A few links and thoughts for managers

Now that I am School director I'm spending more time in meetings, listening to senior managers' ideas about the campus plan for 2013 and I'm reading more posts in The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed. In many ways our NWU, or South African challenges are more universal than we think. Here are three quick perspectives.

Last week Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles released their survey of faculty (academic staff members') activities and attitudes. The survey reached more than 23 000 faculty members at four-year colleges and universities in the US. The table below shows activities and time spent:

How Faculty Members Report Spending Time, in Hours per Week, 2010-11

	0	1-4	5-8	9-12	13-16	17-20	21+
Schedule teaching	5.8	15.8	34.6	28.6	9.2	3.7	2.1
Preparing for teaching (including grading)	4.9	11.5	24.4	22.4	13.9	12.1	10.7
Advising and counselling students	4.4	56.7	27.1	7.8	2.2	1.1	0.7
Committee work and meetings	7.6	58.0	23.7	6.8	2.2	1.3	0.4
Other administration	30.6	39.7	13.8	6.6	3.4	2.7	3.2
Research	13.1	30.3	19.2	12.9	6.9	6.0	11.7

The report shows that time spent on teaching is less than the years before, but time spent on research is not notably up. Many faculty members spend small but regular chunks of time each week on committee work, advising, research and other activities. I am keen to compare this to our School where most of the staff would fall in the 5-8 hours of teaching per week bracket. It is clear that the faculty members in the survey do not get close the the NWU's idea of splitting their time 40:40:20 between teaching, research and community / commercialisation.

Another interesting table shows what is happening in class:

Men, Women and Teaching Methods in Used in All or Most Courses

Method	Men, 2001-2	Women, 2001-2	Men, 2010-11	Women, 2010-11
Extensive lecturing	54.6%	34.1%	52.7%	33.8%
Class discussions	68.3%	78.9%	78.3%	88.0%
Cooperative learning	32.6%	55.8%	48.5%	68.8%
Student presentations	30.4%	45.2%	36.9%	53.8%

Faculty members seem to be moving to more student-centered approaches, but the men still seem to prefer more lecturing. This is specifically the case in the so-called STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). This week our campus is hosting a conference on teaching excellence and I am excited to go and have a look at what the top lectures are doing in their courses.

Finally, the report shows that these academics are stressed. The challenge for a manager though is that "teaching load" or "committee work" are not the big stressors. Items like self-imposed high expectations, working with under-prepared students and research or publishing demands rank much higher. Empowering staff to take their teaching or research to the next level will require more than just giving them more time. I think that training is one part, but I also like the idea of nudging. Maybe exposing people to that next level quality will inspire their own efforts.






This brings me to two other interesting posts. Margaret Wente writes in the Globe and Mail that Canadian Universities will have to choose between access and quality. The problem starts with government's goals of access and mass participation. But:

Academics insist that universities must not become job factories. Their mission is to guide students to cultivate the life of the mind. But there’s a big disconnect between what academics want and what students want. For students, higher education is all about the job. Yet, they get virtually no counselling about what returns they can expect for their investment, or what their job prospects might be.

She goes on to argue that changing this will be difficult and outlines a number of points that sound familiar in SA as well: Big classes, more teaching done by part-time staff (adjuncts), all the incentives for research. Her solution is a bold one:

Give more research money to the most productive researchers, and far less to the rest. Let’s abandon our cherished egalitarianism and fund our leading research universities properly, so they can compete on the world stage. Let’s develop a tier of teaching universities that are excellent at what they do. The result would be smaller classes and lower tuition, a win-win all around.

I also do not think that universities should become job factories, and I disagree with the article's idea that there should be greater government intervention, but I agree that the system as it is set up, is a danger to undergraduate teaching and in the end post-grads and research will suffer for it as well.




Finally, the Chronicle writes about a Michael Rizzo, a full-time lecturer in economics at the University of Rochester, and argues for two tracks for faculty - teaching, or research. The idea put forward is:

But what if the academic work force were made up primarily of two types of faculty members? One, a small proportion of tenure-track professors—those who earn doctoral degrees, do research, train graduate students, teach advanced seminars, and help administrators run the university. And two, a larger portion of full-time instructors, like Mr. Rizzo, who teach undergraduates, help advise them, keep up with developments in the field by reading and attending conferences, but do no research. Instead of earning Ph.D.'s, like those on the tenure track, instructors could stop with a master's degree, as many in the adjunct teaching pool already do.

At the NWU this idea is heresy: we recently scrapped the idea of a teaching-learning associate professorship. But then management also has this idea that we can't have all these part-time lecturers on the  school's budget. Who is supposed to do the teaching then? Or the other way around, if everyone's teaching, who's supposed to do the research then? As an economist I am in favour of the idea of the division of labour and specialisation. If everyone has to do everything, there can be limited gains from trade.

In conclusion, I don't have answers to these different questions, but I do find it interesting that there are many more people out there, thinking about them.