Another interesting question I received was whether I see any differences in the way universities functioned several years ago and now. I started teaching at the college level in 2001 and working as “a real professor” in 2008, and I’m definitely seeing some changes.
The “old boys’ club” is losing power. Not everywhere, not entirely but the trend is there. There have been some important upsets to its power recently.
Students are getting better. This summer I’m teaching the same course I do every summer and I’m absolutely stunned with how articulate, intelligent and responsible the students are all of a sudden. I’m thinking I will have to revamp the course, making it harder, because it’s looking like I will have to give everybody very high grades because it’s too easy for them. Now that the job market has started recovering and many high schoolers go straight to the job market, we are getting only those students who are really prepared for college, and that’s making a difference.
The concept of a teaching institution is dying out. Everything is becoming about research, and this is creating tensions between various generations of academics.
Among the negative trends, I would list a silly and childish belief in the need to employ technology to deliver good quality instruction. This is a passing fad but it’s inflicting damage while it still hasn’t passed. Schools that are the most eager to embrace this bad strategy are the ones who cater to lower-income students. And these are precisely the students who are most likely to be hurt by this trend.
At the schools where I’ve worked, there has been no reduction in tenure lines (actually, I’ve seen the opposite) and no adjunctification. There is some growth in administrative personnel but we are a state school, so it hasn’t been outrageous.
There is a very unfortunate fixation on inter- and multidisciplinary projects which, in my experience, never produces anything of value. It’s a fad, and a pretty nasty one, at that. Funding is being diverted away from legitimate research to completely meaningless projects created only in order to satisfy the multidisciplinary requirement.
I will write more if I think of anything else. Thank you, twicerandomly, for these great questions.
Clarissa's Blog 
OK, it’s beginning to scare The Phytophactor a little that we are so often on the same wavelength, e.g., interdisciplinary studies, at the same time. Keep up the good work.
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I very much agree that the teaching university is moving more toward research. I think in my case it’s because the job market is so bad that people who would rather have a research job have ended up at a 4/4, teaching general education classes with only one class in their specialization every few years. Since these people would rather do research in their specialization instead of giving up on it except once every 3-4 years, their research ends up becoming more important all the time. Then, people like me do a lot of research and prove that it can be done while teaching a 4/4 load. That raises expectations for tenure, and does nothing to reduce teaching loads. As I’ve implied, I’m part of the problem. My success has shown that faculty can do more with less. And yet, it’s insanity — all the time. I have thought that maybe I should slow down in order to both make my life more manageable. Basically I started blowing off my teaching more, although it seems like the students still had a great experiences. I
‘d like to write myself out of this job, so maybe I should just write my head off. I don’t know. It’s complicated. Technically, there’s nothing in writing saying I have to publish for tenure, but I do have an accepted article, a presumed accepted article, and two others out for consideration right now. That’s all happened in one short year, and I definitely let teaching take a back seat. So yeah, I’m part of the problem.
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“Technically, there’s nothing in writing saying I have to publish for tenure, but I do have an accepted article, a presumed accepted article, and two others out for consideration right now. That’s all happened in one short year, and I definitely let teaching take a back seat. So yeah, I’m part of the problem.”
– Wow, that’s amazing! Please don’t feel guilty for being talented and hard-working. You are doing what you need to do to make your life more enjoyable and you are justified.
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The technology one irks me as a current student, because it ends up making university more expensive and emotionally taxing with all of these other invisible costs added on. Online version of the textbook that has to be the current edition so you can’t buy an older, cheaper, used one? iClickers, which you have to purchase in order to take in-class quizzes? Having to constantly switch from Blackboard to Moodle to who knows what’s next because the university didn’t check if it was accessibility software compatible and has to switch to avoid a lawsuit? It takes a toll and makes learning, which should be joyful, downright irritating.
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I have been resisting the clickers for years but there are huge efforts to push them on me. A more useless thing has never been invented.
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The obsession of formerly teaching focused schools with becoming research powerhouses has been a disaster in the biomedical world. The flattening of the NIH budget happened just after universities all over the country put up expensive new research buildings with no plan for how to pay for them other than “We’ll fill it up with researchers and they’ll all have multiple million dollar NIH grants.”
Now we’re seeing the fruits of that business model. The former head of NIGMS (national institute of general medical sciences) has openly admitted that the only solution is a big Malthusian die off of research groups over the next 5-10 years. A lot of schools are going to be stuck with empty research buildings.
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