A bill introduced late last month in the North Carolina General Assembly has set faculties across the state abuzz with a bold suggestion: Require all professors in the University of North Carolina system to teach at least eight courses each academic year.
Senate Bill 593 — titled “Improve Professor Quality/UNC System” — would reduce the salary of any professor who failed to hit that annual mark. Sen. Tom McInnis, a first-term Republican who sponsored the bill, said in a written statement that his mission was to “generate legitimate debate about the role of professors in the classroom.”
Mr. McInnis said he was motivated by “countless” complaints from constituents frustrated by the number of public-college classes that are not taught by credentialed professors. (None of the institutions in the public-university system reside in his district.)
The backlash from faculty members across the state was immediate — and unsurprising. Professors expressed outrage: A mandated 4/4 course load — four courses per semester — would make it almost impossible, many said, to focus on their research and other responsibilities. Some faculty members predicted that the bill, if enacted, would lead to faculty attrition and difficulty in recruiting professors, graduate students, and even undergraduates.
Of course, the bill almost certainly will not pass, at least in its current state. Since its introduction, Mr. McInnis has met with professors, students, parents, and university-system officials about their concerns. He said he would submit a revised bill “in the coming days.”
But some professors say the damage has already been done. They view the proposal as the latest salvo in a brewing fight between North Carolina’s higher-education system and its increasingly conservative politicians.
“It’s been a real blow to morale,” said Laura Wright, an associate professor and head of the English department at Western Carolina University. “This indicates a real disconnect between what university faculty are doing and what the legislature seems to think we’re doing.”
‘Far-Reaching’ Consequences
It’s not yet certain what the final piece of legislation will look like. In fact, the bill’s key supporters have floated two options.
Mr. McInnis was not available for an interview, but last week he told the Salisbury Post that he would alter the bill by taking into account how much research each institution conducts. Under that model, professors at institutions like North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill would have a smaller required course load than their colleagues at Appalachian State University and the University of North Carolina at Asheville, for example.
But Jay Schalin, director of policy analysis for the conservative John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, said a substitute bill, to be put forth in committee, would increase course-load requirements only at North Carolina’s research institutions. That proposal would hold professors in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields to lower course-load standards than professors in the humanities or social sciences, Mr. Schalin said.
“That’s a more realistic look at the way the world works,” he said, adding that professors in the STEM fields often get grants to do outside research, which provides a benefit to the local economy.
The goal, he said, is to recenter the university system on education: “Too often undergraduate education is given short shrift.”
Many campus administrators have spoken out against the broad reach of Mr. McInnis’s bill. Joni Worthington, a spokeswoman for the university system, said in an email that applying a blanket teaching requirement would have “significant and negative impacts on the research and service missions” of the campuses. Faculty teaching loads are annually approved by the system’s governing board, she said.
Professors from across the system echoed those concerns. A minimum course load, they argued, would limit the faculty’s ability to do research. That, in turn, would lead to a “mass exodus” of existing professors and hurt departments’ ability to recruit top newcomers. Without active research or a world-renowned faculty, they said, students would be less drawn to the public research institutions.
The consequences of the bill would be “so far-reaching,” said W. Fitzhugh Brundage, a professor and chair of the history department at Chapel Hill. “Faculty will divert ship, and they’ll go to other research institutions that remain committed to supporting research through reduced teaching time,” he said.
Professors also said they worried that the proposal would hurt their ability to recruit graduate students. Chapel Hill’s graduate stipends are low, Mr. Brundage said, but the fact that graduate students get opportunities to teach is a major selling point.
Mr. Schalin, however, said that argument actually worked in favor of the bill.
“The universities are simply producing too many Ph.D.'s who intend to teach,” he said. “This will help address that. If there are fewer graduate programs, or graduate programs are smaller and fewer Ph.D.'s are produced, there won’t be quite such a glut.”
With tenured and tenure-track professors teaching more courses, he added, universities would have less incentive to hire faculty members into low-paying, less-secure adjunct positions.
Mr. McInnis’s bill would reduce the salary of any professor who taught fewer than eight courses per year, but institutions could restore the lost pay using endowment proceeds.
That stipulation fails to consider the smaller institutions or the system’s five historically black colleges, said Tony E. Graham, chair of the Faculty Senate at North Carolina A&T State University. Those colleges don’t have large endowments, so they’d be at a disadvantage to the bigger institutions, he said.
“It’s dangerous legislation at best,” he said. “It’s thoughtless. Quite frankly, this is a cruel legislation.”
A National Conversation
It’s not entirely clear to what extent a course-load mandate would change professors’ semester-to-semester lives. According to the university system’s data, faculty members already teach an average of 3.7 courses a semester, and the actual numbers vary drastically across the campuses. For instance, Elizabeth City State University professors teach an average of 5.2 courses a semester.
But Mr. Schalin said that number dwindles for tenured professors. According to his own research, the average number of courses taught by tenured or tenure-track professors is closer to 2.4 per semester.
But regardless of the numbers, some professors said the idea doesn’t bode well for higher education in North Carolina or elsewhere.
“There have certainly been elements in North Carolina, and elsewhere in the country, that politicians want to play a much bigger role” in higher education, said Jürgen Buchenau, chair of the history department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Mr. McInnis’s bill, he said, is an example of that.
“Certainly if that’s ever successful in one state, it may be successful in others,” he said.
One state that could bear watching is Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, said in January that universities could save money “just by asking faculty and staff to consider teaching one more class a semester.”
It’s become a trend for legislators across the country to try to micromanage university systems, said David A. Zonderman, chair of the faculty at North Carolina State.
That’s problematic, he said, because universities and departments already set course loads based on faculty responsibilities. “How would the legislature know that?” Mr. Zonderman said. “That’s what’s known at the campus level.”
Whatever comes of the bill, Senator McInnis appears to have gotten the conversation he wanted. But professors, said Ms. Wright, the Western Carolina English chair, “are tired of this particular conversation.”
Correction (4/23/2015, 11:10 a.m.): This article originally misstated the name of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
