Chair Talk #11

CHAIR TALK #11          Written with Prof. Tricia Serio

We all know that change is upon us in how we teach at universities.  Two very different examples of change: the evolution of online instruction and the steady increase in the use of non-tenure track faculty to provide instructional content.  What has been lacking in these efforts at the UA, well intentioned though they may be, has been a robust conversation amongst faculty about how to manage change so that the UA of the future will be one we can be proud of.  

What we write here is in anticipation of cuts to our instructional budgets and starts with the assumption that everything needs to be on the table.  And it also takes for granted that any solution we come up with must make contact with the broader context of the UA as a whole – a complex organism with many important parts.  

Let’s assume, just for the purposes of this discussion, that we are an AAU research university that insists on maintaining its research prowess all the while it embraces the challenges now being faced by most public universities.  How can we change our approach to our core instructional mission in ways that would allow us also to both maintain our commitment to our students and to thrive in research in a landscape of reduced resources?  The quick answer is that, absent significant new revenue streams, we are going to have to teach more “efficiently”.   What are the various ways we can be more efficient and what are their trade-offs for our core values and principles: (1) maintain excellence; (2) use fewer, not more, part-time faculty; (3) do not sacrifice diversity;  (4) do not sacrifice access?

Here are some of the ways we can think of lowering costs in how we teach:

1. Increase the average teaching load across the institution – it’s surprising what a small change could actually do.  Let’s say faculty agree to teach one added course every two years on average.  That computes to about 750 extra courses taught each year by existing faculty.  We now pay about $5K to part-time faculty per course, who are hired for limited duration to cover sabbatical replacements and other brief absences.  If we could, that’s $3.75M in potential savings – which could support quite a lot of creative activity across campus.  We could leave it up to departments to apportion this teaching increase – as long as it added up to an extra course per FTE every 2 years.  Would enough of us be willing to take on an extra course every other year to free up this kind of money?  It’s a question at least worth asking.
2. Decrease the personnel costs associated with those who are delivering the instruction.  There are a few ways this could be done – one of them we’ve already ruled out – that is, using even more part-time faculty.  Another way would be to exchange expensive senior faculty, who retire, for less expensive junior faculty.  This is a good idea for lots of reasons but it won’t generate a lot of ‘savings’.
3. Restrict course offerings.  Which courses should be offered every year, every other year or every third year or be completely eliminated?  These discussions must ensure that student progress toward degree and quality of education are not negatively impacted, but perhaps there is room for efficiency.  
4. Rationalize our curriculum.  There are a number of ways this could be done that could generate significant savings, but all would involve hard conversations that challenge cultural assumptions and disciplinary turf.  

One reason we agreed to write this message is that we both think that options 3 and 4 are the path that we should be pursuing instead of options 1 or 2 above. The basic idea is that we identify “inefficiencies and redundancies” in the curriculum that we can eliminate, thereby freeing up new instructional resources.  The obvious downside of this approach at the start of RCM is the reduced revenue stream, but if the freed resources were reinvested in new course offerings and creative activity across campus, this “loss” could be amplified into a greater gain for the whole community.

If we are to implement this approach we would need to set up a process for identifying redundancies, and for adjudicating how each of these would be dealt with so as to maintain the quality and breadth of how we teach while teaching more efficiently.  Importantly, such an analysis can create opportunities for collaboration rather than enhanced competition about who “owns” an area of instruction.  Why not work together across units to team-teach existing courses with significant overlap, allowing each contributor to retain intellectual input, to share in the resources generated, and to free up faculty time in both units that could be redeployed to new course development and/or scholarly projects?

If we don’t do something like this, and eschew the other options as well, we will be back where we started, starving our creative side and left to watch as a once outstanding research university struggles to survive.

Lynn Nadel
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Chair of the Faculty
Regents Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science
University of Arizona
nadel@u.arizona.edu