Help, Please. I looking for the “famous” quote that I can’t remember and I can’t remember who said it. It is concerning the idea that using the same kind of thinking that got you into a problem will not get a solution to the problem. You must think “on a higher level.” Thanks in advance for your assistance.
Philosophy
A Modest Proposal for the Re-engineering of American Higher Education
A Modest Proposal for the Re-engineering of American Higher Education
By Baylis ?2
For many years, I have been intrigued with any title that begins with a phrase “A Modest Proposal.” Jonathan Swift’s classic satirical essay from 1729 has conditioned everyone to know that what follows is anything but modest, and possibly bordering on sensationalism. I have deliberately used the phrase “A modest proposal” to get people’s attention. However, the heart of the essay is not a satire. I truly believe that American higher education would benefit from adopting some, if not all twenty, of the suggestions that I make in the body of the essay.
I will also admit that I used another sensational term in the title of the essay. “Re-engineering” grabs people’s attention because it has come to mean radical changes that could affect the entire institution. That’s exactly the idea that I wanted to convey.
- Education is helping students develop the knowledge, skills and dispositions necessary to move them from where they are to where they need or want to be. There are two actors in this process. Each actor has different responsibilities and roles. Students must come to education with goals. They should know what they want to be. The role of faculty is to identify where the students are and the best route to take the students to where they want to or need to be. Faculty need to realize that the students’ goals are important and they should not unnecessarily impose their own goals on students. Faculty should serve as guides in assisting students along the route to reaching their goals. Students need to realize that education is hard work. It is not an entitlement; it is a privilege.
- American higher education should adopt a Social Change Model of Education as the foundational philosophy for building its superstructure. The basic tenet of a Social Change Model of Education is that education should be about helping students learn so that they can improve themselves, society, and the community.
- Within the framework of a Social Change Model of Education, institutions need to focus the educational process on helping students acquire the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to live useful lives in order to better themselves and society. An institution must pay attention to all three areas of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. In a 1978 hit song, Michael Lee Aday, commonly known as Meatloaf, suggested that in the area of personal relationships, “Two out of three, ain’t bad” However, in education, “Two out of three, ain’t enough.”
- Each institution must have a clearly delineated mission. All individuals involved with the given institution must have a solid understanding of the mission of the institution and a firm commitment to that mission.
- The mission of an institution must be clearly communicated to all prospective students and the community at large. The leaders of an institution, especially the president, administrators and faculty, must understand the history of the institution and how that affects the current development of the institution and possible future development.
- Institutions need to hire, evaluate and reward faculty in terms of helping students learn. Good teaching should be measured in terms of student learning. Teaching itself is only a means to the end of learning, not an end in itself.
- Institutions should consider revamping graduation requirements more in line with competencies instead of credit hours earned in course blocks. What’s more important, the number of credits earned by sitting through the required number of class hours, or what a student knows, can do, and values?
- Schools need to consider scrapping the current semester, trimester. or quarter systems that are agriculturally based, in favor of a more flexible schedule that allows or even encourages learning anytime and anywhere, possibly in a 24/7/365 format.
- Institutions should be aware and open to the possibility that curricula will evolve. Some new disciplines will emerge while some old disciplines will become obsolete.
- Institutions should consider revamping their fiscal model away from the charge for credit hours to one more closely aligned with charging students a credentialing fee based upon completion of competencies.
- Faculty must be encouraged to study learning theory with an eye to understanding and using different teaching modalities other than just lecturing. Faculty must be encouraged to experiment with educational pedagogies and technologies appropriate to discipline.
- Faculty must know their students. They must be aware of and account for the varying goals of the students they are teaching. It is not the job of faculty to produce clones of the faculty. The job of faculty is to help students develop the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to improve themselves and society.
- Institutions should be prepared to provide appropriate learning spaces and resources for faculty and students, including classrooms, laboratories, libraries, and technology.
- Institutions should consider paying faculty according to their track record of helping students learn or complete competencies, instead of their degrees and years of service.
- Institutions must be prepared to offer developmental resources to faculty to help them use the most appropriate pedagogies and technologies in their teaching.
- Faculty should be open to the possibility of unbundling their work. Faculty may have to be open to the idea that faculty governance is too expensive and inefficient.
- Faculty need to understand that tenure and academic freedom are not entitlements, but are privileges.
- Faculty and institutions need to be abused of their unattainable illusions of grandeur. Not all institutions can be prestigious, research universities. Institutions must get off the academic treadmill of trying to keep up with the institutions that are their neighbors or competitors.
- Institutions must realize that not all institutions will look the same. Some institutions will be geared toward a residential clientele. Some institutions will focus on commuter students and some institutions will serve a mixed clientele. Serving these differing collections of student types will mean institutions will have to tailor facilities, curricula, schedules, and teaching modalities to the students they are serving.
- Everyone associated with an institution–Board of Trustees, President, administration, faculty, and students–must be held accountable for their part in the well-functioning of the institution and promoting student learning.
I believe the quality academic institutions of the future may look and feel very different from the quality academic institutions of the past. That’s the basis for my modest proposal. We should be ready to embrace the new look of academic institutions and not be afraid of it.
Full-TIme Faculty as a Minority
Full-Time Faculty as a Minority
“By” Baylis
I am very surprised that I have not seen the avalanche of typical articles that appear each year decrying the decline in the percentage of full-time faculty within the academy. This past week beginning June 3, a conference entitled, “Reinventing the American University, The Promise of Innovation in Higher Education,” was held without much fanfare in Washington, DC. When I looked at the proposed agenda (available at http://www.aei.org/event/100218#doc), I thought to myself this could be a great conference. Speakers were addressing the topic of the American University from many different directions. Some speakers and sessions proposed returning to the era of full-time, tenured faculty as the norm. Some speakers and sessions proposed other models as normative. I think the conference planners intentionally tried to present all sides of the story.
Every time I see a headline or an article about full-time faculty becoming a minority, as a statistician and administrator, I want to yell, “How are you counting faculty and what is the most important thing in education?” Aren’t we supposed to be concerned the most about student learning? Most of the arguments that I have seen about full-time faculty becoming a minority are based strictly on head counts of faculty. How many people are employed as full-time faculty and how many people are employed as part-time faculty? What would happen if, instead of looking at this from the faculty perspective, we looked at this from the students’ perspective? Who are the students actually seeing in the front of their classes? What do I mean?
All of my 40 years in higher education have been spent in private small to medium size institutions, where the average annual credit load for faculty was 24 credits. Courses were predominantly 3 credits. The data from one school in particular illustrates what I am trying to say. Because courses did not all have the same number of credits assigned to them, the average number of sections per semester taught by full-time faculty was 4.2 but still with an average credit load per semester of 12. We did employ adjunct faculty with the average number of sections taught by adjuncts at 1.2 sections per semester, and an average credit load of 2.8 credits per semester.
There are two ways to measure how much teaching faculty members are doing. These are the number of sections taught and the number of credit hours generated. Neither of these really gets at the question of how much students are learning. To get at the answer to this question, we will have to dig deeper into the assessment of student learning. This is something that the academy as a whole has been reluctant to do, whether because of cost or difficulty.
Returning to the question of who are students actually seeing in front of their classes, two different years at the same institution will illustrate what I am trying to say. The first year, we had 107 full-time faculty members and 125 adjuncts. That’s a 46% to 54% ratio. Thus the full-time faculty was in the minority according to headcount. However, at an average load of 4.2 sections per semester, the full-time faculty taught 75% of the sections, while the adjuncts taught 25% of the sections. The typical student on average would see a full-time faculty member in front of his or her class 75% of the time. The next year, we were able to hire another 7 full-time faculty. We offered the same number of sections the second year. By maintaining the same average load of 4.2 sections per semester, we covered 80% of the sections by full-time faculty. Under these circumstances, we were able to eliminate 25 adjuncts and still cover everything we needed to cover. With 25 fewer adjuncts and 7 more full-time faculty members, the ratio of full-time faculty to adjuncts was reversed to 53% to 47%. Under these conditions we had 20% of the sections covered by adjuncts. Thus, a typical student had a full-time faculty member in front of his or her class 80% of the time. If we looked at this question from the perspective of credits generated, this particular year the full-time faculty generated 78% of the credits earned by students. The primary reason this percentage was so high was that we intentionally kept adjuncts out of the large entry-level course sections. Adjuncts did teach some entry-level courses, but these courses had smaller section size.
At the same school, when it adopted a slightly more generous course release policy for full-time faculty, the average number of sections covered by full-time faculty dropped to 3.8 per semester. Under these conditions, we found that we needed to hire 19 more full-time faculty members to maintain the suggested guideline that we adopted of having 80% of sections covered by full-time faculty. It also meant that, to maintain the same 20% of the sections covered by adjuncts, we found that we had to maintain the same adjunct count as we had the year before. These changes meant that the ratio of full-time faculty to adjuncts was 60% to 40%. This change increased the faculty salary budget by $1,400,000 per year which the school was able to afford that one year only because admissions had a great year and brought in 100 more students than the budget was based on. But these 100 more students had a ramification in the number of students faculty had in each class. Keeping the same number of sections offered as the previous year, the average class size increased by 6, so the typical full-time faculty member was teaching almost 24 more students per semester than he or she had done before. Because of this increase the full-time faculty generated 85% of the credits generated that year.
I was asked what it would cost to have all full-time faculty members with the same average sectional load of 3.8 per semester. I calculated that this would require the hiring of an additional 32 full-time faculty members in order to eliminate all adjuncts. When I calculated the cost of this proposal, it turned out it would add more than an additional $1,600,000 per year to the budget, which was more than this school could afford since you cannot count on great admission years, year after year.
Having achieved one round of increased release time, the faculty pushed for another round of increased release time that would have made the average semester sectional load for a full-time faculty member, 3.2 sections per semester. If we held to the suggested guideline that 80% of sections taught were to be taught by full-time faculty, it would require an additional 24 full-time faculty and no additional adjuncts. This would have resulted in a 56% to 44% full-time faculty to part-time faculty ratio. The budget impact of this decision would have been an increase of $1,800,000 per year. Since that cost estimate was so great, the faculty did not push for an all full-time faculty with average semester load of 3.2 sections. This would have required an additional 38 full-time faculty with an increase of more than $2,000,000 per year to the salary budget.
When somebody decries the fact that full-time faculty members are in the minority, they almost always appear to be talking about absolute head counts and not the number of sections taught by full-time faculty versus the number of sections taught by adjuncts. There is a big difference. However, I will admit that teaching is not the only contractual contact that faculty members have with students. What happens to advising loads when the number of adjuncts grows above 50%? It depends upon how the advising system is configured. At the above school we had an advising office with specialists for all first-year students and for second-year undecided students. Students beyond their first year that declared a major, which represented 67% of the student body, were assigned a full-time faculty member in that area. Under the 46% to 54% full-time to adjunct ratio, we had an average advising load of 18 students per faculty member. The next year when the ratio switched to 53% to 47% of full-time to adjuncts, the average advising load dropped to 16 students per faculty member. The following year, when the ratio of full-time to adjunct faculty was 60% to 40%, the average advising load dropped to 14 students per faculty member. There is no straight linear function between the average advising load and the number of full-time faculty because the number of first-year and undecided second-year students changes each year. If the institution had adopted the all full-time faculty policy and maintain the advising center for all first-year students and undeclared second-year students, the average advising load per faculty member would have been approximately 10 students. However, since advisors were assigned by discipline, some faculty would have been assigned fewer than 5 advisees and some faculty would have been assigned more than 25 advisees. Individual faculty members would have seen very little reduction in the number of advisees assigned to them. Because of all the variables involved, such as the number of students, the number of majors, and the disciplines in which the students major and the disciplines in which adjuncts are used, the average advising load numbers will vary from institution to institution and from year to year at a given institution.
Some programs are helped by having adjuncts instead of all full-time faculty members. Music is a program with so many sub-disciplines and instruments in which students can study or concentrate that an institution can’t afford a full-time faculty member for each instrument. Even at a large institution, there may only be three or four oboists enrolled at one time. Teaching these three or four students will not be a full-time load. At a smaller institution, there may be only one or two oboists, enrolled at one time. Nursing is another area where adjuncts are very useful, and for smaller institutions, a necessity. Clinical instructors must be active nurses, so unless the institution has its own hospital, it must hire practicing nurses as adjuncts to cover the hospital clinical that nurses must complete.
In conclusion, when the cry goes up from full-time faculty about the decline in their numbers, let’s ask, “What is the real complaint?”
Where are the Simon Cowells within the Academy
Where are the Simon Cowells within the Academy?
By Baylis ?2
I am not an American Idol fanatic, but I will admit that I do enjoy watching it. I will even admit that Simon Cowell is my favorite judge. The reason that I like Simon is because I think he gives the most accurate evaluation of the contestants’ performances. Simon once said something that was almost profound. When asked why he was so hard on the contestants, he said, “I was not hired to be a friend to the contestants. I was hired to help them improve and to help the show to find the best performer.” This philosophy of accurate and consistent evaluations pegged to real world standards suggests a situation that I believe troubles the academy.
There are at least three manifestations of a lack of a Simon Cowell philosophy within the academy. The first place it shows up is with student grades. Many of us use the expression, “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” whether we believe it or not. A topical search of the Chronicle of Higher Education reveals more than 300 articles or blogs in the Chronicle about grade inflation. That’s a lot of smoke; is there a fire?
A 2001 highly publicized statement by Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield led to an investigative report by the Boston Globe. The report resulted in a stinging exposé the likes of which were normally reserved for political corruption. The report exposed the fact that many students were receiving A’s and being graduated with honors. Mansfield claimed that the grades that Harvard professors were now giving “deserved to be a scandal.” Some of the claims of Mansfield and the Boston Globe were collaborated by a 1993 U.S. News and World Report article that reported the following statistics: in 1992, 91 percent of all undergraduate grades at Harvard were B- or higher. In 1993, more than 80 percent of all Harvard seniors graduated with honors.
But Harvard was not the only university with these types of numbers. An internal Minnesota State University Mankato article on grade inflation reported an average GPA of 2.93 for all undergraduates, noting that this is nearly a B average. This Mankato report quoted a 1993 U.S. News and World Report article written by John Leo entitled “A for Effort , or Showing Up” ,that suggested only 6 percent of all student grades at Stanford were C’s. Leo also claimed that prior to 1993, Stanford did not permit an F grade.
In 1995 Ron Darby, a Chemical Engineering Professor, wrote a memorandum to the Academic Affairs Committee of the Texas A&M Faculty Senate, on the subject of grading standards. Darby begins his memo by claiming “that a serious situation exists within our university that will probably result (if it hasn’t already) in very serious consequences relative to the credibility and reputation of this institution.” To what situation was he referring? The situation was the “establishment, enforcement, and maintenance of reasonable standards of performance for students, and related qualifications for degrees…”
Darby went to the Texas A&M University Regulations to point out that grades assigned by instructors should be assigned according to the degrees of achievement:
A Excellent
B Good
C Satisfactory
D Passing
F Failing
Darby continued by suggesting that there should be a direct correspondence between these grading levels and the levels of proficiency demonstrated by our students. However, Darby continued by suggesting that the “vast majority of instructors on this campus consider the grade of C to be unsatisfactory.” Therefore, they assign other grades accordingly. Darby gave an example of a report turned in by an undergraduate student in his department. Two other departmental faculty members decried the quality of this report, but noted that instead of the grade of D or F that it deserved, the report had actually received a grade of B-.
Darby with a certain sense of irony noted that the average grade in many of the departmental courses that emphasized technical writing was a B+ or A-. In spite of the fact that the department was frequently reminded by the employers that hired departmental graduates, those communication skills were the greatest weaknesses of Texas A&M grads.
Darby continues by outlining the problems that are a result of grade inflation.
The integrity of the institution can be questioned, if the institution is graduating students who have demonstrated less than satisfactory performance, the institution has lost its creditability in the eyes of the prospective employers of those graduates.,
- The students themselves eventually suffer because when they get into the “real world,” they will find that their sloppy work with which they got by in college will not cut it out there.
- The instructors suffer eventually because those less competent students that are graduated with good grades will reflect negatively on the instructors.
- The institution with low standards suffers via a bad reputation which will eventually effect recruitment of students, faculty, grants and gifts.
- The employers who hire graduates expecting them to be qualified and find that they are not reap the consequences of having to retrain those individuals or replace them with competent employees.
- The public suffers because the public does not get what it is paying for, whether through financial aid to students at private institutions or direct budget assistance to public institutions.
Darby concludes his memo with a proposed solution. Darby proposes that the institution and individual faculty members should adopt essentially the Simon Cowell philosophy for evaluating student performance, i.e., a standard consistent with the standard that they will experience after graduation. If the institution and faculty would do that, everyone would be assured that there was a definite correlation between performance in school and performance later on the job.
A 2002 Chronicle of Higher Education article written by Alfie Kohn began with the statement “grade inflation got started in the late 60’s and early 70’s.” Many people both inside and outside the academy believe this statement. However, Kohn continues by reminding us of the 1894 Harvard Committee on Raising the Standard which suggested that “grades of A and B were given too readily, with grades of A given got “work of no [sic] very high merit” and grades of B for “work not far above mediocrity.” The 1894 Harvard report concluded that “one of the chief obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.” Apparently the concern about grade inflation among faculty has been around for more than a century.
Is grade inflation really a problem; and should we be concerned? What’s wrong with inflated grades? Ron Darby’s memo outlines a number of problems with inflated grades. What are the purposes of grades? Many in education and most people outside the academy believe that grades are supposed to be a gauge of how much a student knows or how well he or she can do something. If we inflate grades, it gives students and others an improper evaluation of the knowledge or skills of the given student, making us susceptible to the problems Darby outlines.
The second place we need the Simon Cowell philosophy is in the annual evaluations of both faculty and staff. At one institution at which I worked, I was asked by the Director of Human Resources to help design a better annual evaluation form. Why? The form that was in use had a number of characteristics listed relevant to the particular job under consideration. The supervisor was asked to indicate for each characteristic whether the employee met expectations, exceeded expectations, or failed to meet expectations. One year over 80% of employees exceeded expectations on 75% of the characteristics listed for their jobs. We were living in Lake Wobegon.
The one change to the form that I suggested was to require supervisors who gave an employee anything other than a rating of met expectations, to also give a concrete example what the employee did to exceed or fail to meet the expectations. The supervisor was also required to discuss the ratings with the employee in a short given time frame and the employee was given the opportunity to append a statement explaining his or her perspective on this matter. The number of employees who exceeded expectations dropped dramatically and very few employees disputed their fail to meet expectation ratings. After several years of using this new form, the Director of Human Resources had a paper trail to assist in decisions about promotions or dismissals. Since the employee had an opportunity to discuss each review annually and respond to what he or she thought were errors, the employee could not claim that he or she didn’t know how his or her performance was viewed by the supervisor and the institution.
- In the Match 28, 2010 issue of the Chronicle Review, Ben Yogoda expressed the usual faculty thinking about annual evaluations in his article, Why I Hate Annual Evaluations. These evaluations are useless and evaluate the wrong things, or evaluate the right things improperly or in the wrong ways. Since many faculty members have a predisposition to the conclusions expressed by Yogoda, the mounds of research to the contrary are of no avail. If you have s positive interest in SEF or are dead set against them, you should check out Peter Centra’s book Reflective Faculty Evaluation and the research that is available at The Idea Center website www.ideacenter.org. Another good resource on faculty evaluation is a handbook for college faculty on art of evaluation and developing a comprehensive evaluation system written by R. A. Areola, (2000), entitled. Developing a Comprehensive Faculty Evaluation System: A Handbook for College Faculty and Administrators on Designing and Operating a Comprehensive Faculty Evaluation System. None of these three resources will mention Simon Cowell by name. But all three emphasize the necessity of honest and consistent evaluation of performance measured against the ideal professional standard, which is what Simon calls for and is criticized for doing. However, it we follow this path, it will find us the best performer, whether on stage or in the classroom.
A post on Sprynet.com by Michael Huemer, entitled Student Evaluations: A Critical Review attempts to highlight the enormous body of literature on student evaluations of faculty performance (SEF).Sprynet is an inexpensive web posting service provided by Earthlink. Thus I will have to admit that Huemer’s posting is not peer-reviewed. However, most of the literature Huemer cites is peer-reviewed. I found very interesting two notes on the validity of ratings of instructors. The first note was on whether ratings of instructors change as years pass. Peter Centra in his book Reflective Faculty Evaluation makes the claim that SEF tend to correlate well with retrospective evaluations by alumni. Former students do not change their perceptions of their instructors over time. The second note was that one of the favorite evaluative methods espoused by faculty at least for tenure was found in multiple tests not to be valid. This evaluative method is peer evaluations and peer observations. In an article that appeared in Volume 52 (1997) of American Psychology written by Herbert W. Marsh and Lawrence Q. A. Roche, it was shown that multiple tests of ratings by colleagues and trained observers did not substantially agree with each other’s ratings of a given instructor. Thus these ratings were found not to be reliable which is a necessary condition for validity. This reminds me of the ratings given by the judges on American Idol. Many times the ratings and critiques did not agree. Why would faculty prefer peer evaluations when faculty generally close their classrooms off and don’t let each other know what they are doing? I have some suspicions. One is that faculty believe that colleagues will be easier on them than students since they are going through the same trials and tribulations. Here is where we need Simon Cowell as a colleague to give an honest assessment of our performance.
The third place the Simon Cowell philosophy is needed is on promotion and tenure committees. In spite of the recent publicity about professors being denied tenure, what happens when we dig into the statistics about tenure denials and tenure approvals? Peter Fogg in a Chronicle of Higher Education article entitled “No, NO, a Dozen Times No”[1] discusses the recent history of tenure decisions at University of North Texas., in particular, one year in which 12 faculty members up for tenure were denied. Fogg makes the claim that until 2003, getting tenure was almost a sure thing at UNT since “only one of the 33 professors who ever went up for tenure was denied. The year before, none of the 25 professors who applied got the thumbs down”
When I assumed the reins of CAO at one institution, I reviewed the recent promotion and tenure decisions at that institution. There was one recently tenured and promoted faculty member that caught my attention because I kept hearing rumors of incompetence. When I investigated, I came to believe the rumors. When I inquired of the Chair of the P & T committee concerning the rationale for promoting and granting tenure to this individual, I was somewhat surprised by the answer. The Chair responded that the committee knew the faculty member was not a good teacher; however, the faculty member was a great person and was a close friend of many members of the P & T committee. Their children played together. How could they turn such a good person out into the streets? Tenure’s Up or Out Policy is difficult to apply to friends. In the meantime, the department in which this faculty member taught was suffering badly and rapidly losing students each year. I had to remind the P&T Committee of its responsibility to help provide quality education for students and not to reward their friends. We needed Simon Cowell on our P & T Committee.
[1] Information taken from Peter Fogg’s article, No,NO A Dozen Times No” which was written October 1, 2oo4, but appeared in Chronicle of Higher Education April 20, 2010 in the Faculty Volume 51, Issue 6, Page A12