NAS Blog

There is so much that is wrong with Herbert London’s short essay that I despair of mentioning more than a couple of major issues in a brief comment. First, he homogenizes all forms of higher education. In my own state, only the major research universities have a 2/2 teaching load for faculty, while the four-year colleges have a 3/3 teaching load – that’s a fairly hefty teaching load. Asking faculty to teach more would threaten the quality of their teaching. At the research universities there may be more efficiencies possible, but in many departments at my local research university faculty have major external grants to support their research and scholarship, and the State makes money off of their work. In the local Chemistry department, for example, every faculty member has externally funded research and supports graduate students and post-docs, and still teaches. To suggest that efficiencies are possible is trite – of course efficiencies are possible. The real challenge is to identify specific, workable, fair forms of efficiency. Simply asking faculty to teach more is naïve.

Second, London reveals one of his major sources of irritation with faculty when he offers the rather non sequitor comment about preaching rather than teaching. Does he imagine that these are mutually exclusive? Some of my best teachers were also preachy. What does this have to do with cost-cutting, except to reveal that London would like to dismiss any faculty member who drifts into preach mode? Again, not a very workable proposal. Don’t like preachy faculty? I don’t like preachy bankers, and I’ll wager that the political views of bankers were much more complicit in creating our current financial crisis than preachy faculty.

How about a different approach? London’s comments imply that state employees – who are not responsible for their state’s financial crises, but who are victims of these crises – should shoulder the burden of solving budget problems that they did not create. In my state, people want all of the services that state and local governments supply, from education to trash pick, but don’t want to pay higher taxes for these services when the state can no longer afford to pay for them. Tough. Raise tuition, raise taxes to pay for services such as health care for the poor, let people who use services pay for them through fees or taxes. Why punish state workers with cut-backs, pay reductions, layoffs, etc? And don’t use the country’s financial crisis – linked to banking and Wall Street abuses – as an opportunity to punish universities for harboring faculty whose views London finds offensive.

I’m also struck, finally, by the ease with which people who don’t have to make tough decisions can toss out simplistic advice – my friends and colleagues in our state university system are struggling every day with very hard choices about budget reductions and the impact these have on real lives, students, staff and faculty.