A reasonable question for postdocs looking to enter the faculty ranks in 2011 and midcareer administrators eyeing the college presidency might have been, Are you sure you want the job?
Professors and presidents alike found themselves in the thick of political battles that questioned their productivity, their pay, and their rights to collectively bargain. Their campuses encountered rising demands for accountability and brutal assessments of their rigor. At the same time, resources diminished, particularly at public universities reliant on state dollars, leading to cuts in programs and positions and increases in class sizes and tuition.
The collision of those factors contributed to the departure in 2010-11 of at least one university president, Robert N. Shelton, who announced in June that he was leaving the University of Arizona to become executive director of the Fiesta Bowl. He told The Chronicle he was running out of creative ways to do his job. “The sword gets dull, and the shield gets a few holes in it,” he said. “And you start to think that maybe it’s time for someone else to try.”
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The day after Mr. Shelton’s announcement, Carolyn A. (Biddy) Martin, said she would be leaving the University of Wisconsin at Madison to become president of Amherst College. She rebuffed suggestions that her decision signaled an exhaustion with budgetary constraints and political attacks. Her short tenure as chancellor of the public flagship, though, coincided with high-profile clashes over the future of the Madison campus and the power of labor unions.
Faculty and students were among the tens of thousands who descended on Wisconsin’s capital in February to protest legislation, pressed by Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, that sought to deny public workers, including faculty members and academic staff at the University of Wisconsin, the right to collectively bargain. The governor signed the law in March, and the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in June that the policy could take effect.
A similar measure passed in Ohio, and voters there will be asked in November whether the state should repeal the law. If voters agree to keep it, the law would sharply limit the collective-bargaining rights of many state workers and specifically render most public-college faculty members ineligible for union representation by reclassifying them as managerial employees.
The gains Republicans made in governorships and state legislatures in November 2010 led to new attacks elsewhere on perceived excesses in the college workplace, too. Iowa’s Republican governor, Terry E. Branstad, signed a bill that limited sabbaticals to 3 percent of the faculty at any one time at the state’s public universities. Utah debated a bill to end tenure, and South Carolina considered requiring professors to teach at least nine credit hours per semester.
Increased Scrutiny
Questions about what faculty do with their time were prevalent in Texas, where the University of Texas system in May released a vast data file about its professors, including salaries and the number of students they teach. Many politicians advocated doing more to measure faculty productivity, saying that teaching was too low a priority and that students were suffering because of it.
College presidents’ pay also drew scrutiny. In California, Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, told California State University trustees that the state cannot afford the salaries the system pays its leaders. “The assumption is that you cannot find a qualified man or woman to lead the university unless paid twice that of the chief justice of the United States,” he wrote in a July letter. Nevertheless, the trustees approved a $400,000 compensation package for the new president of San Diego State University, Elliot Hirshman.
The median total compensation for public-college presidents in 2009-10 was $375,442, according to a Chronicle analysis, a number that includes base pay, bonuses, and deferred compensation collected in 2009-10. At private colleges, 30 chief executives earned more than $1-million in total compensation in 2008-9, the most recent available, according to a Chronicle review of federal tax documents. That compared with 23 leaders in the year before.
The paychecks of professors, meanwhile, continued to be squeezed by the lingering effects of the recession. The average salary of a full-time faculty member in 2010-11 increased by 1.4 percent over the previous year, according to the American Association of University Professors. That was barely above the previous year’s increase of 1.2 percent, the lowest year-to-year change in the survey’s 50-year history, and just below the rate of inflation. The minimal increases exacerbated inequities facing seasoned faculty, whose salaries stagnated while their newly hired peers were paid at competitive market rates.
One of the starkest challenges to academe in 2011 stemmed not from financial turmoil or political pressure but from a scholarly study. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), released in January, made a damning indictment of American higher education, saying that four years of undergraduate classes made little difference in many students’ ability to synthesize knowledge and put complex ideas on paper. The book, by Richard Arum, a professor of sociology at New York University, and Josipa Roksa, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, drew its share of critics, who said its assessments of certain teaching and learning methods fell short. But the findings spurred widespread calls for colleges to improve curricula and build campus cultures of academic rigor.
“We’re very concerned about American higher education,” Mr. Arum told The Chronicle, “and the extent to which undergraduate learning seems to have been neglected.”
Elyse Ashburn, David Glenn, and Jack Stripling contributed to this article.
