A great article on how education, enroute to becoming a business, is treating the core of its workers; educators, esp. non-tenured professors. Just like store workers in businesses, e.g. WalMart, McDonald's, Starbucks etc are paid minimum wage, non-tenured professors in Canadian & multitude of American post-secondary institutions are being paid peanuts & are hired on contracts, so they are also devoid of beefy benefits.
When these educators are treated as such, then why would they ever put so much effort to teach the next generation of students? How can education system become better when its providers are themselves financially insecure & are always worried about their contract renewals & wages? How will this affect the quality of the education in post-secondary institutions?
On the side note, Ontario just released its 2015 budget, & to come up with balanced budgets in 2017, provincial government is going to cut its funding to education & healthcare. This means universities will either increase tuition (higher prices for its customers; students) or decrease educators' expenses by lowering or keeping their wages constant (decreasing supplier costs), or perhaps doing both to increase their profit margins.
If this trend continues, which it seems like it will, the quality of education being provided by public universities will go down while private universities will start opening up (many are available in US) to provide higher quality of education. As I have blogged previously on many occasions that similar to healthcare, education will then become two-tiered, like it's in developing countries, e.g. in South Asia. Rich will send their kids to private universities, while poor will send their kids to public ones, which by the way, are still not that cheap & tuition keeps rising.
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In the long run, contract teaching needs to be abolished.
It’s not just the abysmal pay – roughly on the order of $7,500 per course with teaching load varying from 2 to 8 courses a year, usually falling somewhere in the lower middle – or the chronic uncertainty of pay-per-course four-month non-renewable contracts. It’s that contract faculty, no matter how highly qualified or dedicated they may be, are permanently consigned to the shadows of academia.
The job of contract faculty is to slip into the classroom, deliver the prescribed aliquot of education, & then slip out again. They may spend weeks or months creating course materials & teaching strategies, but too often, this knowledge simply vanishes with them as they take up the next dismal temp job & a new cohort of students begins from zero.
Needless to say, it’s a singular path. Contract faculty aren’t generally paid to develop or update courses, aren’t usually invited to sit on curriculum committees ... . They are mostly excluded from student & campus events unless they participate on a voluntary basis & they have no obvious prospect of career advancement, ever.
In the short term, creating what is essentially an academic underclass is probably a neat way to cut costs. In the long run, universities cannot function as vibrant hubs of intellectual activity when they are staffed in large part by a merry-go-round of temporary instructors who sometimes barely know their tenured peers or even each other.
At least part of the problem is that universities are torn by competing policy objectives.
On one hand, we recognize the value of a well-educated society; postsecondary institutions are swollen with record quantities of students & someone has to teach them. On the other, Canada is in hot pursuit of invention & innovation, & professors who excel at research are often rewarded with “teaching release” to enable them to produce more of it.
More research requires more graduate-level students – but once these bright young things have finished slogging out 4 to 6 years of laboratory or field work to gain their PhDs, what fate awaits them? Under the current regime, many are simply plowed directly back into the system as contract faculty, paid peanuts to teach mass quantities of undergraduates. And the cycle perpetuates – the profession feasts on its young.
... When you are paid for a minimum number of hours, why not do the minimum amount of work? Why bother reporting academic dishonesty when it takes unpaid time & untold effort? Why bother with interactive classroom technologies when reading PowerPoint slides aloud is just so much easier? Why pour untold hours into supporting troubled students who might reach out with problems ranging from drug addiction to sexual assault?
Finally, recall that in the absence of any other markers, contract faculty live & die by the student evaluation. Why bother ensuring that exams are challenging, rigorous & fair when it’s hardly a trade secret that the quickest way to ensure “student satisfaction” is simply to inflate their grades? The fact is that most contract faculty do bother, & the reason is quite simple: They are genuinely passionate educators. Without this passion to sustain them, most would have quit long ago.
To many, the resolution to this is a quick, painful death: Contract teaching should mostly cease to exist. Instructors cannot be treated as dispensable when they are clearly anything but.
Instead, universities should create a permanent roster of salaried teaching positions, resorting to contract faculty only when desperate. Institutions such as McMaster University & the University of Waterloo have already moved in this direction, having recognized that professors need time, resources & a modicum of security to deliver the continuity, relevance & attention to detail that world-class postsecondary instruction demands.
A great education isn’t meted & doled out by the hour, & great educators cannot exist in quarantine from the rest of the academic community.
When these educators are treated as such, then why would they ever put so much effort to teach the next generation of students? How can education system become better when its providers are themselves financially insecure & are always worried about their contract renewals & wages? How will this affect the quality of the education in post-secondary institutions?
On the side note, Ontario just released its 2015 budget, & to come up with balanced budgets in 2017, provincial government is going to cut its funding to education & healthcare. This means universities will either increase tuition (higher prices for its customers; students) or decrease educators' expenses by lowering or keeping their wages constant (decreasing supplier costs), or perhaps doing both to increase their profit margins.
If this trend continues, which it seems like it will, the quality of education being provided by public universities will go down while private universities will start opening up (many are available in US) to provide higher quality of education. As I have blogged previously on many occasions that similar to healthcare, education will then become two-tiered, like it's in developing countries, e.g. in South Asia. Rich will send their kids to private universities, while poor will send their kids to public ones, which by the way, are still not that cheap & tuition keeps rising.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the long run, contract teaching needs to be abolished.
It’s not just the abysmal pay – roughly on the order of $7,500 per course with teaching load varying from 2 to 8 courses a year, usually falling somewhere in the lower middle – or the chronic uncertainty of pay-per-course four-month non-renewable contracts. It’s that contract faculty, no matter how highly qualified or dedicated they may be, are permanently consigned to the shadows of academia.
The job of contract faculty is to slip into the classroom, deliver the prescribed aliquot of education, & then slip out again. They may spend weeks or months creating course materials & teaching strategies, but too often, this knowledge simply vanishes with them as they take up the next dismal temp job & a new cohort of students begins from zero.
Needless to say, it’s a singular path. Contract faculty aren’t generally paid to develop or update courses, aren’t usually invited to sit on curriculum committees ... . They are mostly excluded from student & campus events unless they participate on a voluntary basis & they have no obvious prospect of career advancement, ever.
In the short term, creating what is essentially an academic underclass is probably a neat way to cut costs. In the long run, universities cannot function as vibrant hubs of intellectual activity when they are staffed in large part by a merry-go-round of temporary instructors who sometimes barely know their tenured peers or even each other.
At least part of the problem is that universities are torn by competing policy objectives.
On one hand, we recognize the value of a well-educated society; postsecondary institutions are swollen with record quantities of students & someone has to teach them. On the other, Canada is in hot pursuit of invention & innovation, & professors who excel at research are often rewarded with “teaching release” to enable them to produce more of it.
More research requires more graduate-level students – but once these bright young things have finished slogging out 4 to 6 years of laboratory or field work to gain their PhDs, what fate awaits them? Under the current regime, many are simply plowed directly back into the system as contract faculty, paid peanuts to teach mass quantities of undergraduates. And the cycle perpetuates – the profession feasts on its young.
... When you are paid for a minimum number of hours, why not do the minimum amount of work? Why bother reporting academic dishonesty when it takes unpaid time & untold effort? Why bother with interactive classroom technologies when reading PowerPoint slides aloud is just so much easier? Why pour untold hours into supporting troubled students who might reach out with problems ranging from drug addiction to sexual assault?
Finally, recall that in the absence of any other markers, contract faculty live & die by the student evaluation. Why bother ensuring that exams are challenging, rigorous & fair when it’s hardly a trade secret that the quickest way to ensure “student satisfaction” is simply to inflate their grades? The fact is that most contract faculty do bother, & the reason is quite simple: They are genuinely passionate educators. Without this passion to sustain them, most would have quit long ago.
To many, the resolution to this is a quick, painful death: Contract teaching should mostly cease to exist. Instructors cannot be treated as dispensable when they are clearly anything but.
Instead, universities should create a permanent roster of salaried teaching positions, resorting to contract faculty only when desperate. Institutions such as McMaster University & the University of Waterloo have already moved in this direction, having recognized that professors need time, resources & a modicum of security to deliver the continuity, relevance & attention to detail that world-class postsecondary instruction demands.
A great education isn’t meted & doled out by the hour, & great educators cannot exist in quarantine from the rest of the academic community.
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