An Open Letter to President Obama from Someone "On Notice"

Dear Mr. President,

In your last State of the Union you put public higher education “on notice,” if we do not to try to keep costs down. I’ve been in academe for over 10 years both in information technology and more recently as faculty. Let me give you a little advice. Universities are raising tuition for two basic reasons: cuts in public funding and cuts in student aid. Not loans. Aid.

Universities now receive less funding from state government and more financial patronage from industry. Over the last thirty years, states have cut their budgets for postsecondary education by a national average of 34 percent. At the same time, vocational training in universities increased due to pressure from both students – who want to graduate and attain employment – and industries that need students to have certain skills. Institutions of higher education began engaging in market-like behaviors, a kind of “academic capitalism” in which educational outcomes (students and artifacts of research) are “products.” In the past twenty years, university autonomy has shrunk under the pressure of government, industry and student demands for accountability. Academia is becoming managed. We are doing more with less. This has led to some interesting consequences.

For example, as of 2003 only 44.9 percent of all faculty members hold full-time tenured positions. Schuster & Finkelstein conclude “contingent or term appointments became during the past decade the modal form of new full-time faculty appointments” (p. 55). In addition, from 1993 to the present, the percentage of all newly hired full-time faculty appointed to non-tenure track positions increased every year from barely more than 50 percent to almost three in five. Looking through a wider lens, in the last thirty years the categories of full- and part-time non-tenure-track faculty—both increased by over 200 percent. Just as in other areas of the economy, more and more faculty members are “outsourcers.” Outsourcers are contingent, non-traditional, term contracted employees, who are solely responsible for their career development and receive little, if any, organizational support, benefits, or recognition.

So in reality Mr. President we have been cutting back for years by hiring part-timers over tenure track faculty members. Guess what? It still doesn’t make up for all the cuts in government funding. It’s time to stop treating a higher education as a commodity and like a public good again.

Mr. President, your threat to put us “on notice” is redundant. We’ve been on notice for twenty years.

Sincerely,

Dr. Andrew F. Herrmann