the returning soldiers. Their war experience awakened new dreams. They saw that the only difference between them and many of their “educated” officers was formal education. The rank and file soldiers found that they were just as smart as their officers. They began to question why had they been deprived of an opportunity to advance themselves. They demanded the right to go to college, and some colleges opened their doors to these new students. However, more than college for themselves, they demanded college for their children so that they could better themselves and not be limited to the status of a lackey or foot soldier in the future.
Jubilee Hall, oldest permanent building on the campus of Fisk University (an HBCU in Nashville, TN). It was opened in 1876. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. Image courtesy of Fisk University, National Park Services and Wikimedia Commons.
A third stream formed with the opening of colleges for African-Americans. At first, this was a small stream because these students had many deficits to fill in from their lack of education prior to the Civil War.
In 1860, there were less than 10 institutions of higher education which were open to African-American students. By 1900, there more than 100 institutions that were dedicated primarily to the education of African-American individuals. These schools became known as Historical Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU).
First-year students in cadaver lab of Univ. of Penn Medical School in 1890. The image is in the Public Domain since it was first published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Amy Hutchens, University of Pennsylvania and Wikimedia Commons.
A fourth stream formed with the demand for specialized training and education. Career colleges, business schools, technical and engineering institutions, art schools, research universities, Bible colleges and seminaries, agricultural schools, medical specialty colleges, nursing schools, and law schools began popping up in every corner of the growing country.
Another new strand of higher education emerged in the first decade of the 20th century, the community or junior college. These colleges were designed to offer the first two years of a general college education and permit their graduates to then transfer to the four-year colleges and universities. Joliet Junior College in Illinois was the first public junior college. It opened in 1901.
A publicity card depicting the two founders, Sam Knight and William Baine, of Central City Commercial College in Waco, Texas. Image courtesy of the William Baines Papers of the Texas Collection at Baylor University.
Previously, colleges were primarily residential and located in rural or semi-rural settings. But now urban students demanded and got schools in the middle of cities. These students didn’t want the residential experience, so a new type of commuter college was invented.
Schools like Central City Commercial College (4C), which opened in Waco, Texas, in 1924, met the need of urban residents for training in employable skills or retraining in new skills. In 1935, 4C expanded its evening programs in order to accommodate shift workers who wanted to learn new skills.
Prior to the Civil War, most colleges were founded under the flag of religion. By the time the Civil War began, many of these institutions had drifted from their religious moorings. Some had become secular institutions, while others had their ownership assumed by governmental agencies and had become public institutions.
The Honorable Justin Smith Morrill, Senate sponsor of the Morrill Act of 1862. The photograph was taken between 1865 and 1880. The image is courtesy of Brady-Handy Photograph Collection (Library of Congress). It is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cwpbh.04981.
After the Civil War, three separate strands of institutional control were formally recognized. The first strand was public institutions, which were primarily funded by governmental agencies such as states, counties, or cities. These institutions were kick-started by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, also known as the Land-Grant Acts. These pieces of legislation provided grants of land to states to finance the establishment of colleges specializing in Agriculture, Home Economics, the Mechanical Arts, and other useful professions. Public institutions began to dominate higher education with their seemingly untouchable advantage of an apparently unending supply of tax revenue.
The second strand consisted of private, non-profit institutions. These were chartered by states, but controlled by independent boards. Some of these were sectarian in nature. They were founded by, controlled by denominations or churches, and funded through the religious founders. Others were non-sectarian, without any particular religious bent.
The third strand was the proprietary schools. These consisted of schools typically founded by an entrepreneur who viewed the institution as a profit-making venture. They were chartered by states, but controlled by the founder or a board of trustees, similar to a corporation. These three strands still dominate the higher education scene of the 21st century.
Diversity in these colleges was not just limited to the type of control, students, programs offered, or geographic location. Students began choosing colleges for more reasons than particular academic programs. They began including in their selection processes non-academic programs like athletics, debate teams, musical opportunities, both vocal and instrumental, and social organizations.
In the opening game at Michigan Stadium, Michigan beat Ohio State in October 1927 before a crowd of 84,000. This image is courtesy of Kaufmann & Fabry Co. – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pan.6a28995. See Commons: Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2348814
Rutgers University defeated Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game on November 6, 1869. The University of Michigan’s football stadium, Michigan Stadium (known as the Big House), was built in 1927 with a capacity of 72,000. It soon outgrew it and added 10,000 more seats within five years. The stadium was formally dedicated on October 22, 1927, when Michigan beat Ohio State before a standing-room-only crowd that exceeded 84,400 people. College sports had become a big-time business. Colleges began recruiting athletes to attend their school in order to play for them.
Intracollegiate debating on college campuses seems to have originated in literary societies as early as 1830. The first recorded intercollegiate debate may have been between Wake Forest University and Trinity College (later known as Duke University) in 1897. Soon debate teams were touring the country, holding matches and tournaments. The movie “The Great Debaters” memorializes a 1935 debate team of African-American students from Wiley College (Marshall, TX) which supposedly traveled to Harvard University, and defeated the reigning national championship debating team. In reality, the debaters from Wiley did not debate Harvard. They debated and defeated the reigning national debate team from the University of Southern California. However, the Wiley team could not declare themselves victors because African-Americans were not permitted to join the Debate Society until after WWII.
James Farmer, Jr., was recruited as a 14-year old freshman by Melvin Tolson, the founder, and coach of the Wiley College Debate Team to become a valuable member of this formidable debating powerhouse. He went on to a have distinguished career in civil rights work in the United States in the middle of the 20th century.
Civil Right Activists including Martin Luther King Jr, Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and James Farmer Jr in the White House on January 18, 1964. The picture is in the public domain because it is a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person’s official duties under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code. Image is courtesy of the LBJ Presidential Library and Wikimedia.Commons
James Farmer Jr. was considered one of the “Big 4” in the civil rights world. The first of the other three was Martin Luther King Jr. (1948 graduate of Morehouse College an HBCU institution in Atlanta, GA), and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). The second was Whitney M. Young Jr. (1941 graduate of Kentucky State University and HBCU institution in Frankfort KY) who served as the Executive Director of the National Urban League, transforming it from a passive organization into an aggressive force working to give socioeconomic access to all individuals who had been historically disenfranchised. The third member of the group was Roy Wilkins (1923 graduate of the University of Minnesota which had a long history of accepting African-American scholars and students), who was Executive Director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1955 to 1977. Roy Wilkins was one of the primary organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. In 1967, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian decoration.
Postcard publicizing the Carlton College Glee Club itinerary for the 1913 season. The image is in the public domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Carlton College and Wikimedia Commons.
Glee Clubs were small choral groups dedicated to singing glees, short secular choral songs, which were written or arranged for several vocal parts. These clubs originated in London in the late 18th century and made their way to the American college campuses in the mid-19th century. The first documented American collegiate glee club was founded at Harvard University in 1858.
By 1910, there were more than 100 colleges hosting Glee Clubs. Many of these co-curricular clubs were replaced on campuses by larger choral groups and formal choirs which performed under the auspices of the music department or school. Many of the colleges would sponsor the Glee Club tours for fundraising and student recruiting purposes.
The Purdue Marching Band “Block P” formation from 1922 football game. Image in the Public Domain since it was published prior to 1924. Image is courtesy of Purdue University and Wikimedia Commons
Historically marching bands were associated with military ventures. They consisted primarily of wind, brass, and percussion instruments. By the middle of the 19th century, they found their way onto college campuses. The first official collegiate marching band was the University of Notre Dame Band of the Fighting Irish, founded in 1845. It first performed at a football game in 1887. By the end of the 19th century, hundreds of American colleges and universities hosted marching bands and orchestras. In 1907, the Purdue All-American Marching Band unveiled the first pictorial formation on a football field with their rendition of the Purdue “Block P.” Not to be outdone, later that year, the University of Illinois Marching Illini band performed the first full halftime show at the football game between the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago.
Colleges and universities began recruiting students to perform in their vocal and instrumental musical groups. Other performing arts, like drama and dance, soon followed. Colleges and universities became cultural centers, not only for students but for the communities in which they were located.
Fraternities, sororities, and other social clubs dated their beginning on American campuses from December 5, 1776, with the founding of the Phi Beta Kappa Society at the College of William and Mary. Between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, fraternities and sororities developed slowly. They were primarily centered in the Northeast quadrant of the United States.
A photograph of the monument in Lexington, VA commemorating the founding of three Panhellenic fraternities in that town. SuperNova at the English Wikipedia, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publishes it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Super Nova and Wikimedia Commons.
After the Civil War, with the great expansion of colleges and universities, fraternities and sororities also flourished. The American higher education system began encountering racial, religious, and gender diversity and new colleges were founded or reformed throughout the south and west. Growth in the fraternity system overall during this period would lead some to label the last third of the 19th century as “The Golden Age of Fraternities.”
However, the diversity of institutions which engendered a diversity of students also had a darker, hidden side. Students looked to the fraternities and sororities not as vehicles to encourage diversity, but as avenues of escape and as a way to avoid associating with large numbers of particular types of students. They became vehicles of discrimination.
Thus the period between the Civil War and WWII was an era of growth in terms of the number of students and the diversity of types of institutions, types of campus activities, and diversity of students within the system as a whole. Paradoxically, it was also an era of rampant discrimination and exclusion. WWII produced another pause in the development of the American higher education system. We pick up that story in the next post.
My previous post KPI- Part IX: Higher Education in Colonial America highlighted the fairly slow start of higher education in colonial America. In this post, I will address the first age of expansion in American higher education, the post-Revolutionary War era. In the four-score plus years between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, higher education blossomed in the United States on several fronts.
Map of the United States in 1860 showing 33 states and a number of territories. This image is in the public domain in the United States because it only contains materials that originally came from the United States Geological Survey, an agency of the United States Department of the Interior. Image courtesy of United State Geological Survey and Wikimedia.
During this period the United States grew both in terms of population and geography. Although there was no census data in 1780, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that the population of the thirteen colonies was approximately 2.5 million. By 1860, the 8th official census put the population of the 33 states and several territories, which made up the United States just prior to the Civil War, at 31.4 million. This population increase amounted to more than a twelve-fold increase.
The addition of 20 states and territories added more than 2 million square miles of land mass to the 864,746 square miles of the original 13 colonies. By the start of the Civil War, the United States stretched from “sea to shining sea.” It had crossed the Appalachian Mountains, the Mighty Mississippi River basin, the great plains, and the Rocky Mountains. It spanned the great land gap between Canada and Mexico.
With more people spread out across more land, there is an increased need for primary and secondary education. It was only natural for the people of each town to demand their own local primary and secondary schools. This created an accompanying need for more teachers, which created the collateral need for more higher education. As more teachers are involved in the classrooms, in addition to deeper subject-content matter mastery, they found a need for more specialized training in teaching methods.
This colonial structure located in Lexington (MA), which now houses a Masonic Temple, was the first state-supported normal school. This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1924 and 1977 without a copyright notice. Image courtesy of Boston Public Library and Wikimedia Commons.
This created a need for a new type of higher education institution. Thus the teacher education school or “normal school” was created. Some of these schools were short-lived such as several founded and run by Samuel Read Hall. Hall founded teacher education programs as an adjunct to academies in Concord (VT), Andover (MA), Plymouth (NH), and Craftsbury (VT). The earliest teacher training programs were typically two years beyond the secondary level designed to introduce the best secondary students to the topics of curriculum and pedagogy in order to turn them into teachers.
As noted in the previous post, there were also no “official” medical or law schools in the colonial period. Although several of the colonial colleges did offer additional courses in anatomy and “physik.” they were not intended to train doctors. As the U.S. population grew and spread out all over the country, there was a much greater need for more doctors and lawyers. The apprenticeship model of education which worked well for a small demand proved totally inadequate for the much larger demand of the new world. A new, more efficient, model had to be instituted. We needed a model that would produce consistent, quality results. We needed schools for doctors and lawyers.
Litchfield Law School building constructed by Tapping Reeve in 1784. The building stands today on its original location, south of Tapping Reeve’s House on South Street in Litchfield, CT. This photo is licensed under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Image courtesy of Litchfield Historical Society and Wikimedia Commons.
The first institution established for the sole purpose of teaching law was the Litchfield Law School in Litchfield (CT). The school was founded in 1874 by educator, lawyer, judge Tapping Reeve. Reeve opened his law school to accommodate the large of apprentices that he was attracting. Judge Reeve continued lecturing at his law school even after becoming the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the State of Connecticut, until shortly before his death in 1823.
Without the name and draw of its founder, the Litchfield Law School lasted just one more decade until it closed due to lack of students. However, during its sixty-year run of operations, it attracted more than 1,100 students. The most famous/infamous Litchfield graduate is probably Aaron Burr, Jr., the brother-in-law of Tapping Reeve.
Engravings of Stephen van Rensselar III, New York statesman, military general, and philanthropist, whose generous gifts established one of the first technical, scientific and engineering schools in the U.S. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c21159. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.
As the country grew, so did the demand for more and better buildings, bridges, transportation, and communications. We needed people with technical skills. How could we possibly produce such people in sufficient quantities to meet the demands? We needed technical and engineering schools. Another new type of schools is instituted.
Technical and engineering schools began popping up in urban contexts. Two of the first technical and engineering schools were Norwich University (1819) in Northfield (VT) and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1825) in Troy (NY).
People are people and they must have their religion and their churches. With the population increase and with the dispersion of the population across a wider expanse, there was a need for more churches, and hence a need for more clergy. With the changing nature of the first round of religious schools, America needed schools that were again dedicated to educating individuals who could preach the gospel and teach their congregations the tenets of the faith.
A photograph of the 2-D work of art entitled: “Andover Theological Seminary,” lithograph printed in colors, by the artist J. Kidder. Image Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University, New Haven, CT, and Wikimedia Commons.
More seminaries and faith-based colleges teaching piety and virtue were created. Due to the lack of action in filling a chair of preaching, on the part of growing faction of liberal faculty at Harvard, a number of the older orthodox, conservative-Calvinistic faculty members left Harvard in 1807 to form the Andover Theological Seminary in Newton (MA). Similar events took place at many of the schools of religion within the Colonial Colleges.
The residence of the Superintendent of West Point. It is the oldest existent building (1820) on the campus. This image or media file contains material based on a work of a National Park Service employee, created as part of that person’s official duties. As a work of the U.S. federal government, such work is in the public domain in the United States. Image courtesy of the National Park Service and Wikimedia Commons.
Besides education, religion, and professional studies, one area of concern to the whole human race has been military activities. In the history of mankind, there have been wars and rumors of war. During this era of great expansion of higher education in America, war and military action went to college. In addition to the U.S. Military Academy, established in 1801 at West Point (NY), and the U.S. Naval Academy, established in 1845 at Annapolis (MD), there were at least a dozen more military schools established during this time frame.
This is a bird’s eye view of Mount Holyoke College in 1837. This is a faithful photographic reproduction of a two-dimensional, public domain work of art, as such this photograph itself is in the public domain. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and the Murray City School District.
In the previous post, I noted that almost exclusively the institutions in the first round of colleges were open only to men. As the nation matured and changed, women understood that education should be open to them.
The first solution to this new demand was the creation of women’s colleges. A few of the earliest women’s colleges were Georgia Female College (1836) in Clinton (GA); Stephens College (1833) in Columbia (MO); and Mount Holyoke College (1837) in South Hadley (MA).
Photograph of Old Main of Franklin College, built in 1847. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Mingusboodle at the Wikipedia project. Image courtesy of Mingusboodle and Wikimedia Commons.
The second solution was a slow opening up of a few of the male-only enclaves to women. Oberlin College (OH) was the first college to formally admit women in 1837. A few institutions, like Franklin College (IN) followed suit in 1842.
During this period of history, the United States was deeply divided over the practices of slavery and segregation. Although slavery was prohibited in all Northern states by 1850, African Americans were routinely denied even basic education through institutionalized segregation.
This is a photograph of a 2-D work of art, entitled: Wilberforce University, Xenia, Ohio. (The colored peoples college.) It was drawn, lithographed and printed in oil colors by Middleton Wallace & Co. This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pga.03979. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.
By 1860 a few colleges were established for African-Americans. These institutions became known as the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU). Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1854 was the first HBCU to offer college degrees to its graduates. The first HBCU to be owned and built by African-Americans, Wilberforce University in Ohio, soon followed in 1856. The Cheyney University of Pennsylvania (which was originally called the Institute for Colored Youth) was founded in 1837 and is currently recognized as the oldest HBCU in the United States. However, it did not offer college degrees until 1914. Oberlin College in Ohio is generally credited as the first of the historically white-only colleges to admit African-American students in 1835.
With the vast expansion of the educational enterprise in America, colleges began to engage in the first academic arms race. They began to look for prominent individuals that they could hire to be faculty or administrators, in order to attract a greater number of quality students. States and cities joined in their own version of the academic arms race. Every state, city or town had to have their own college, in order to outdo their neighbors.
All of these changes produced a drastic change in the number of colleges and students. From the ten schools that were really colleges in the colonial period, the number grew to more than 300 by the beginning of the Civil War. The number of college students in the United States is estimated to have grown from less than 2,000 in 1780 to approximately 50,000 students by 1860. This is indeed an era of expansion. Stay tuned for the next installment, the Post Civil War Expansion.
