American Association of University Professors
Retrenchment has become so commonplace that it has been accepted as part of a broader shift in the higher education landscape. But that doesn’t mean that it makes sense.
First, faculty compensation –salaries and benefits—constitutes just 18%-25% of the budgets of Ohio’s public universities. When universities calculate the instructional costs, they typically report them as 55%-65% of the institutional budget. But faculty salaries amount to just a third to half of those reported costs.
At most of our universities, administrative compensation—salaries and benefits—constitute as much or more of the institutional budget as faculty compensation. The salaries of mid-level administrators are generally in the same range as those of faculty with higher ranks and seniority. Upper-level administrators receive salaries much higher than those received by anyone else in our universities—with the possible exception of some football and basketball coaches.
Retrenchment seldom involves upper-level administrators. When administrative cuts are made, it is almost always lower-level support staff whose positions are eliminated. Ironically, in many cases, those lower-salaried positions have actually been reported under the heading of instructional costs.
The major problem with retrenching faculty as a means of addressing budget problems is not only that faculty compensation is a relatively small part of university budgets but also that faculty teaching and research produces almost all of the revenue at our universities.
Just about everything else is supported by instruction and research.
It is a common misperception that intercollegiate athletics produce a great deal of revenue. But in Ohio, Ohio State University is the only public university at which intercollegiate athletics are self-supporting. At the other universities that field football teams, the athletics programs are supported by subsidies from the universities of $20 and $40 million per year.
In the mid-2010s, a study conducted at Ohio University revealed that students at Ohio’s public universities are, in effect, subsidizing intercollegiate athletics with at least $1,000 to $2,000 of their tuition per year.
Retrenchment means that students are getting even less for their tuition dollars that are actually supporting instruction. For full-time faculty are generally replaced by multiple part-time or adjunct instructors. Without undervaluing the efforts of these adjunct instructors, they generally do not have the credentials that full-time faculty have.
Because adjunct faculty either have other full-time employment or teach, by necessity, at several institutions, they are not generally on campus outside of class time and specific office hours. This limited availability means that students do not receive the mentoring that is often a very key component of their educations, particularly if courses in their majors are not being taught by full-time faculty.
Likewise, because adjunct faculty either have other full-time employment or teach, by necessity, at several institutions, they generally do not have the time or the resources to sustain active research and scholarship. And because a university’s academic reputation is largely defined by the research and scholarship that its faculty members produce, the value of the degrees that students earn is eroded when full-time faculty positions are cut and replaced with part-time positions.
Full-time faculty are annually evaluated on the quality of their teaching, their research and scholarship, and their service. Without undervaluing the efforts of administrators and support staff, most of the service to community groups and professional organizations is conducted by full-time faculty. This service establishes professional relationships of value to the universities as institutions and, more importantly, of value to the students who will reside in and contribute to those communities and engage with other professionals in their fields.
In sum, retrenching full-time faculty to compensate for overspending in other areas is the equivalent of a corporation investing in stock buybacks instead of in its core products and services—and then pegging executive salaries and bonuses to the stock price. This sort of practice may account, at least in part, for the fact that the average lifespan of the corporations on the S&P 500 has been between 15 and 20 years over the past decade compared to 67 years in 1960. The common political talking point has been that our universities need to be run like businesses. But our universities are not businesses. They are, instead, public institutions, and no one would want to replace or even reconfigure them every 15-20 years.
Another side of retrenchment is the elimination of programs with few recent graduates. On the surface, this seems like a commonsensical approach, but it actually reflects a simplistic notion of curricula.
If one examines in detail the recent reductions in majors at several Ohio universities, one finds that the elimination of a large number of majors results in surprisingly small numbers of faculty positions and course offerings being eliminated. This seeming incongruity is actually quite easily explained. The faculty members teach the courses for other higher-enrolled majors, but the low-enrolled majors reconfigure requirements to give students a broader variety of majors (and minors) from which to choose. So, despite the appearance of smart business management, eliminating most of the majors was not actually saving the universities much money, but they were, instead, simply eliminating options available to students. Many of the faculty retrenched ostensibly in conjunction with these large reductions in majors have actually had nothing to do with the eliminated majors.