Archive for Stephanie Findlay

The backbone of today’s university is the ill-paid, overworked lecturer

In 2000, 36-year-old Leslie Jermyn went to teach her first course as a sessional lecturer at the University of Toronto. For $4,550, she taught 100 students a two-month first-year anthropology course. Though Jermyn would go on to teach courses every summer for the next 11 years, the job was never guaranteed, and every year she experienced “gut-wrenching tension” waiting to find out whether she’d won a new contract. “Often I was hired within two weeks of the start time of the course,” she says. For years she had no benefits and worked out of a shared office, furnished with one desk and one telephone. In 2007, after she had been teaching upwards of 800 students a year for three years straight, she argued to the dean that the department needed a regular teaching position. That didn’t work, and Jermyn says she knows why: “I’m cheaper without benefits.”

Jermyn’s lot is similar to that of many North American university undergraduate teachers today. A November 2010 report titled “Employees in Postsecondary Institutions” released by the U.S. Department of Education concludes that the proportion of university instructors who have tenure or are on the tenure track fell below 30 per cent in 2009—a big drop from 1971, when 57 per cent were on the tenure track or had tenure already.

In Canada, the numbers tell a similar story. A 2010 Statistics Canada survey of full-time teaching staff in universities shows that there were 20,685 tenured professors in 2009, down from 26,487 in 1999. Meanwhile, over the same period the number of sessional staff rose from 2,865 to 3,135. Estimates from the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), a 65,000-strong academic staff union, say that between 40 and 60 per cent of undergraduate teaching is done by sessional lecturers who often cobble together a living earning between $5,000 and $7,000 for a four-month course, sometimes travelling between two or three universities in one term. The joke in academic circles is they’re “roads scholars.”

Related: Small town universities and tenure

But for undergraduate students, who paid 15 per cent more in tuition last year than in 2006, and whose debt has risen 20 per cent over the past decade, it’s no laughing matter. Many in the nation’s academic community say the cheap labour is shortchanging students who are being taught by overworked, underpaid lecturers, who, though often excellent teachers, aren’t the cutting-edge researchers universities would have you believe are instructing kids.

“When you’re substituting full-time professors with teachers with longer hours, and higher workloads, it basically undermines the whole profession,” says James Turk, executive director of CAUT. “They earn half to a third of what a regular faculty member will earn, and have to teach ridiculous amounts to earn a modest living. They’re not paid nor expected to do research, [which] limits their ability to have a career as an academic.”

Take Teressa Fedorak, 39, who, since 2003, has worked as a lecturer at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, B.C. She teaches 80 to 100 students a semester and estimates she spends 60 hours a week teaching. The rest she spends at her other two jobs: as an elementary school teacher and gym trainer. She says it’s the only way she can earn enough to pay her mortgage and keep her academic career on track. “I’m trying to achieve the tenure track position—you can’t let it slip,” says Fedorak. But, she says, it may be a fruitless quest. “You’re working, working, working just to pay your bills,” she says. “You have no access to professional development or the time to do that.” And she says the university “likes to hold us in this pattern because it’s such a money-making device.”

For tenured profs, it’s equally frustrating. Thanks to a drop in government funding and a rise in corporate partnerships, says James Compton, an associate professor at the University of Western Ontario and president of the faculty association, “there’s increasing pressure on tenured faculty to look for those sources of money, and to do more research to get that money.” Along with the pressure to hunt down lucrative research grants, profs are burdened with a disproportionate amount of administrative work, because sessional lecturers exclusively teach.

The idea of tenure is a relatively recent one. Fifty years ago, says Michiel Horn, professor emeritus at York University and author of Academic Freedom in Canada: A History, CAUT became concerned about codifying secure tenure and the separate but related issue of academic freedom. “Professors started to insist that there be documents outlining terms of their appointment, and terms at which they could be dismissed,” says Horn. Universities acquiesced because it made them more attractive to job-hunting academics, then in short supply. “It was important for institutions to show that if you took a job at fill-in-the-blank you weren’t in danger of being sacked because the departmental chairman didn’t like your suit,” says Horn.

In the juggle of priorities on campus, books are falling off the shelf

Last month, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced it had built the world’s first bookless library. Its Applied Engineering and Technology Library offers access to 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions, and librarians say they’ve yet to hear a complaint from the 350-plus students and faculty who pass through its doors daily. “We’ve gotten no negative feedback,” says Krisellen Maloney, library dean at the University of Texas. “We looked at circulation rates, we looked at electronic resources, we looked at requests, and we decided that having the services was more important than the physical books.” She adds bluntly: “When we prioritized the needs, the books weren’t the priority.”

It used to be that the size of a collection defined a library’s greatness, but now with access to online academic journals and e-books, a large physical collection doesn’t yield the same competitive advantage.

Now the bookless trend is taking hold in Canada, where more and more libraries are expanding their electronic resources. “My own institution has increased its holdings exponentially,” says Ernie Ingles, vice-provost and chief librarian at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). “Virtually 90 per cent of our journals are electronic now, without print equivalents, and I believe we have approaching one million e-books in one kind or another.” Ingles says that all the members of CARL, including the University of British Columbia, the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie University, are moving in a similar direction.

However, Roger Schonfeld, research manager at Ithaka S+R, a non-profit research organization that focuses on the impact of digital media in academia, cautions that digital materials can be censored or restricted.

Recall in July 2009 when Amazon deleted copies of George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and 1984 from people’s Kindle devices over a licensing spat with a publisher. Also, smaller universities with tighter budgets that can’t afford an electronic archive can find themselves in a precarious position. “What we’re discovering is yes, you buy the archive, but then you have to buy access to the platform that the archive sits on,” says Marie De­Young, university librarian at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. “You’re always paying money hand over fist to the publishers because they own the content and they frequently own how you access the content.”

But it’s not just about accessing the information, it’s how well students are able to navigate through it.

Since the Internet became ubiquitous, DeYoung’s role as a librarian has changed dramatically. In the past, DeYoung says she might have spent 10 or 15 minutes with a student, but now the average time has increased to an hour. “When they’re asking us for assistance, it’s not for the easy stuff anymore, it’s the hard stuff,” says DeYoung. Gohar Ashoughian, university librarian at the University of Northern British Columbia, is managing a pilot project called iRoam, which sees five librarians armed with iPads roaming the libraries acting as a “mobile reference service.” When students need help they can page a roaming librarian who will then come and provide support. Ashoughian says the pilot is a success.

Servicing readers is only one part of the library, though. “We’re in the business of preservation as well,” says Ingles, “making sure that these assets are available many, many years into the future.” Ingles says digital is no less ephemeral than print. He is working to address “bit rot”: the “digital medium itself will deteriorate over relatively short periods of time, five, 10, 15 years.”

But for all the easy access and quantity of online scholarship, Mitch Renaud, 21, in the third year of his composition music major at the University of Toronto, says there’s “a privilege to having a large library.”

Renaud, who frequents the music library, says, sure, there are holes in the collection, but “there’s quite a bit of that that is difficult to find online.” And while he enjoys accessing digital resources like Oxford’s Grove Music Online, he says that “a lot of learning a piece is to be able to write on the music, and make notes on interpretive things to do.” Laptops and the Kindle or iPad can’t replicate that—yet. Renaud adds: “There’s something about being in the Hart House library that would be lost sitting at home in front of a computer terminal.”

Still, without the library’s real estate being taken up by print, the University of Texas’s Maloney says the space is now full of students instead of books. “If you’re walking through any of our libraries, you see students studying all over the place,” says Maloney. “It’s the heart of the university.”

How university students are spending less time hitting the books while earning better grades than ever

In 2006, Philip Babcock, a labour economist at the University of California, was surfing online when he came across a survey on the time use of undergraduate students at his school that shocked him. He noticed students were reporting perplexingly low studying times. Comparing his own university experience to his teaching experience over the past five years, Babcock had a gut feeling students weren’t studying as much, but remembers thinking, “people are always criticizing the generation that comes after them. Maybe they’re working their tails off.” So he decided to test the hypothesis. In the resulting study, to be published in the Review of Economics and Statistics later this year, Babcock and his co-author, Mindy Marks, found that since 1961, the amount of time an average undergraduate student spends studying has declined by 42 per cent, from 24 hours a week to 14. That drop is found within every demographic subgroup, within every faculty and at every type of college in the United States.

The study didn’t look at Canada, but the trend is true across North America. In his upcoming book, Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education, James Côté, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, analyzed a data set taken from 12,000 students from the U.S. and Canada and found similar results. Study times have gone down and grades have gone up, with the Canadian university average climbing from C to a B+/A- over the past 30 years.

Babcock’s study is one of the largest of its kind. The data of full-time students at four-year undergraduate programs was extracted from national surveys of thousands of people and represented four time periods: 1961, 1981, 1987-1989, and 2003-2005.

“The challenge was to make sure that we were comparing likes to likes,” says Babcock, who said it was complicated to account for demographic changes at the schools—more women, more working students—and to control for differently worded questions. In fact, women in recent cohorts were found to study on average more than men, and some faculties, like engineering, clocked more hours hitting the books than others.

As for the cause of the studying drop, he says the study only gives the hard numbers, but speculates the most plausible explanation is that university standards have fallen. He cites another of his studies, one on grade inflation to be released in the Journal Economic Inquiry later this year, to back up that claim. “The basic evidence is that instructors give higher grades, students work less and also students give them higher ratings,” says Babcock. “I don’t think there is much pressure to rein in the generous allocation of grading or to make sure that people make their courses difficult or demanding.”

Babcock is not the first to suggest that lower study times and grade inflation are linked. “When you look at grade inflation it’s a sign that we’re putting in less human capital, the standards have dropped and students are less engaged,” says Côté, who says disengaged students study less. “Most of the excuses for why we should tolerate disengagement don’t pan out,” he adds. “At best, work cuts into study time about two hours a week on average. That’s not an explanation for widespread disengagement.” He says that instead of studying, students have increased their leisure time and enjoy activities like sports, beer drinking, and parties.

But stats don’t tell the whole story, says Dean Giustini, reference librarian at the Biomedical Branch Library at the University of British Columbia. Having worked in the field for 15 years, Guistina says it’s impossible to demarcate what constitutes studying across the years, given that habits are changing all the time. “I remember talking with some of my professors, who said, ‘When we went to school we had to memorize 500 sources, and memorize the entire cataloguing rules from A to Z,’ ” he says. “Now there are so many different ways we can learn a subject. We don’t have to memorize.” Guistini says that in classrooms today you’ll be more likely to find a team-oriented, problem-based approach to learning as opposed to regurgitating facts and statistics. “More social forms of learning have taken the place of that model,” says Guistini. In other words, in the information age, the increasingly blurry line between studying and communicating may muddy the question of whether a student learns the material.

Ross Alger, an engineering student at the University of British Columbia, would say that squares with his own experience. “Every resource is at my fingertips,” says Alger. “If I have a physics problem I go to a website, I don’t have to spend hours going through a textbook trying to figure out something basic.” For the record, says Alger, even with the Internet, on top of his six-hour-a-day, five-days-a-week course load, he studies a minimum of two or three hours a night, and he says his classmates do more.

But Babcock says that if new technological tools have streamlined studying, it’s not by much: between 1988 and 2004, there was only a two-hour decline in study time. The greatest drop occured from 1961 to 1981, which was when professor ratings first came into vogue. That in turn motivated profs to grade easier, leading to falling standards, which Babcock argues led to a grade-inflation epidemic.

Instead of spending their time studying, Babcock and some of his fellow critics suggest students are finding other ways to produce better grades. Last year, Iris Franz, a visiting economics professor at Houston Baptist University, published a study that found students pester professors—obsessive emails, emotional crying, annoying visits to their offices—with more success than professors realize. “Professors don’t want to deal with students,” says Franz, “so they just inflate their grades so they can just close the door and do their research.” And now, it’s not just students that professors have to deal with. Tim Rahilly, associate VP of students at Simon Fraser University, says today’s students have “unprecedented levels of parental involvement.” Rahilly says that he often fields calls from parents and that increasing numbers of students are filling out privacy forms so parents can access their marks.

This trend dovetails with a system-wide push for universities to show results. Schools are on the hook to demonstrate better averages, as are teachers. Measurable ways to assess teachers have become the focus of a heated national debate about American public schools. This week, the Economic Policy Institute, an American think tank, released a report concluding that public school administrators rely too much on evaluations, and consequently “do a poor job of systematically developing and evaluating teachers.”

Calin Valsan, a finance professor at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Que., says universities face similar problems. In his 2008 study in the Journal of Economic Issues, Valsan says that since student-teacher evaluations were introduced in the 1960s, universities have used them to appear more like corporations with measurable results. Valsan says that the evaluations “were hijacked by university administrators” who were looking for hard numbers to quantify teaching as a marketable statistic to secure funding and as an easy way to assess profs. Valsan says that the evaluations are “central in universities for tenure and promotion” (albeit slightly less so for major research universities). “As a feedback mechanism they are fine, but as an administrative evaluating tool they aren’t,” says Valsan, who says the evaluations are manipulated on both sides.

Babcock says the evaluations create “perverse incentives” for instructors who aren’t rewarded for a rigorous curriculum, but are rewarded for maintaining a high class average. “A very fine communicator that grades very strictly may very well get a lower rating than a poor instructor that grades easy,” says Babcock. “I find it really disturbing.”

“It’s a classic game of prisoners’ dilemma, says Valsan. “Both students and professors make life easier for the other party.”

A wave of grads sees no hope of finding work. But that’s cool.

When the recession hit, Gaelan Love’s future changed—maybe, he says, for the better. The recent McGill University graduate had always planned to work at a bank when he completed his major in geography and minor in economics, but thanks to the recession, he’s come to the realization that it’s just not going to happen, at least not yet.

“It’s not really the right time to be going into the market,” he says. At first he spent his time doing interviews, but now he’s given up, and he’s happier for it. In fact, he says, now he just wants to have fun.

The sheer impossibility of finding a job in the middle of Canada’s worst recession in decades forced him to think, Love says. “Maybe I don’t want to grow up so fast. I mean, you can graduate and go into the working sector. But then you think: I’m 22, and I’m never going to be 22 again.”

So instead of pounding the pavement in a soul-destroying—and likely fruitless—quest for a real job, he’s decided to enjoy his summer in Montreal instead. He’s saving up money working at a Mexican bar before travelling to London in September, and then to Vietnam for internships at management consulting firms.

Love is part of a whole wave of young people who, in the face of harsh economic times, have decided they’re not jobless, they’re “funemployed.” They know they can’t get the work they’ve trained and studied for, and they could spend their time brooding over the stacks of rejection letters—but why? They’re confident that eventually things will get better, and they know it isn’t their fault.

There’s a proliferation of websites and blogs dedicated to people in Love’s situation, such usFunemployment.com—“because not everyone is lucky enough to work at a job they can’t stand”—and Stuff Unemployed People Like, a take-off on the cultish Stuff White People Like site.

The jokes aside, times are indeed rough for the recently graduated cohort. A labour force survey by Statistics Canada showed that in May alone, the unemployment rate for youth climbed to 14.9 per cent—the highest rate since 1999. Among students aged 20 to 24, participation in the labour force fell “substantially” from 2008, dropping from 75.2 to 68.6 per cent.

A recent study by Pew Research Center, a Washington think tank, reports that “Generation Next,” also known as “Generation Y” (born 1977 or later), is being squeezed harder than any other age group by the recession. A third of people aged 18 to 29 have cut down or cancelled their cellphone plans altogether. To judge by the emphasis on social networking and Twitter, that is no small sacrifice. Four in 10 say they have cut down on alcohol and cigarettes due to the recession. And one in five young adults have moved in with a friend or relative since the downturn.