By now, you’ve undoubtedly had the pleasure of enjoying Prof. Richard Quinn’s smackdown of the students in his “Strategic  Management” class at the University of Central Florida.  (I say ‘undoubtedly’ because  I’m late chiming in on this story, and that YouTube link appears to have been e-mailed amongst professors only slightly less than “One Professor’s Fantasy” and “So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities”.)

Just the facts: The integrity of Quinn’s midterm was violated when, as reported by ABC,

Two hundred students, approximately one-third of the class of seniors, were believed to have received advanced copies of the exam. It was the largest cheating scandal in the university’s history.

Quinn, who called the scandal “a knife to my heart, calculated exactly who’d cheated, and then gave the entire class a dressing down.

And, of course, for mandatory knee-jerk, Canadian coverage, Maclean’s reports that:

Richard Quinn discovered that 200 students–one third of his business course–cheated on a midterm, managing to secure the answers ahead of time.

Of course, as we now know, “cheating” was probably a strong word to use — apparently the students had ordered the bank of test questions from the publisher’s website, perhaps in an Instructor’s copy of their textbook. [No news on whether Maclean's will bravely go on to crack the latest "cheating scandal" surrounding the sample questions in SAT study guides]

In its defense, Pearson Higher Education (the publisher in question), replied that:

The company . . .offers test banks to instructors only, said spokeswoman Wendy Spiegel. It is never made available to students, either for sale or for free, she said. “We do everything we can to protect the integrity of this material . . .”

And just in case the website had difficulty differentiating actual instructors from students who tried to create instructor accounts, Spokesperson Spiegel directs us to the sure-fire alert posted on the Pearson site, which should settle the matter nicely.

In the aftermath, of course, there’s been no end of willingness of equally brave souls attacking Quinn for perceived laziness and incompetence.  (Maclean’s must have been otherwise distracted.)

But here’s the point that I want to make.  The lesson of this incident — more than absolutely any other lesson that concerns ethics or yout’ today — is the fact that workload is directly connected to academic quality and integrity.

Where do I begin?

Should professors write their own tests?  Absolutely, which means that they should be given the time to do so.

Should professors grade their students’ assignments?  Absolutely, which means that they need to be given the time to do so properly.

Should professors be creating their own overheads?  Study Guides?  Reading Questions?  See above.

In the last years, instructors in all levels at all institutions have been given more classes with more students.  They’ve had less time to do that actual necessary work of preparation, teaching, and grading.  And publishing companies, sensing a competitive edge, have helpfully stepped in to fill that need.

As a consequence, we could envision a future where increased demands on professors would effectively result in publishing companies determining what students learn, how they learn it at home and in the classroom, and how they’re tested on that material.

And that future is, erm, now, or — for most of us — is probably only one unexpected, time-consuming emergency away.  And that future means that corporations, not professors, will effectively be teaching our students.  (And that’s fine, if Ontario is ready to see Pearson offering its own unaccredited degrees, marketed with the slogan: “It’s precisely the same education that you get in Ontario’s Colleges and Universities, at half the price”.)

And if we don’t want to see that, then we need to make sure the professors have the needed time to actually do the  work of teaching, which extends far beyond the classroom, and yes, does include creating assignments and giving students useful feedback on them.

So far, Ontario’s Universities and Colleges have been doing the opposite, trying to maximize student numbers and professors’ workloads.  This phenomenon and its effects were noted in the 2010 online survey of faculty and librarians at Ontario universities, conducted by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations (and discussed here).

That survey reported that:

• 69.6% of respondents claim that, in their own departments, budgetary pressures had specifically led to increased class sizes
• 31.5% report an increased reliance on multiple-choice tests
• 38.4% of respondents report reduced out-of-class contact with students
• 42.2% of respondents “stated that they perceive a decline in quality between 2005 and 2008”

Increased class sizes, leading to more multiple-choice tests and less time assisting students out-of-class.  I can’t think of a recipe more likely to compel professors to rely on the short-cuts provided by publishing companies; I can’t think of a recipe more likely to compel students to seek out the service of publishing companies to assist them in preparing for exams.

This is the situation in Ontario’s Colleges and Universities.  In Colleges, it’s a consequence of managerial fiat (increased class sizes; static hours for out-of-class assistance; altered evaluation factors to increase the student-faculty ratio).  In Universities, it’s a consequence of budget cuts and the offloading of work onto grad student teaching assistants.

In both cases, it’s a side effect of the forces that are justified with reference to “expanding educational opportunities in Ontario”.  In both cases, it has the effect of undermining and circumventing education from actually taking place.

If you’ve come under pressure to change your evaluation techniques, in order to accommodate increased students.  Feel free to share your experiences at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com, to let me know “how that’s working for ya“.  (Anonymity will be preserved.)

Below, please find a response to last week’s post on the OCUFA survey of Ontario University faculty [parts one and two linked here], sent by my most frequent respondent :

What you have provided here is empirical evidence of what we all have known in our bones for decades. The colleges have adopted a full-bore “business model.” That involves the commodification of curriculum, the Wal-Mart theory of quality control and the fiscal imperative, which is to maximize productivity while minimizing labour costs. It adds up to a betrayal of any educational ideal worthy of the name.

As for “critical thinking,” it is a new corporate slogan similar to “thinking outside the box.” In practice it means “problem solving,” understood as figuring out the answer to a question, but having no say in defining the question or deciding in whose interest the question should be answered. So, an exercise in critical thinking might arise with the question: “How can we best eliminate poverty?” What remains unstated is the initial premise, “Without altering the economy in any significant way and without changing basic relations between rich and poor, how can we … etc., etc.” [...] So, “critical thinking” turns out to be just another illusion or, at best, a method for coming to a pre-determined conclusion from non-negotiable premises. Call it the critical thinking of the Rubik’s Cube.

Admittedly, I may harbour some small disagreements with the sentiment — my concern with current trends in postsecondary education isn’t necessarily some sort of managerially-imposed quality control, so much as the threats to quality that are the effect of underfunding.

Actually, truth be told, I’m all for administrators’ having the power to control quality — the power to determine class sizes, to hire full-time faculty as needed, to ensure that faculty are given what the time and resources that they need to ensure the actual quality of each student’s educational experience.

But that’s not what I’m seeing.  I’m seeing a system in which managers are denied the means to accomplish those things, and in which their continued employment depends upon their creating ‘fixes’ to accommodate (and perpetuate) that denial.  One of those fixes, I think my respondent might agree, is the standardization of education to lowest common quantifiable denominators, where quantifiability is introduced in the stead of anything quite so nebulous as “quality”.  (Or, for that matter, “education”).

But the response of Ontario’s Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities to the survey strikes me as significant.  He’s chosen to reject the collective conclusions of 2,000 university faculty, and to base his assessment of Ontario’s postsecondary system upon funding levels and (uncited) student feedback, instead.

Which does lead me to wonder — assuming that claims of empirical fact need to be falsifiable — what hypothetical piece of evidence would persuade Minister that Ontario’s postsecondary education is, in fact, declining?  (I’m not saying that it is — I’m merely asking what piece of information might serve to convince the Minister in a way that the reported experiences of 2,000 university professors do not.)  After all, if it’s just about “customer satisfaction”, to Minister Milloy, then my correspondent would be wholly correct in saying that the Ministry is treating education as nothing more than a commodity.

This question — about how to make convincing claims about an educational system’s quality — may be crucial to the outcomes of our future efforts as professors to create structural improvements in the college system.  And how dismaying it would be, were Minister Milloy to indicate that he had no interest in professors’ collective opinions, thus leaving them with one sole means of effecting change in the system…

A recent online survey of faculty and librarians at Ontario univerities was conducted by the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations in March and April, to assess faculty opinion about changes in Ontario’s universities since the Ontario government’s “Reaching Higher Plan” commenced in 2005.  The survey was based upon over 1,400 responses, which is probably a reasonably high (if self-selected) sample rate around 10%.

Noting that the survey is drawing conclusions about faculty perceptions of changes, the results [part one; part two] may be instructive to us as Ontario college professors, and include some of the following data:

• Only 15% of respondents said that the majority of vacated tenure-stream positions in 2005-8 were replaced with positions that were of an equivalent level, while 35.4% said that the majority of replacement hires were in lower-ranked tenure-stream positions, 23.3% said that the majority were replaced by adjunct faculty positions, and 17.2% who said that the majority were not replaced at all.
• More strikingly, when asked about vacancies from the previous year, 45.7% of respondents reported that a majority of vacated tenure-stream positions in the departments had not been replaced at all. Which leads us to the corollary…
• 60% of respondents claim that their class sizes increased from 2005-8, and 55.9% identified an increase in the past year alone. (This compares to 5.7% who claim their class sizes decreased from 2005-8 and 6% who reported a decrease in the last year).
• 69.6% of respondents claim that, in their own departments, budgetary pressures had specifically led to increased class sizes, and 77.3% claimed that such pressures had led to deferred hiring. (I’m curious about the 8.3% gap between those last two statistics – the professors who felt that deferred hiring had not necessarily produced increased class sizes. Possibly, those are departments in which enrolments have dropped or classes have been cut.)
• A remarkable 79.1% said that the “Hiring of New Tenure-Track Faculty” should be the overwhelming priority for any new funding earmarked for teaching support. Hiring new faculty — not shinier technology or nicer offices or labs for the current profs, nor increased time-off through professional development. That number even increased to 90.1% – the percentage who responded that the hiring that universities needed was that of “permanent, full-time, full-reponsibility positions”.

You can check out Part Two for the details about perceived changes in the student body’s needs and preparedness. But, as ever, my interest comes back to education and educational impact, and the following statistics sober me:

• 42.2% of respondents “stated that they perceive a decline in quality between 2005 and 2008” – the period covered by the government’s Reaching Higher Plan – and 57% perceive “a decline in quality over the past year”, which, as the report’s authors report, “coincides with the province’s measures to cap or rollback expenditures across the broader public sector.”
• 38.4% of respondents report reduced out-of-class contact with students (although the study doesn’t tell us whether that’s a reduction in net hours or time-per-student), and 31.5% report an increased reliance on multiple-choice tests, with 26.8% describing “other” impacts upon their teaching as a consequence (and a symptom) of the changing face of Ontario university education.

To restate that last point, a third of responding faculty admit that they were compelled to change the way that they teach – to limit their students’ educational opportunities, and to limit the effectiveness of their evaluations of students’ knowledge – as a consequence of “budget cutting measures”. 

Why does that strike me as so important? Because that one statistic tells a story. It’s the statistic where professors recognize their first-hand involvement in the reduced educational quality at Ontario’s universities that 57% of them identify. It’s where they recognize that the education they provide is not what it used to be.

Remember that Ontario’s university professors (like college professors in British Columbia or Quebec) have academic freedom and more control over their classes than Ontario’s college professors. Unlike us, they have no managers performing SWF calculations to conclude that increased multiple-choice testing is needed to accommodate increased class sizes. Apparently, though, they have no need of such managers: 60% of respondents report increased class sizes, and unless days will now feature more than 24 hours, a reduction of individual attention to students (whether grading their assignments or addressing their needs out-of-class) is a mathematical inevitability.

*                    *                    *

Granted, these professors are being asked to report on their own jobs, and one might be justified in questioning their objectivity.  The foremost dissenting voice — speaking in defense of educational changes since 2005 — is John Milloy, Minister of Training, Colleges, and Universities, whose response to the survey was reported in the Globe and Mail as follows:

Universities Minister John Milloy disputed the notion students are being short-changed.

Operating grants to universities have risen 77 per cent from $1.9 billion in 2002-2003 to $3.2 billion in this past fiscal year.

While part of the increase is due to enrolment growth, Mr. Milloy said dollars-per-student have increased by 28 per cent during that time and surveys show high levels of student satisfaction.

“Quality is not declining … it’s in fact the opposite,” Mr. Milloy said.

“We’ve seen a phenomenal investment in the system.”

If the Globe and Mail’s reportage is faithful, then I understand the Honourable Minister’s argument as resting on the following reasoning:

Premise One:  The province is spending more money on university education

Premise Two: Surveys show high levels of student satisfaction

Conclusion: Eduational quality is improving

As a completely unrelated aside, apropos of absolutely nothing at all, I’m reminded of one final statistic from the OCUFA survey:

• 49.8% of respondents who supported remediation programs in Ontario universities identified “critical thinking” as a priority area for remediation

It’s been a while since my last post, mainly because I was working on a new page explaining SWFs, which I’ve just posted.  You can see it on the right-hand column, along with the other pages on Modified Workload Agreements.

In a recent post, I discussed the Ontario government’s request for several universities to discontinue contract negotiations with their faculty, as well as the rumours of potential renegotiation of current contracts. Without a doubt, these developments are a sign of things to come for Ontario colleges, which are, after all, more under the direct control of the provincial government than universities.

However, in that post, I did neglect the fact that Ontario’s college administrators have already been subjected to the wage freeze that the government is seeking for faculty. Technically, this is a freeze not of individual salaries, but of the salary figures associated with the highest salary step level – administrators’ salaries will increase as they continue to gain new steps, until they reach the maximum step for which they are eligible.

I expect that a freeze of faculty salaries would look similar, and fundamentally, I see a certain fairness – and perhaps even some long-term benefits – to tying faculty salary structures to those in place for college administrators.

And who knows? Perhaps college professors would even support freezing their highest salary step for two years, if they would also become eligible to receive the other components of administrators’ salary structures (i.e., merit bonuses – even for work that is considered merely adequate, salary bonuses for added responsibilities or for the acquisition of increased credentials, performance incentive bonuses for individuals who are already at their highest salary step, and the ability to achieve the highest salary step within 5-7 years of employment).

Although the compensation guidelines for college administrators are no longer freely available online, please feel free to e-mail me at ontariocollegeprof@yahoo.com for a copy of the 2009 compensation guidelines, since those structures appear to have been fixed in place by Bill 16 until 2012, including the ability to exceed the maximum salary step, through Exceptional Performance Initiative Bonuses.

Such is, at least, my reading of the Backgrounder and FAQ provided for administrators by their representative organization, the Ontario College Administrative Staff Association. [I invite anybody to correct my reading of the document if necessary, although I encourage you to do so quickly, since OCASA documents have a history of disappearing from the web soon after I link to them.]

These documents go on to note with dismay that the highest salary steps for all administrative positions have been frozen until 2012 (as the Ontario government appears to be encouraging universities to do to their faculty as well).

Perhaps contrary to expectation, I share OCASA’s dismay at the salary freeze for managers. While I do think that the managers’ salary structures would benefit from some revision (including, say, the merit bonuses of up to 2% assigned for managers whose work qualifies as “Satisfactory/Needs Improvement”), I do feel that administrators are necessary for the functioning of Ontario’s Colleges, and that their work is challenging and worthy of appropriate remuneration.

If I have a concern regarding the ranks of administrators in Ontario’s colleges it concerns the swelling of their per-student numbers in relation to the shrinking numbers of full-time college faculty, per student.  [As a reminder, Figure 6 on this document from Colleges Ontario demonstrates that, while there are 18% more full-time college students since 1993-4, there are 13% more full-time adminstrators but 13% fewer full-time faculty]

And, although I don’t think that salary increases for administrators should be automatic or disproportionate, I don’t think that any employee (public or private) should be legally prevented from at least trying to negotiate a raise in salary.

Let me repeat that: I think that legislating an across-the-board pay freeze for all college administrators is inappropriate.

And I say that out of a sense of collegiality, given our common role as public servants, and our mutual role in the education of Ontario’s college students.

But at the same time, I can’t ignore my suspicions that my sense of collegial support isn’t necessarily reciprocated, when one considers the fact that no single individual represented by OCASA ever publicly opposed the imposition of Terms and Conditions upon Ontario college faculty. Nor do I hold much confidence that OCASA’s members would return the support by publicly objecting to any proposed salary freeze for college faculty in the future.

But the greatest threat to my confidence that administrators and professors share a common purpose comes from OCASA President’s own justification of the significance of college administrators. Noting with dismay the fact that the Ontario government didn’t consult them prior to the wage freeze, the president asserts OCASA’s importance at the bargaining table, by claiming:

College administrators are an important partner in delivering the Ontario government’s priorities for higher education.

Ah yes. I see.  Well, I suppose that if you understand your own role as implementing the will of the government of the day, then you would indeed feel betrayed when that government arbitrarily limited your compensation for “delivering” their priorities.

Personally, though, since “the Ontario government’s priorities for higher education” include perpetuating the system’s chronic underfunding, I’d rather side with those individuals – whether they be faculty, support staff, administrators, or their representative associations – who are more committed to responding to our students’ needs, and those of their prospective employers.

And today, I think that responding to our students’ needs necessitates the bravery to publicize the fact that Ontario’s postsecondary system is deeply underfunded at the per-student level, and that the quality of education is clearly suffering as a consequence.

And maybe – just maybe – the willingness to announce that unpalatable truth constitutes the difference between being a public servant and a political one.

Well, just to provide some context for the current Unviersity negotiations, the offer that we — Ontario’s college faculty — voted in February to accept covered the period from Sept. 1, 2009 until August 31, 2012.

That’s a three-year stretch, but the first five months of it had already expired by the time that the offer was voted on (and another seven have passed, without our having yet seen a finalized version of the Collective Agreement).

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that the contract will expire 24 months from now, which means that  negotiations between the two sides will commence roughly 21 months from now, which means that Ontario’s college profs will be selecting a bargaining team and establishing bargaining priorities about 16 months from now.  (And yes, I know, we just finished the last round of negotiations six months ago.)

What will those negotiations look like?  The best indicator is likely shown in the current negotiations at some of Ontario’s Universities, as reported in the following article from the Globe and Mail:

Ontario calls on universities to agree to two-year wage freeze

Government urging management and labour leaders to stop ongoing contract negotiations

[by] Karen Howlett and Elizabeth Church

Published on Wednesday, Jul. 21, 2010

The Ontario government is calling on university management and labour leaders who are in the midst of contract negotiations to stop talking and instead agree to impose a two-year wage freeze on unionized employees.

The government is urging all public-sector employers and labour leaders in the province to accept two year freezes. It plans to target universities first because many of them have collective agreements that are set to expire.

“It’s not that we chose them or they chose to go first,” a government official said last night. “It’s just that chronologically [their agreements] are coming up.”

More than half a dozen universities in Ontario are in the midst of bargaining talks, including the University of Western Ontario, Carleton University and the University of Waterloo.

Finance Minister Dwight Duncan laid the groundwork for consultations with a variety of groups, representing the 750 contracts that expire between now and March, 2012, at a meeting on Tuesday with about 60 public-sector employers and labour leaders. He appealed to his audience, which included university presidents, to do their part to help the province rein in spending and sustain public services.

“If you are already at the bargaining table I encourage you to agree to pause,” Mr. Duncan said. “And I also hope you will agree that … arbitrations will be put on hold.”

Campus labour groups say they are considering their options. “The government is trying to impose its wishes for zero compensation increases without the legislative tools to do so,” said Henry Mandelbaum, head of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, who listened to Mr. Duncan deliver his request at Tuesday’s meeting.

Campus leaders, too, are trying to sort out the implications of the province’s request. “Universities are seeking further clarification of the government’s expectation,” said Council of Ontario Universities spokeswoman Jennifer Grass.

The province has indicated it will begin talking with employers and unions early next month. Both sides say they expect to hear soon how those consultations will work.

Several universities now in contract talks with employees are represented by a range of public-sector unions. Those talks are most advanced at the University of Toronto, where compensation issues with the campus faculty association are before arbitration.

A decision in that case could be made shortly, Mr. Mandelbaum said. It could test the government’s resolve to usher in its new era of restraint.

Some quick thoughts:

1. “Cart?  This is Horse speaking…”  Why is the Minister of Finance involving himself in Ontario University contract negotiations?  Shouldn’t that be the balliwick of John Milloy, Ontario Minster of Training, Colleges and Universities?  And, more importantly, isn’t it the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance to serve the needs of the province’s education system, rather than to determine those needs?

2. I haven’t yet heard the Ontario government ask businesses (say, gas stations, grocery stores, or GTA-house-sellers) to charge less money than they could.  What exactly would one call wage control unaccompanied by a corollary price control?

3. I haven’t yet heard the Ontario government ask corporations to stop requesting corporate tax cuts

4. If there’s a line in the article that raises my eyebrows, it’s Finance Minister Dwight Duncan’s following request to both parties: “I also hope you will agree that … arbitrations will be put on hold”.  Why is this strange?  Arbitrators are third-parties who are selected by the schools and their faculty unions to resolve differences.  They are perfectly capable of taking into account the province’s finances, as well as the province’s academic needs.  Why would Duncan wish to take them out of the loop, unless he knew that there is a strong, reasonable argument to be made for salary increases?

But, thinking generally of this situation as it might apply to our own upcoming negotiations, I have to admit to a certain curiosity: It’s likely that the province (which has profound direct impact on the operations of Ontario colleges, unlike Ontario universities) will offer 0% raises.  It’s conceivable that they could even legislate this, if the Charter of Rights and Freedoms admits it.  So my curiosity would be this — would will the colleges be willing to offer in place of salary increases?  Academic Freedom?  New full-time hires?  Fixed or reduced class sizes?

In a nutshell (and you’ll probably hear me repeat this quite a bit in the next few months), the colleges could offer many things to professors instead of salary increases — all of them would be extremely bitter pills for the colleges to swallow, and the colleges would probably prefer (as they did in the last round of negotiations) to simply offer salary increases and avoid disrupting the status quo of the colleges’ “way of doing things”.  We’ll see whether the province is sufficiently invested in this “way of doing things” to pony up salary increases when it comes time for the Colleges to negotiate.

If not, the colleges’ current way of doing things could change.

A correspondent responds to the latest evidence of the rapid decline of tenure.  It’s hardcore, but I’m reminded that the difference between paranoia and prophecy is at times nothing more than hindsight:

Long, long ago, there was a clear relationship between tenure and academic freedom. Colleges and universities worried about the implications of allowing teachers to have “guaranteed” employment. What might happen if some errant Marxists or feminists or existentialists or Darwinians somehow snuck into academe? What could be done if they insinuated themselves into invulnerable positions and, immune from dismissal, began for upsetting the placid groves of academe by touting some subversive theory that would encourage riot and rebellion?[... .]

As long as there was a perceived danger that critical educators might lead students astray, complicate their lives with contrarian ideas, undermine elite ideology by paying attention to questions of environmental sustainability, social justice and personal development, and generally make nuisances of themselves by questioning the mantras of their organizational superiors, administrators were eager to undermine tenure in the universities and the next best thing to it – permanent contracts with seniority provisions – in Ontario colleges.

At exactly the same time, the financial appeal of contract teachers, whether in the form of callow teaching assistants in universities or part-time and sessional instructors in the colleges, was increasingly apparent to the bean-counters in both domains. Tenured teachers had annoying habits such as wanting to read (or even write) books, take sabbaticals and learn more than they minimally needed to know to attend to their classroom duties. Some even aspired to be “public intellectuals” on company time.

Then, somewhere around 1980, the authorities had an epiphany. By closing off university tenure and full-time college jobs, the ideological domination of neoliberalism, vocationalism and corporatism could be assured and money could be saved at the very same time!

Total political and economic control! What could be better?

Ideological control? That’s easy. Part-timers’ jobs depend, semester-after-semester, upon making no waves, causing no troubles and following the outcomes-based learning objectives with meticulous care. So, no sensible contract employees are apt to upset their organizational superiors by doing something as controversial as encouraging students to “think”!

Fiscal control? That’s even easier. Part-time faculty are cheap hourly workers. They are “flexible” (i.e., they can be hired on spec, fired without cause and they are generally indifferent to questions of assignments. They need the job. So, if the boss wants someone to teach anthropology, no problem. Zoology? Also no problem. Expediency trumps expertise every time. And, best of all, they do not drain budgets with pesky demands like vacation pay and other benefits. The moment the semester ends, they are back on Unemployment Insurance, waiting for the next gig.  [...]

We now live in K-Mart Kollege, just another brand in a Wal-Mart World. Here, education is commodified, quantified, pre-digested, pre-packaged and delivered to “customers” in hermetically-sealed plastic containers, all according to the logic of the marketplace. It all amounts to a hideous betrayal of education, our students and ultimately our society. We should be ashamed. We should be outraged. And we should be especially ashamed that we are not outraged

Personally, while there’s clearly a relationship between tenure and political power within academia, I’m not yet convinced that tenure (or, in the case of Ontario’s colleges, full-time employment) is being gutted primarily for the sake of consolidating administrators’ power.  (After all, in Ontario at least, college professors have never had academic freedom to lose.)

More likely, the simple reason for the decline of full-time jobs was — as it so often is in education – saving money, with the consequent rise of a small army of eager (desperate, compliant) adjunct faculty being a welcome side-effect.

The impact of this business model on education (be it college or university) is known to all profs.  On the other hand, last year’s events indicate that it’s probably evident to few of our students, who have for the most part grown up in educational systems that were marked by large classes, overworked teachers, and standardized education leading up to standardized testing.

Lastly, it might be unreasonable to expect senior adminstrators to be aware of or concerned about the impact of the business model on education, since they are hired and fired exclusively based on the degree to which they view education — like one would view any commodity — in terms of quantifiable inputs and outputs.

So, to those who perpetuate this business model on the basis of fiscal considerations, one might ask the only question that they might consider relevant:

How much richer are schools — now that they have adopted the business model currently defended and perpetuated by adminstrators – compared to when the vast majority of faculty had job security?

This from the U.S. Department of Education’s upcoming “Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009″ report on U.S. college and university hiring:

It’s taken from “Tenure, RIP: What the Vanishing Status Means for the Future of Education“, from the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Money quotes as follows:

Now that tenure is disappearing across higher education, you don’t hear the same kind of debates. What people in higher education do talk about is whether the system that has grown over the last 20 years—heavy on adjunct professors who are paid as little as $1,500 per course—is what educators would have designed if the destruction of tenure had been more purposeful. The universal answer to that question appears to be: No.

“To think the way some of the finest higher-education institutions in the nation educate students is with gypsy adjuncts who have to teach at two to three different places, that would not have been what you would have wanted,” says Ronald G. Ehrenberg, a professor of industrial and labor relations at Cornell University. “You want faculty with a vested interest in the institution.”

According to [Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors], though, the biggest loss isn’t what professors can’t say in the classroom. It’s what they don’t say to the president or the trustees—or to politicians. “The president doesn’t really care what you say in your World War II-history class,” says Mr. Nelson. “You can say what you want to about your subject matter, but don’t think you can say what you want to about the president’s edicts.” Indeed, what’s disappearing along with tenure, say its advocates, is the ability of professors to play a strong role in running their universities and to object if they think officials are making bad decisions.

In other words, the major effect of tenure’s growing scarcity is that the power to make educational decisions at the heart of the school is increasingly consolidated into the hands of administrators, who may boast greater experience in business school than in the fields over which they are given authority.  Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

More relevant to us, I suppose, is the following passage:

Vanishing tenure may be bad for students as well as teachers. A couple of dozen studies over the last decade have shown that as the proportion of professors off the tenure track rises, the proportion of students who return to college the following year and eventually graduate declines. Some researchers [. . .] say that may be because contingent instructors typically lack teaching resources, including offices, supplies, or professional-development opportunities.

In other words, what is the impact of this increased reliance on contract faculty upon schools’ rates of retention?  Graduation?  Student satisfaction?  Alumni funding?

In short, if educational decisions are based upon fiscal criteria, what is the impact of that model upon both a) the colleges’ success in fulfilling their educational mission, and b) their fiscal health?

Presumably, postsecondary schools rely on adjunct labour to save money.  Presumably, they have saved money by implementing this policy, which accounts for its enlargement.  So, postponing any consideration of the educational impact until an upcoming post, let’s instead ask this question for now:

Are the schools richer than they used to be?

[Note: This is a really long post -- it should really be a fixed page, and will eventually be one soon.  We'll call this post the sneak preview, in case it might be useful while your Chairs are setting up September's work assignments -- CollegeProf]

No feature differentiates the offer that the college faculty recently approved from our previous Collective Agreement as much as that of Modified Workload Agreements (MWAs). These potentially represent a profound change to the workload of full-time faculty, and I’m told that managers at different colleges are being urged to implement these within their departments. For that reason, it’s worth taking the time to explain how life under a Modified Workload Agreement might look different from life under the SWF, and some things that you might want to keep in mind if you choose to abandon the SWF and work under a Modified Workload Agreement.

After comparing the two systems, I’ll go on to talk about why some (sane) faculty might choose to abandon the SWF, and the reasons why managers at some colleges are currently being compelled to promote them to faculty. But first, let’s put things in perspective…

How Might I End Up with a Modified Workload Agreement?

To begin, I should point out that – in order for you to lose the workload protections of the SWF, four things would need to happen:

1. The Chair would have to meet with all the professors who would potentially be working under the proposed MWA as a group. (This could include the whole department, but it could also include a group of professors within your departmnet who teach the same cluster of courses.) E-mail doesn’t cut it, nor do meetings with faculty members as individuals. If no group meeting took place, the MWA isn’t kosher.
2. Two-thirds of the professors in that group would need to consent to working under the rules of a Modified Workload Agreement, instead of the SWF. (Most of this page will be devoted to explaining what that entails.)
3. You yourself would have to agree as an individual to working under the negotiated MWA. Even if more than 2/3 of the group of profs want an MWA, dissenting individuals still have the right to bow out and work according to the provisions of the SWF, while their colleagues do otherwise.
4. The union would have to consent to the MWA, with the proviso that it many not unreasonably withhold consent.

Long story short, you don’t need to panic. (Yet.) If you like the SWF’s workload protections, then nobody can deny you them. On the other hand, it’s best to remain cautious: Chairs may coerce faculty into agreeing to MWAs (by, for example, threatening layoffs or department closures), and if some profs in your department agree to a MWA, there could be residual dangers to all professors in your program – even or especially those who opted against it. But I’ll discuss this in a future page; in the meantime, let’s get down to brass tacks…

What’s the Difference Between a Having a Modified Workload Agreement and Working Under the SWF?

Okay, it’s time to roll up our sleeves. The Collective Agreement includes different provisions that explicitly limit faculty workload (because, after all, pretty much everybody would agree that there is some limit to the number of hours a week that faculty can work before the quality of education begins to suffer).

The first method of limiting faculty workload is a number of articles in the Collective Agreement that set hard limits on, say, the number of days that a faculty member can work annually, or the maximum number of classroom hours that a prof can be assigned in any given day or week. (I’m going to call these “the hard limits”, although the term ‘maxima‘ would probably be more precise, and would have a cool “Gladiator” feel, to boot.)

The second, and more often discussed, means of limiting workload is the Standard Workload Formula (SWF), which is a fairly detailed formula that tries to measure profs’ workloads, by taking into account such data as the number of students taught, the number of different sections or courses taught in a semester, and the nature of the grading requirements for each course.

Now, the SWF is actually a result of the hard limits. Article of the Collective Agreement set a hard limit on the number of hours that a full-time faculty member can work weekly before being paid overtime (i.e., 44), and a limit on the limit on the number of hours that she can work weekly, under any circumstance (i.e., 47).

But of course, in order to calculate 44 hours of workload, you need to take lots of different things other than classroom hours into account: class sizes, how the students are evaluated, class prep (and therefore whether it’s a new class or a repeated one), as well as the time allocated for office hours and administrative tasks and meetings.

The SWF is just that – a Standard Workload Formula. It’s a formula for measuring a prof’s overall weekly workload. It takes all of those factors (listed in the Collective Agreement), plugs in the specific details, and ultimately comes up with a number of hours worked per week. So long as that number is under 44 (or 47, if you dig overtime), then that’s a valid workload, according to our Collective Agreement.

That system works pretty well for most courses that have a fairly consistent structure of classroom instruction and assignments throughout the semester. It can be awkward, though, if a class has more work for the professor in the second half and less in the first. (For example, a class on landscaping taught in the Winter Semester might have more work for faculty and students in the second half of the semester, when the snow is gone.) A Modified Workload Agreement permits faculty to agree to work assignments that might give them 60 hours of workload in the second half of the semester, and only 20 hours in the first (to offset the increase).

At least, that’s what was intended when the Workload Monitoring Group recommended introducing Modified Workload Agreements into the Collective Agreement. They said that MWAs should last only for a semester, and that workload should be monitored closely, to ensure that a faculty’s total workload did not increase from one semester to the next.

That’s not quite what made its way into the offer (an offer that we as faculty voted to accept). Instead, the offer allows Modified Workload Agreements a) to last for up to three years, b) to ignore almost all of the hard limits on workload specified in the Collective Agreement, and c) to stop measuring workload together, since student numbers and evaluation factors would no longer necessarily be considered.

In a word, it’s conceivable that a Modified Workload Agreement could oblige profs to work well over 44 hours weekly – well over 60 hours, even – with no overtime.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First of all, let’s take a look at the workload limits guaranteed by the SWFs (by which I refer to the standard provisions of the Collective Agreement) vs. the MWAs (which bypass most of those provisions). These apply to college profs in postsecondary programs:

Now, as the preface stated, these are limits that are guaranteed by the SWF or MWA, respectively. However, if you wished to enter into a Modified Workload Agreement, there is every reason to think that such limits can (and should) be negotiated with your chair, although they’re not explicitly guaranteed by the Collective Agreement.

As you can see from the chart above, some aspects of workload can be negotiated under the SWF as well. The important difference is that, with the SWF, the default is that a prof can teach no more than six sections, unless she agrees in writing to teach more. In an MWA, on the other hand, the default is that a prof will teach as many sections as the manager chooses, unless they both explicitly agree to limit that number.

So, long story short, if you enter into a Modified Workload Agreement, anything that’s not explicitly limited in the agreement will be decided exclusively by your manager. Do you want to avoid working Sundays for the next three years? Be sure to get that limit in writing, otherwise, you’ll have no right of appeal.

So What Should My Modified Workload Agreement Specify?

The first and foremost thing that an MWA must specific is its duration. An MWA can last longer than a year, up until the expiry date of the current Collective Agreement (which would be August 31, 2012). What that means is that you could be setting up the terms of your employment for a long-term period, with potentially the only guarantee that you’ll have no more than an average of 648 teaching hours, occurring over an average of 180 days, annually.

Beyond that, everything is up for grabs, so pretty much everything else better be written down for the duration of the agreement, to give yourself some minimal protections. If, for example, your manager doesn’t want to guarantee that you won’t be asked to teach 9 hours a day in the Spring semester of 2011, then I would encourage you to avoid signing any MWA that lasted that long. Offer to sign one that lasts for a shorter period of time, during which your manager would actually be able to make such guarantees.

So, when you’re asked to sit down as a group with a manager who’s proposing a Modified Workload Agreement, be sure to ask the following question: 

1. How long will the MWA last?

.. as well as all of these next questions, which would apply to the entire life of the Agreement:

1. How many contact days will I be assigned throughout the agreement?
2. How many contact hours will I be assigned throughout the agreement?
3. How many of those hours will be spent in the classroom?
4. What’s the highest number of hours that I’ll be asked to teach on any day?
5. What’s the highest number of contact days per week that I’ll have?
6. How often will I be working on Friday nights? Saturdays? Sundays?
7. What’s the highest number of hours scheduled in the classroom or on other duties that I’ll be assigned in any given week?
8. What classes will I be asked to teach throughout the entire agreement?
9. Will I be assigned to teach online classes? If so, how many and with what structure?
10. How will I evaluate the students in those classes?
11. How many different preps will I be given at any one time?
12. What’s the highest number of sections that I’ll have to teach at any one time?
13. What sort of breaks between hours or classes am I guaranteed?
14. What’s the latest in the day that I’ll be asked to teach? What’s the earliest?
15. Can I be guaranteed at least x hours between the end of one day’s teaching and the start of the next day’s?
16. What complementary duties will I be assigned other than teaching? How many hours will I be assigned to complete them, and will those hours be scheduled or unscheduled?
17. Can you provide schedules right now that will cover the entirety of the period covered by the MWA? If not, when will I receive my schedules? How often can assigned schedules be changed? Can I be guaranteed that a given schedule will last for at least seven weeks? Fourteen weeks?

Missing information in any one of those above categories could burn you. If you don’t know exactly what classes you’re being asked to teach over the entirety of the Agreement, you could find that you’re assigned the most difficult, labour-intensive assignments, with no additional credit. If you receive no guarantees about scheduling, then only Ontario Labour law would limit the number of hours that you could be asked to teach in a day or week. (Does the law prevent you from being asked to teach classes for 24 consecutive hours? I don’t know, but I do know that if you sign on to a Modified Workload Agreement, the Collective Agreement won’t prevent this.)

And lastly, the absolutely most important questions that you want to get resolved in writing before signing an MWA: 

1. What’s the maximum number of students that I’ll be asked to teach in any one class?
2. What’s the maximum number of students that I’ll be asked to teach at any one time?

Why does that matter? One simple reason: Workload is directly proportional to the number of students that you have. If students aren’t measured, then workload isn’t measured, and the MWA rules were designed explicitly to take students out of the equation. Students will only be measured if you insist on it (which is to say, if you refuse to agree to any Modified Workload Agreement that ignores student numbers).

Why the need to insist on student numbers? Well, for one thing, there’s no guarantee that you’d be assigned to teach in the same classrooms as before. You could be given larger classrooms with more students, and receive absolutely no compensation for this, if your MWA only credits you for contact hours.

The other reason why student numbers are crucial is because of online classes. One online class can be given a virtually infinite number of students, which means a virtually infinite workload for the prof, who would nevertheless only be credited with the three teaching contact hours customary for the class. (I expect that partial-load profs are already facing this issue, and do wonder whether partial-loads are being given a disproportionate number of online classes, since they would not be compensated for the additional students.)

To Conclude…

Some profs might like Modified Workload Agreements. They might like the idea of teaching additional classes during the school year and having more time off in the summer; they might recognize that some classes (ones that involve independent, semester-long student projects, for example) are taught most effectively with additional class time at the beginning of the semester, and less at the end.

However, the simple fact is that management would not have insisted on gutting the Collective Agreement’s workload limits for MWAs if they weren’t interested in using them as a means of increasing faculty workload without increasing faculty pay.

This doesn’t mean that every MWA is bad; it just means that before signing one, you should get in writing exactly what you will be doing, where, when, and for how many students, for the entirety of the period covered by the MWA, before you sign. If your manager says “well, I can tell you what the work assignment will look like for the first semester, and we’ll just wing it after that”, you don’t want to sign; if you do, you will have trouble grieving three semesters later, when you find out that your work assignment includes six killer preps with 300 students in one online class.

When I was writing about MWAs leading up to the contract vote, some correspondents accused me of overreacting, pointing out that profs would have the right to negotiate MWA, and turn down unfavourable ones. That’s true, but I’ll warn you that the language of the contract that we voted to accept makes it difficult for the union to grieve an MWA on the ground that it will hurt the profs involved. If you and your chair sign off on an MWA, you could be very well stuck with it until the end of the collective agreement, however you feel about it two weeks later.

So negotiate. Make sure that everything’s in writing. If something’s not in writing, try to make sure that your MWA contains a clause that ensures that all of the terms and conditions of the Collective Agreement apply unless they are explicitly abrogated by mutual agreement in the signed MWA. [And just to be clear, this bit of advice comes from somebody who has no background whatsoever in contract law.]

As I said, some profs may have valid reasons for preferring a Modified Workload Agreement instead of the SWF. That’s their right, although I’m of the opinion that MWAs might potentially hurt all profs generally as time goes on. For that reason, I might suggest that MWAs in principle are best avoided if you can. I’ll post some of those concerns separately.