Sunday, May 18, 2008
A university is not a hardware store
From the RoundTable blog
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Frank H. Weiner
Weiner, of Blacksburg, is a professor of architecture at Virginia Tech and has been a member of the faculty since 1987.
The front-page story in The Roanoke Times dated April 25 entitled "Radford plans to refresh faculty" barely caught my eye. As a faculty member at Virginia Tech during the most hectic time of the academic year, I gave it little attention. It was only because an alert colleague had asked me if I read the article that I took a second and closer look beyond the headline.
I wondered what this article was about and why Virginia Tech's faculty was not being "refreshed." I was jealous. My first thought was that Radford University was planning something special for its faculty after a long academic year. This in itself would have been unusual and certainly a newsworthy item. Surely Radford was not offering discounted spa vacations to its faculty members. Very quickly I realized that the article was not at all about refreshing faculty but rather ruthlessly eliminating faculty members with years of irreplaceable knowledge and experience.
Of course, some faculty members at Radford University may have been hoping for a buyout package, particularly given the recent tone of its governing board and administration. What's more, the article informs us that by replacing at least 75 faculty members out of 98 eligible for the buyout, new faculty could be paid less, thus saving the university $2 million in annual payroll costs.
The target group for the buyout are faculty members with 20 or more years of service, however, Rector of the Radford Board of Visitors Randall Kirk suggested that it be broadened to those with a minimum of 15 years of service. With this logic, even more money could be saved.
It seems that today the only "idea" in higher education is money; that, in itself, is not an idea. One invests in something or someone, not in money. Clearly there are enormous challenges that any university faces today, so it would be naïve to simply ignore them. I am calling only for a higher sense of human dignity in how we craft solutions to our current problems and for understanding the essence of the university as a place of knowledge for its own sake.
Evidently, one of the main reasons given for the buyout was a revision of the curriculum to better reflect market forces with potentially different prices for different degrees. If a curriculum is a course of study designed to educate individuals in a particular discipline, then students must be taught the principles upon which their discipline is built, despite the latest trends. At least there should be some consideration for what should change and what should not.
The words of the late John Ruskin, former Slade professor of art at Oxford, may be of assistance in our present situation. He wrote, "'Unchanging' or 'eternal' truth, is that which relates to constant -- or at least in our human experience constant -- things; and which, therefore, though foolish men may long lose sight of it, remains the same through all their neglect, and is again recognized as inevitable and unalterable when their fit or folly is past."
A curriculum is not a piece of equipment that can simply be discarded. Faculty members are not something to be refreshed like a screen on a computer. If this were true, an academic career would have the half-life of a computer, or about three years. The following statement by Kirk sums up the root of the problem: "We sell a lot of different products here."
Where is the wisdom in such crass thinking?
The problem is that the "here" is a university not a hardware store. The degrees that students earn are not "products," and faculty members are not assembly-line workers, their every action determined by their managers. These statements are not meant to offend either hardware store employees or assembly-line workers, but rather to say that there is a profound categorical confusion in play.
The administration has forgotten that students and faculty members are people engaged in an earnest search for knowledge. What a demoralizing way to run and even ruin a university -- when a feeling of deep resignation overcomes the possibility to form a viable consensus. If I were a faculty member at Radford, I would seriously consider taking the buyout. Perhaps the administration of Radford University could then outsource the entire teaching mission to a global information management corporation, saving many millions of dollars.
