Former Stanford Provost: Intolerance a Threat to Higher Education

Former Stanford Provost John Etchemendy, and a speech to the Stanford Board of Trustees, talked about threats to higher education. After briefly discussing threats from outside the academy, he turned to the “The threat from within.”

But I’m actually more worried about the threat from within. Over the years, I have watched a growing intolerance at universities in this country – not intolerance along racial or ethnic or gender lines – there, we have made laudable progress. Rather, a kind of intellectual intolerance, a political one-sidedness, that is the antithesis of what universities should stand for. It manifests itself in many ways: in the intellectual monocultures that have taken over certain disciplines; in the demands to disinvite speakers and outlaw groups whose views we find offensive; in constant calls for the university itself to take political stands. We decry certain news outlets as echo chambers, while we fail to notice the echo chamber we’ve built around ourselves.

This results in a kind of intellectual blindness that will, in the long run, be more damaging to universities than cuts in federal funding or ill-conceived constraints on immigration. It will be more damaging because we won’t even see it: We will write off those with opposing views as evil or ignorant or stupid, rather than as interlocutors worthy of consideration. We succumb to the all-purpose ad hominem because it is easier and more comforting than rational argument. But when we do, we abandon what is great about this institution we serve.

It will not be easy to resist this current. As an institution, we are continually pressed by faculty and students to take political stands, and any failure to do so is perceived as a lack of courage. But at universities today, the easiest thing to do is to succumb to that pressure. What requires real courage is to resist it. Yet when those making the demands can only imagine ignorance and stupidity on the other side, any resistance will be similarly impugned.

The university is not a megaphone to amplify this or that political view, and when it does it violates a core mission. Universities must remain open forums for contentious debate, and they cannot do so while officially espousing one side of that debate.

But we must do more. We need to encourage real diversity of thought in the professoriate, and that will be even harder to achieve. It is hard for anyone to acknowledge high-quality work when that work is at odds, perhaps opposed, to one’s own deeply held beliefs. But we all need worthy opponents to challenge us in our search for truth. It is absolutely essential to the quality of our enterprise.

I fear that the next few years will be difficult to navigate. We need to resist the external threats to our mission, but in this, we have many friends outside the university willing and able to help. But to stem or dial back our academic parochialism, we are pretty much on our own. The first step is to remind our students and colleagues that those who hold views contrary to one’s own are rarely evil or stupid, and may know or understand things that we do not. It is only when we start with this assumption that rational discourse can begin, and that the winds of freedom can blow.

Nice words, and when Etchemendy was actually serving as Provost, he made some comments that, in context, have to be interpreted as chastising the politically correct leftists on campus.

Unfortunately, your average university President / Provost / Chancellor is craven in the face of demands from intolerant leftists, or Federal bureaucrats demanding that speech be silenced as “harassment” or that males accused of sexual assault be convicted by kangaroo court proceedings. We are not aware that Etchemendy was any better than other university bureaucrats on these issues.

Activism on Behalf of Adjunct Faculty at Jesuit Universities

This came in our e-mail (and presumably, in the e-mail of the rest of the Marquette faculty):

Dear Friend —

This week is Campus Equity Week. On campuses across the country, instructors are highlighting the inequities that exist on our campuses and advocating for faculty voices as the solution. Equity is part of Jesuit values. That is why we are bringing our petition demanding a voice on our campuses to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU).

Have you signed the petition?

We will be delivering the petition next week and will call upon Father Sheeran, S.J. to support just employment policies on all Jesuit campuses and help facilitate a national discussion with Jesuit school faculty about the need for improved working conditions and student learning conditions.

Add your name to the petition today, and if you’ve already signed, circulate this link to your social network.

Thanks,

The Faculty Forward Network Team

OK, what in the world is that about?

One has to click on the link to find out. It’s about adjunct faculty.

The text of the petition explains:

There are over 218,000 students and 20,000 faculty members at 28 Jesuit institutions across the United States. Once a middle-class job, nearly a majority of college and university faculty are now working part-time for very low pay, isolated from colleagues without job security, benefits or even office space. Jesuit institutions are no different, in fact, more than half (53 percent) of instructional faculty at Jesuit colleges and universities are now non-tenure track.

Because of these striking contradictions between Jesuit mission and practice, faculty and students across the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities have been organizing for inclusion and a voice in the campus community, improved working conditions and job security -- all in service to students and the rich traditions of Jesuit social justice. While some Jesuit institutions like Georgetown have chosen to embrace their mission and allow faculty a voice in the educational decision making, other institutions like Seattle University have chosen to hide behind their religious association to deny faculty their fundamental right of free association in pursuit of justice, standing in stark contrast to the fundamental mission of Jesuit education.

Uh, oh!

That last part of the give away. Faculty Forward is a front for the Service Employees International Union. Their real agenda is to unionize college employees, and they seem to aim at the most vulnerable, those adjuncts, graduate students, and so on.

So that is what is lurking behind that “social justice” rhetoric. The real agenda is not to give faculty a voice, but to give union activists a voice.

Adjuncts

The rhetoric about adjunct instructors does touch on a real issue in higher education, notwithstanding the self-interested union agenda behind this campaign.

The simple fact is that having courses taught by adjunct faculty is cheap. Getting a course taught by an adjunct costs in the low to middle four figures. Getting four courses taught by a new tenure track hire costs in the mid- to high five figures (or more in some disciplines). So the temptation to have a lot of courses taught by adjuncts is huge.

Exploited?

We don’t much sympathize with the notion that adjuncts are exploited. Nobody forces anybody to work as an adjunct. Adjuncts are not expected to publish, nor do the sorts of things (committee work, advising, etc.) that regular faculty do. The job is just going into the classroom and teaching, typically teaching a class one has taught multiple times before with little new preparation needed. Usually, the sections are not large, since large sections are usually taught by tenure track faculty with teaching assistants.

Most adjunct faculty have other jobs, and are merely making some spending money doing something they rather enjoy.

Further, some departments with a large load of “service” courses (required courses that huge numbers of students take) have to use adjuncts, since there is no way to pay for tenure track lines to cover all the necessary sections. (And many tenure track faculty would not like to do the vast majority of their teaching in freshman level courses.)

Also, faculty get grants, fellowships, and so on, and therefore go on leave. So somebody has to be hired to fill in for the absent faculty member.

A Quality Issue

But having said that, a college that relies too much on adjunct faculty is providing a second-rate education. Often you can hire adjuncts who are good teachers. Political Science at Marquette now has a group of adjuncts who are excellent teachers. But in the past, we have had one or two disastrous situations.

Further, with excessive use of adjuncts, students lose the opportunity to take particular faculty members for both freshman and advanced courses, to develop a relationship with one or a few professors, and to ask for recommendations from faculty who know them well.

Finally, with excessive use of adjuncts, the administrative overhead (committee work, student advising, etc.) gets concentrated upon very few faculty. One can reach a point where one group of people are doing the vast majority of teaching, and another is keeping things running.

So would-be freshmen looking for a school would be well advised to check out the use of adjuncts at each of the schools they are considering.  If the number is quite large, the quality of education is questionable.

Fiscal Crisis at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

From an e-mail widely circulated among faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.  The author is anonymous, but our sources say the analysis resonates among the faculty of that institution.  Indeed, the UWM faculty is up in arms about what is happening.

Dear UWM Department Chairs,

At your discretion, please forward the message below to your departmental faculty and teaching staff. This message details the root causes of our institution’s current structural deficit.

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to you anonymously to relay some of the analyses that have been assembled in recent months through activity of the Natural Sciences Executive committee. This committee was formed to respond to the rapidly deteriorating state of the College of L&S [Letters and Sciences] and UWM budgets. The analyses were undertaken using the campus and system databases of expenditures particularly those data available from the office of institutional research and from IPEDS [Integrated Post Secondary Data System] data. Despite any counter argument that may be offered in response to this message, these data are objective and as accurate and telling as any available. While it is common to be selective and promote notions that most benefit those who undertook the analysis, this did not occur in this instance. These are trends and numbers that describe the causes of the current dire financial state of this institution.

The overall assessment is that UWM is poorly administered and has no galvanizing vision. Our administrators control the lines of funding and have distributed funds in a rather haphazard manner, largely within their own ranks, in response to numerous individual and group solicitations. These numerous relative small affirmative fiscal decisions attempt to appease the solicitor(s) without incorporating long-term enrollment and funding revenue considerations into any strategy. This has resulted in a large expansion of positions and unit costs that have greatly exceeded UWM’s revenue streams. If such an expansion had not occurred a large fraction of the current 38 million dollar structural deficit would not have accrued. It is important to remember that this deficit is independent of recent state reductions in funding.

Some fraction of the data for this analysis is available from Professor Kyle Swanson’s website: [here]. We all owe Kyle a debt for his relentless acquisition and analysis that has exposed the true costs at UWM. Trends many of us have long suspected to exist now have thorough objective analyses behind them.

Some of the dominant trends or conclusions are as follows (in no particular order):

1) Academic units consistently get handed budget cuts, yet overall expenditures on salary increased by $17.2m (7.3%; +85.2 FTE [Full Time Equivalent]) from 2011 to 2015.

2) Instructional FTE has increased by 116 (2080 to 2196; 5.6%) despite a 9.1% decrease in in the number of credit hours offered. Teaching academic staff FTE has increased 14.7% (589 to 676 FTE), while faculty numbers have fallen from 836 to 808 FTE.

3) Limited Employees (administrator types) are multiplying, as there are 27 more FTE in Fall 2015 compared to Fall 2011. The overall pay pool increased by $3.7m, or 23.4%.

4) Faculty and support staff in academic units are routinely ignored for salary equity considerations or simply told that no monies for raises or merit are available. However, it is starkly obvious that if you want a career path at UWM, it is best by some considerable margin to be in the administration. Average pay within the administration has increased by 11.2% over the prior four years (numerous administrators have received 30% or greater increases over this period). It appears that being able to set the budgets is a primary corrupting influence.

This is indelible, our administrators should no longer be seen as the stewards of our institution’s budgets. Whether they realize it or not (and I suspect they do not) they have become the primary drain on our threadbare resources at the expense of our core functions.

5) If you examine only non-instructional UWM employees earning greater than $80K per year, salaries have increased on average by a staggering 9.5% per annum since 2011. In addition the university has added 45 FTE in this salary category in the last four years.

6) Total expenditures on non-academic activities have expanded greatly since the 2010 Goldwater report that suggested UWM had a lean administration. This seems to have been a call-to-arms in terms of non-academic expenditures. During the last 5 years UWM has increased the percentage support spending from ~30% of the budget to almost 38%. This accounts for the bulk of our current $38 M structural deficit.

7) Despite the proliferation of support (and to a lesser extent instructional) positions and the rapid growth rate of administrative salaries none of the core issues facing the university have abated. Our student retention numbers have not changed and our average time to graduation is vastly too long. The reason for this is that only at the interface can these trends be influenced, yet all of the efforts (PASS, advising, the bloat in Student Affairs etc) and expenditures designed to correct these trends have been centralized, out of the instructional departments .

The Remedy

The remedy proposed by the Chancellor is almost beyond comprehension and indicates the depth of the problems we face. Yet another massive unruly committee manned by the very individuals benefiting from the current budgetary debacle; 18 of the 24 members of this committee report either to the Provost or to Robin van Harpen. These are hardly the people likely to make the only decision that can save this institution: Support activities (ie administration) must be confined to an unchanging percentage of total revenues (30% is a suggested healthy number), such that the only way these costs can expand is when the University as a whole prospers.

Instead what we hear (admittedly as rumor) is that teaching support positions are the primary initial target of budgetary cuts. The individuals that teach a large fraction of our high enrollment service courses (at very low cost). That is, the instructors who enable our campus scholarly activities by keeping faculty teaching at a level conducive to research. Eliminating a significant fraction of these positions will see research on this campus come to a precipitous halt as faculty fill the ranks at the expense of their research programs.

In an effort to rally a collective sense of outrage, I would like to remind you all that there are only two groups of employees at UWM that en masse add to the bottom line, these are faculty and teaching academic staff. They are the only individuals able to bring money to the institution, yet this group has been ignored and I would argue maligned by current administrative actions. Instead of being seen as the institution’s primary resource we are regarded as a difficult group of subordinates. I will submit that the apparently unending expansion of non-academic functions is highly unlikely to solve our current budgetary state. We exist at the whim of high-cost, short-sighted administrators that are for the most part inept at grasping the state of the institution or understanding that its prime functions are, education and research.

Our future is being decided in open meetings held in the regent’s room on Wednesdays from 3-5 - I suggest we all attend.

Those of us who prefer the private sector to public near monopolies, and who are associated with a private sector institution (like Marquette) might be tempted to feel a bit of schadenfreude.

That would be very badly misguided.

The simple fact is that the pathologies that afflict UWM can be found at Marquette.  An excellent piece of investigative journalism from the Marquette Tribune in 2014 discussed the issue.

Marquette, an older, better established and moderately prestigious institution can perhaps better tolerate their ill effects, but they make Marquette much inferior to what it ought to be.

Some key passages from the letter above:

The overall assessment is that UWM is poorly administered and has no galvanizing vision. Our administrators control the lines of funding and have distributed funds in a rather haphazard manner, largely within their own ranks, in response to numerous individual and group solicitations.

And then:

Average pay within the administration has increased by 11.2% over the prior four years (numerous administrators have received 30% or greater increases over this period). It appears that being able to set the budgets is a primary corrupting influence.

Further:

If you examine only non-instructional UWM employees earning greater than $80K per year, salaries have increased on average by a staggering 9.5% per annum since 2011. In addition the university has added 45 FTE in this salary category in the last four years.

And then:

During the last 5 years UWM has increased the percentage support spending from ~30% of the budget to almost 38%. This accounts for the bulk of our current $38 M structural deficit.

In sum: administrative bloat. And a lack of concern for the people who do teaching and research.  De facto, this is a lack of concern for students. Common in all academia.  And certainly at UWM, and at Marquette.

Note that the assessment that in 2010 that UWM had a lean administration.  We doubt this was true in an absolute sense, but may well have been true in a relative sense (compared to the bloat at other institutions).  But then the bloat ramped up.

Who was Chancellor of UWM from 2011 until 2014?  Michael Lovell.

Note:   Professor Kyle Swanson has not responded to our requests for comment.

Update

More information: one thing noted by Arts & Letters faculty at UWM is the plethora of “programs” that are often marginally viable, don’t serve the core mission of the institution, and drain away resources. This, unfortunately, is what one would expect from university administrators. There is a big incentive for them to have “initiatives” on their résumés. That sounds impressive, and by the time it becomes obvious that the initiatives did not work out so well, the administrator is probably gone, having moved on to another institution (probably to a more desirable position, due to the “initiatives” he or she had implemented).

College Course: How to Be a Union Thug

Getting Beyond Race in College Admissions

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal ponders the legacy of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and takes issue with her view of affirmative action.

It’s true that O’Connor is not a fanatical quota advocate. She has said that racial preferences should be seen as “a temporary bandage, rather than a permanent cure.”

What’s disturbing is that liberals were saying the same thing in the early 1970s, when the first racial preference cases were coming to the Supreme Court. The “temporary” expedient isn’t looking so temporary today, especially when there is a whole cadre of activists, affirmative action bureaucrats and liberal politicians supporting it.

Fund continues:

She seemed strangely unaware, however, of the growing evidence that racial preferences might have actually decreased the likelihood that blacks and Hispanics will graduate from college. Put differently, if the body of evidence is correct, the whole affirmative action enterprise has been deeply and tragically flawed from the beginning, failing to achieve its most basic aim: increasing the number of minority college graduates, doctors, lawyers and other professionals.

Other panelists at the Powell symposium discussed the work of UCLA law professor Richard Sander, which shows that minority law students in California who attend law schools at which their academic credentials do not match the credentials of other students are less likely to pass the bar exam than they would have been if they had attended less prestigious law schools where their academic credentials would have been closer to the norm. As a result, according to Mr. Sander, there are fewer minority lawyers than there would have been under colorblind admissions. Justice O’Connor did not attend the rest of the symposium and made no reference to the Sander study in her remarks.

Moreover, Justice O’Connor’s comments about UCLA obscured an important and promising real story. While it’s true that black and Hispanic enrollment at UCLA and Berkeley went down after Prop 209, these students simply didn’t just vanish. The vast majority were admitted on the basis of their academic record to somewhat less highly ranked campuses of the prestigious 10-campus UC system, which caters only to the top one-eighth of California’s high school graduates. In the immediate wake of Proposition 209, the number of minority students at some of the nonflagship campuses went up, not down.

This “cascading” effect has had real benefits in matching students with the campus where they are most likely to do well. Despite what affirmative action supporters often imply, academic ability matters. Although some students will outperform their entering credentials and some students will underperform theirs, most students will succeed in the range that their high school grades and SAT scores predict. Leapfrogging minority candidates into elite colleges where they often become frustrated and fail hurts them even more than the institutions. It creates the illusion that we are closing racial disparities in education when in fact we are not. While blacks and Hispanics now attend college at nearly the same rate as whites, only about 1 in 6 graduates.

Affirmative action often creates the illusion that black or other minority students cannot excel. At the University of California at San Diego, in the year before race-based preferences were abolished in 1997, only one black student had a freshman-year GPA of 3.5 or better. In other words, there was a single black honor student in a freshman class of 3,268. In contrast, 20% of the white students on campus had a 3.5 or better GPA.

There were lots of black students capable of doing honors work at UCSD. But such students were probably admitted to Harvard, Yale or Berkeley, where often they were not receiving an honor GPA. The end to racial preferences changed that. In 1999, 20% of black freshmen at UCSD boasted a GPA of 3.5 or better after their first year, almost equaling the 22% rate for whites after their first year. Similarly, failure rates for black students declined dramatically at UCSD immediately after the implementation of Proposition 209. Isn’t that better for everyone in the long run?

Then there is the claim that affirmative action preferences benefit the “disadvantaged.” After all, aren’t all blacks disadvantaged?

Racial preferences were intended to help disadvantaged minorities, but in reality they have been turned into a spoils system for the privileged. “Most go to children of powerful politicians, civil-rights activists, and other relatively well-off blacks and Hispanics,” says Stuart Taylor of National Journal. “This does nothing for the people most in need of help, who lack the minimal qualifications to get into the game.”

This situation reminds us of the old quip that foreign aid is a subsidy from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries.

And indeed, Fund produces statistics to show that disadvantaged whites have been hurt by race-based preferences, while privileged black students have -- if not exactly been helped -- gotten into schools beyond what their qualifications justified.