The College Fix

I marvel sometimes at how different my undergraduate experience was from the average college student: Nearly all my professors were tenured and taught every class. There were maybe two adjuncts in there. And the vast majority of classes were small enough to know everyone’s name.

This wasn’t at some pricey renowned liberal arts school, but an academically middling religious university that was relatively affordable at the time.

Now as the husband of an adjunct professor whose career goal is teaching over research, I feel like I’m looking into our future whenever I see a professor talk about the direction of higher education as a whole, not just the so-called R1s.

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Dartblog, an unofficial watchdog over Dartmouth College, published a concise and powerful lament Thursday from a professor on the grim prospects facing Dartmouth faculty who joined several years ago but are only now coming up for tenure:

Dartmouth had a reputation as a place where work-life balance was valued, and the inconveniences associated with its rural location were offset by the benefits of raising children within a close-knit community. …

Some of my peers were pressured into service commitments that would have no bearing on tenure, and encouraged to take on projects (writing for anthologies and organizing conferences, for example) that would be time-consuming yet not lead to professional advancement. Recent tenure decisions have many members of my cohort scrambling for the exits …

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I hate to say this, but many younger colleagues express regret at having agonized over their lesson plans and expended so much effort on honing their skills as classroom instructors, when a talent for teaching simply does not factor into tenure decisions.

The anonymous professor says that a turning point in Dartmouth’s evolution is the standalone graduate school it opened three weeks ago, which will churn out “an easily exploitable workforce” of grad students who will be forced to teach … and get nothing out of it when they themselves come up for tenure.

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The end game is Dartmouth will become like any other “corporate state university” that judges professors by their “productivity” – their ability to haul in big grants and publish a lot.

Activist Dartmouth alum Joseph Asch, the author of the post quoting the professor, muses:

[W]hen the call goes out for faculty members to become involved in the new house system and in advising students, how do you expect junior faculty to respond? [President] Phil [Hanlon] is sending mixed signals here: get involved in the houses, but don’t expect any credit for doing so at tenure time.

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