There is so much chatter about this article in the Washington Post over the weekend, I feel compelled to offer at least a few words. In the article David Levy argues that faculty do not work enough hours and that part of the rising cost of higher education is tied to the inefficiency of university level teaching. In short, he suggests that for a forty-hour work week, faculty could teach 20 hours rather than the 10-12 hours that he frequently sees, and use the rest of the 20 hours for preparation for teaching, advising students, and marking.
The best response I’ve read so far comes from Timothy Burke over at his blog Easily Distracted. He argues – in a post well worth reading – that university faculty are gradually succumbing to the same processes that overtook other late 20th century professions. The professionalization process regarded notions of self-governance, autonomy, and commitment to craft as central to their effective contributions to the industrialized economy. Over the last 50 years the fruit of industrialization – the expanding power of corporate interests – have gradually reined in autonomy of professions such as law, medicine, and in the financial sector and argued that these professions need to come more into line with the standards of efficiency central to industrialized, corporate culture. For Burke, professors are the last in the line of professions to be set into a later 20th century corporate model. This is good stuff.
I might add two things, however, to his observations. First, he might have pointed out (in a different post) that growing corporate (let’s say “late capitalist”) attitudes toward higher education do not stop at an interest to break the professional structure of the faculty. These attitudes have saturated all aspects of university life. The presence of similar attitudes toward student life is particularly striking. The desire to increase the efficiency of the learning process by focusing on student life through increasingly fine-grained assessment processes. The result of this is not just a reconfiguration of faculty time and attention, but also student time. As faculty deploy more robust mechanisms to monitor student actions – from projects broken down into smaller and smaller part to online learning environments that simulate Foucault’s famous panopticon – student life has shifted from a form of apprenticeship driven by the final results of their time at university to a process and method driving experience. Faculty members have bought into this paradigm shift through their championing of projects like SoTL (Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) that has frequently reinforced the value of assessment and viewed the student learning experience as a regimented observable series of events. The results of faculty efforts to systematize the teaching and learning experience is student resistance (obviously this process is more complex than I sketch in my post today) and this parallels increasing faculty resentment of administrator’s efforts to manage their professional lives.
Finally, the irony of this is that even as universities attempt to adapt to a 20th century corporate culture, the very structure of innovation in the corporate world is undergoing significant changes. Large corporations – like Google and Apple – have increasingly drawn inspiration from the creative freedoms celebrated by 20th century university life. Google’s famous “20% time” provides employees with the kind of flexibility to be creative that plans like David Levy’s would regard as inefficient. The “low grid” culture of many dynamic high-tech start ups embrace creative space that actively resists the culture of observation, hierarchy, and the maintenance of docile bodies. In other words, the models of 21st century corporate culture increasingly look toward 20th century university models for inspiration at the same time as 21st century universities embrace models of productivity associated with the waning glories of an industrial past.
