August 18, 2014
Academic Freedom Meets Twitter, and Adjuncts Gain Politically
Colleges navigated a time of transition over the past year in whom they employ and how those employees work.
The digital age continued to put new pressures on colleges and their employees, testing age-old policies on academic freedom and fueling further experimentation with nontraditional models of education.
Scores of faculty members discovered how quickly their words can go viral, and their lives be thrown into turmoil, because of the ease and speed with which students and others can share messages and videos across the Internet. In 2013-14, those faculty members included professors whose provocative statements in the classroom were surreptitiously videotaped by students and posted online, professors who vented frustrations on Facebook or Twitter and then watched their posts quickly spread to a wide audience, and professors whose work-related websites were combed by advocacy groups for evidence of the political indoctrination of students.
Controversies over college instructors’ speech placed their employers under intense pressure to discipline faculty members, straining institutional commitments to academic freedom. One prominent case involved a Twitter post by an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas. Responding to the shootings last September at the Washington Navy Yard, David W. Guth, the professor, tweeted: “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters.” The resulting backlash in social media led the university to place Mr. Guth on leave. He was allowed to return about a month later to perform administrative duties for the rest of 2013 and then took previously scheduled leave for a research sabbatical in the spring. As of the summer, he was scheduled to teach again in the fall.
The incident also led the Kansas Board of Regents to adopt a broad policy that granted public colleges’ leaders the authority to discipline employees for a wide range of online statements, including communication that “impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers.” After an outcry from free-speech advocates, the Kansas board overhauled the policy in May. The changes included statements that support academic freedom and free-speech rights, but professors said they feared they would remain subject to discipline for statements that should be protected.
New Academic Models
Colleges, meanwhile, were continuing to experiment in 2013-14 with new academic models, including self-paced learning online. Such competency-based programs, in which students are awarded credits by demonstrating what they know rather than by spending a set amount of time taking a course, gained traction over the past year.
Advocates of the approach saw potential for it to help more people complete degrees and to help colleges deliver a more-effective education at less cost. Private nonprofit institutions like Southern New Hampshire University and Western Governors University had already been offering self-paced, competency-based programs, but public institutions, like Northern Arizona University and the University of Wisconsin system, began offering competency-based degrees, too. The Lumina Foundation also financed an effort to develop competency-based degree programs, and the initial participants—18 colleges and two higher-education systems—were announced in March.
Campuses were also facing a time of transition in their work forces. More and more baby boomers, both professors and presidents, neared retirement, and many experts predicted that the next generation of leaders would come from a broad array of backgrounds, from both within and outside academe. The growing presence of adjuncts in the classroom also continued to change the face of the professoriate and threatened to erode the tenure system long at the core of the academic workplace.
At the same time, adjuncts—who make up about 70 percent of instructors—gained new traction in their efforts to improve their pay, working conditions, and job security. They got attention on Capitol Hill; the senior Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives’ education committee gathered stories about adjuncts’ working conditions and said that Congress should be taking a “serious look” at adjuncts’ struggles. The Council for Higher Education Accreditation released a report that also said the treatment of adjuncts should be a criterion in accreditation standards.
Traction for Adjuncts
Adjuncts sought to gain power through their numbers by pursuing labor-organizing efforts across metropolitan areas, including Boston and Washington. The thinking behind the approach, promoted chiefly by the Service Employees International Union, holds that sufficient union saturation of a local labor market would produce big gains at unionized colleges and put nonunionized ones under pressure to treat adjuncts better, too. By the spring of 2014, SEIU’s campaign had spread to 10 metropolitan areas, where it had formed or was working to form unions on more than 30 campuses, employing a total of about 25,000 adjuncts.
Meanwhile, as colleges increasingly relied on adjunct labor, new Ph.D.’s in many fields faced long odds in getting tenure-track jobs. As a result, colleges and scholarly groups increased their emphases on preparing doctoral students for careers outside of academe, and universities received increased scrutiny about whether they were admitting too many graduate students and whether those students had enough information about their career prospects.
On matters of pay, average salary increases for full-time faculty members in 2013-14 outpaced inflation for the first time in five years, according to the American Association of University Professors. The average salary for full-time faculty members rose by 2.2 percent, to $86,293, from the year before.
Among college presidents, the median compensation at public colleges was $478,896 in 2012-13, according to a Chronicle analysis, using the latest available data. The million-dollar college presidency, which was unheard of at public institutions less than a decade ago, became increasingly common at top-tier institutions. Nine public-college leaders earned more than $1-million in 2012-13, up from four in 2011-12 and three in 2010-11.
At private colleges, 42 presidents earned compensation that totaled more than $1-million in 2011, the latest data available. That was up from 36 in 2010. The typical private-college president earned $410,523, according to The Chronicle’s analysis.
Presidential pay may not amount to much in the context of a university budget, but it remained a hot-button issue. U.S. Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, for example, continued to question whether tax exemptions for nonprofit organizations lower students’ costs or simply enable charmed lives for administrators.
