We've heard much about the increasing reliance upon definite-term contract faculty by universities and the resulting separation of teaching and research functions. Also emerging as a result of this separation is the use of contract, non-tenure-track employees to fill undergraduate administrative positions deemed unattractive to senior faculty members.
A large minority of the faculty members in my own department have either research buyouts that allow them to forego administration altogether, or enough seniority that they meet their administrative obligations at the graduate level. This leaves the day-to-day running of the undergraduate program to me and my undergraduate affairs committee consisting solely of non-tenured faculty in which the most senior member besides me has about four years experience.
On the surface, this may not seem to be a problem. My committee is dedicated to the undergraduate program and has come to know and understand it and our students well. While we face a number of challenges, including the double cohort and expansion of our program to accommodate new initiatives, our support staff are keen, highly knowledgeable and can come up with workable, imaginative responses.
The problem arises because of our almost total lack of power. Repeatedly, our staff put a great deal of work into proposals just to see them dismissed at department meetings by senior faculty members who have no idea how serious the problem is because they haven't been actively involved in the "trenches" of the undergraduate program for years.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. The more than doubling in size of our undergraduate program over the past few years (without an accompanying increase in resources) has left us little choice but to call for dramatic changes in course sequencing and scheduling as well as increases in faculty commitment. These proposals are routinely deemed unnecessary by influential senior faculty who prefer to believe that all is under control because that is the PR currently being distributed by senior university officials who are primarily concerned with maintaining public faith in an overburdened system.
Of course, this only happens if our proposals even get raised at department meetings. Increasingly, the undergraduate report has been moved to the end of the agenda, after two hours of discussion about the latest funding opportunities, proposals for collaboration with other entities, proposals to create new graduate programs, and so on. Often, there is not enough time remaining to cover our agenda, so we must either truncate a 30-minute discussion into three or four minutes or else table our report until the next meeting where we will again be asked to rush through the important points.
Adding to this is the fact that I, even as associate chair, cannot be included in the more sensitive discussions regarding issues related directly to the undergraduate program because I am not a regular faculty member. When hiring new faculty members or promotion of existing members is discussed, the meeting has to pause while I and the other contract committee members gather our things and leave the room. Hiring and promotion decisions are then discussed and made without any effective representation of the undergraduate program.
The tendency to farm out undergraduate administration is understandable. I agree researchers and scholars with a proven track record deserve to be able to pursue their tasks with the kind of focus and commitment that would be compromised by heavy duty at the undergraduate level.
However, the notion that these same individuals must also be the wisest authorities when it comes to decisions that influence undergraduate education often leads to a dissociation between the nature of the decisions being made and the reality of the undergraduate experience. Such a dissociation cannot be maintained forever. If the only faculty members who truly understand the nature of the problems besetting undergraduate programs in our universities today are the ones without a voice in running those programs, then the future of our whole university system is threatened.
Glenn Ward is the associate chair of undergraduate studies in the department of health studies and gerontology at the University of Waterloo.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of CAUT.