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BOOK EXCERPT
"Declining by Degrees"
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From "HOW UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION BECAME COLLEGE LITE - AND A PERSONAL APOLOGY"
by Murray Sperber
... In the 1960s, a funny thing happened on the way to research paradise: The Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War divided the country, often with student rebels on one side and enraged taxpayers on the other. Various politicians articulated the fears and hopes of the protestors and the taxpayers; Ronald Reagan became governor of California by promising to punish the student rebels at Berkeley and to gain control of the university. Reagan succeeded and part of his control was to cut funding to the university. Thanks to him, a University of California education was no longer free, and, by the time he left office, it had started to become expensive. A majority of the public approved his moves, and other politicians in other states imitated him. The era of cascading taxpayer dollars for higher education was over.
However, university administrators and professors had fallen in love with their research programs, not only for the supposed prestige that the programs brought their schools. Many faculty, especially the 1960s cohort, had discovered that they much preferred teaching their specialties in graduate seminars and directing dissertations to teaching undergraduate classes and reading undergraduate papers. When money was plentiful, many universities had reduced the faculty "teaching load" (a term that implies that teaching is a burden) to two courses per semester. When I was a freshman at Purdue in 1957, faculty there, and at most universities, taught four courses a semester; when I began my teaching career at Indiana in 1971, I was assigned to teach half that many. The university expected faculty to spend the rest of their time doing research.
When state funding to public institutions declined precipitously, the logical steps would have been to cut back on research and ask faculty to teach more classes. That did not happen. Instead, most schools made classes bigger and also hired more part-timers and graduate students to teach them. Small classes of fifteen to twenty students taught by a full faculty member not only occupy a large amount of the professor's time - line-editing every paper and long office hours are extremely labor intensive - but such classes also create red ink: too few tuition dollars for too much salary and other expenses. However, classes with 150 or more students generate enough tuition dollars to cover the salaries of the professor and the teaching assistants as well as some departmental expenses.
Lecture classes are far less labor intensive. The irony of lecture courses - and why they are so appealing to many research-oriented faculty members - is that they are much easier to teach than small classes: The professor can give the same set of lectures year after year and does not have to read a single word of student writing. All tests and exams are corrected by machines and/or assistants - and the faculty member can choose to have minimal contact with students.
Similarly, in this period, schools force-marched undergraduates from small classes into huge lecture courses, along with some reasonable- size classes sprinkled into their schedules. However, for an increasing number of classes with fewer than twenty-five students - money losers when taught by faculty - schools began hiring lowly paid non-tenure track faculty or grad students to teach them and to generate a small profit. In the 1970s, the expression "Follow the money trail" became popular; it also applied to university life, particularly class size and professorial salaries. ...
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MEET ADRIANA, JASON, MATT & BRITNEY
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