In our current recession, which has led to deep budget cuts, few public institutions are operating normally—except, perhaps, in an area that expands at the expense of faculty and staff members even in less straitened times: the curriculum.
There seems to be scant policing by faculty senates regarding additions to the curricula—a common, and dangerous, state of affairs on campuses across the country. Even as my own institution reorganizes (with departmental budgets reduced by 25, 35, even 50 percent), new courses and degrees keep being added or proposed. Such constant expansion of the curriculum is a zero-sum game. As universities like mine add courses and programs, their enrollments are often static or decreasing because of higher tuition, stricter loan requirements, and widespread unemployment among prospective students and their parents.
While faculty senates discuss how to eliminate tenured and tenure-track positions in response to the budget crisis, they continue to ignore or avoid the curricula. The reason is neither political nor parochial but rather habitual and myopic—habitual, in that new courses and programs are typically reviewed for pedagogy rather than for workload; myopic, because nobody sees the curricular elephant in the room, even though faculty members have to feed it with course overloads and underpaid adjuncts and assistants.
The truth is obvious: Curricular glut affects workload. If a course is in the catalog, someone has to teach it. And the issue of workload is now more urgent than ever. If curricula expand as budgets contract, with enrollment in stasis as fewer families can afford tuition, professors are apt to teach more, do less research, and risk losing promotion and tenure. Cut curricula, and you will overcome the crisis in the short term, meeting budget reductions, advancing degree progress, and saving support-staff jobs in the process. Fail to act, and you will be furloughing staff members and other salaried employees to pay your bills.
Here’s the reality check: If your department added five or more courses since 1990, deleted none or few, increased the number of credits to graduate, has 25 or fewer majors in your program, teaches five or fewer majors per course in the catalog, or instructs 85 percent or more nonmajors in electives, then you’re one of two species:
- Elephas maximus: A research-intensive program lost in the jungle of general education.
- Elephas minimus: A service department with valuable courses, but which may not deserve its own degree.
If you’re one of those elephants, and your institution has begun slashing budgets and positions, act now, before the end of spring semester. The faculty owns the curriculum, so standing committees can act without administrative approval to eliminate and combine courses to decrease workload and add academic rigor.
Take your elephant by the tusk and begin by ascertaining your level of glut. How many courses has your program or department added since 1990? How many courses has your unit eliminated since then? How many credit hours were required for a degree in 1990? How many now?
Then compare the number of courses offered with the number of majors in your department. That’s right, majors—not student credit hours, which provide cover to programs that should not be offering their own degrees, for lack of student interest. Don’t count additional sections of any course, and count as one any dual-listed class enrolling both undergraduates and graduates.
If your department teaches fewer than 15 percent of its own majors, you probably are specializing in general education, using adjuncts for basic classes while senior professors teach “Avatar Philosophy” or “Harry Potter Science.” It is crucial to ensure that your curriculum is efficiently providing the necessary, if unpopular, courses for its majors (like statistics and economics, which are not only for business majors, but for everyone). Departments should take a hard look at nonfoundational courses and assess whether they are truly relevant to the institution’s mission.
For example, my school of journalism has streamlined curricula so that we have a ratio of 16 majors for every active course. Contrary to our initial fears, that ratio engages and challenges students, and has won praise in external evaluations by site teams required by the regents and for reaccredition.
Small departments don’t have to face the loss of tenured and tenure-track personnel. There’s another alternative. By combining several pedagogies, colleges can become innovative and interdisciplinary, and offer gen-ed courses that serve institutional and strategic plans, while ensuring high-quality education. Suggested steps:
Simplify degree requirements. Focus on cornerstone courses that build a foundation, core courses that expand on that foundation, and capstone courses that assess whether the pedagogy is effective. Reduce the number of prerequisites for electives in the sophomore and junior years to ensure that those courses have sufficient enrollment. Combine specialized emphases, options, and tracks to create rigorous “shared electives.” Use seminars and workshops to introduce new topics rather than creating experimental or new courses. Monitor demand for any experimental or new course and calculate the impact it would have on other courses.
Focus on degree progress. Require first-year students in orientation to draft plans of study that include all the courses they need to graduate on time. And reward professors for advising, either at annual review time or with a course release—one fewer class in the academic year for a large cohort of advisees—to help with student retention and boost admissions. Curricular glut erodes professors’ advising time, or consigns it to e-mail, but nothing is more important for students than face time with their faculty mentors. As soon as your graduation rates improve, tout them to your admissions department, which can boast of those numbers when recruiting. Continuously assess degree progress to determine pedagogical effectiveness.
End curricular silos. Eliminate sequences, options, emphases, and tracks. If it’s not on the official degree, don’t build curricula around it. Funnel nonmajors into large classes taught by your most popular professors to generate student credit hours and attract interest in your pedagogy. Doing so also balances enrollment in smaller classes designed only for majors and builds enrollment of majors because nonmajors have to become yours to take your studio and seminar classes.
Understand curricular basics. And stop relying on teaching assistants to facilitate glut. Losing full-time professors because of budget cuts doesn’t have to mean more teaching for those faculty members and graduate students who remain. Efficient scheduling can ease their workload, with larger classes providing sufficient credit hours to generate revenue, and smaller classes ensuring timely degree progress for majors. (The latter also increases retention.) Moreover, professors will have more time to apply for grants that underwrite research and activities.
Identify and delete outdated courses. Do so even if it means confronting senior professors resisting change at any cost—even the cost of a junior colleague’s job—by eliminating such courses as “Darkroom Photography” in the art or journalism department, or “Mechanical Drawing” in engineering. So-called innovative courses should also be scrutinized. Most promotion and tenure documents reward course creation, and many institutions lure new hires by promising them that they can develop and add their own courses. That can be bad enough, but worse is that even after those professors leave, their courses remain in the catalog.
Encourage continuing professors to apply for grants that underwrite graduate education. Grants require paperwork and record keeping, work that should earn professors a course release that departments may not be able to afford—unless they curtail curricula. All of us in academe will increasingly be relying on grants in the future. Get a head start now.
See your program or degree as it is, not as you wish it were. Research-intensive departments such as chemistry or physics may bring in millions in grant dollars, but they have relatively few majors. They can streamline curricula for those majors and specialize in a few large-section general-education classes to generate sufficient student credit hours. That leaves plenty of time for research.
In sum, your institution can survive the recession and enhance its reputation by serving students with more rigorous curricula focused on mission and degree progress. But first it has to reduce curricular bloat in the form of that overlooked elephant around which we have built our budgets.
In a recession of this magnitude, we can get rid of the elephant—or you
