This link just came across the XChange wire.
Rural Pennsylvanians no longer play role
in the planning of education3.18.10 / Opinion / By The Clarion Call
[9/8/10 NOTE: this opinion piece was written by Vincent Spina. His name does not appear on the Clarion Call web site, so I didn’t print it here. I’m glad that Vincent contacted me via the Xchange with his info]
What is wrong with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE)? First of all, what is essentially right with PASSHE? Answer? The system was established to make sure that rural Pennsylvanians had access to a college education. In many cases, this means the rural poor, who can not only not afford to travel to larger centers of education, but could not afford the tuition even if they could.
In this sense, PASSHE is an entirely good system and an entirely noble one.
But what is wrong with the system? I, for one, don’t have all the answers, but the following may shed some light on the problem:
When compared to student growth, since 1990, management has grown by 25 percent. During the same period faculty has shrunk by 17 percent. At the same time in 1990 10 percent of faculty were temporary faculty hires. That figure is now at 18 percent. Since 2000-01, virtually all faculty FTE is attributable to temporary staff hires, which still hasn’t kept up with student growth. These figures are available at APSCUF, the faculty union.
Why has this happened? Again, I can only give a partial answer, which relates back to the social organization of a university within the PASSHE system. This organization consists of a student body, a faculty and an administration. The student body has a senate as does the faculty. The administration consists of a president, provost, vice-presidents, deans and sundry other administrators. It is here, however, that some confusion sets in. In general, when we think of a president and a senate, we picture to ourselves the American model: an elected president and an elected senate.
Bills (proposals for future laws) normally originate in the senate and may be vetoed by the president. With a sufficient amount of votes, however, the senate may, in turn, overturn a president’s veto, and the bill will become law. (I am not including the role of the House of Representatives, since colleges and universities do not use this term to my knowledge).
This, of course, has never been the case in any PASSHE university. Presidents are “selected” and may remain as long as they wish. The only political entity that can remove a president is the chancellor of the state system itself. As for the two senates, the student and the faculty, they have no veto power over a president’s decision. Both of these bodies may protest as much as they wish.
These protests may reach the chancellor, but the final decision to act upon these protests remains with this individual. At the same time, at least as far as faculty is concerned, protests imply a certain amount of risk to an individual’s career, since a president is the last word on whether the individual will be promoted up the three ranks from assistant, to associate, full professor, which over a 30 year career, promotion or no promotion will mean a difference of hundreds of thousand of dollars in lifetime earnings.
What I have learned over my years as a professor working within this (or any system) is that the goal of any one of the entities I have mentioned above is to grow and find more needs to which new members of that entity become the answer.
In my own field for instance I can imagine many needs. I teach Spanish, but “Spanish” may easily be divided between Spain and the Spanish American countries. In my field the need is for one specialist in Spain and one in Spanish America. But there are over a dozen countries in which Spanish is spoken, each with its own “dialect” of Spanish and it own body of literature. Perhaps I’ll need a specialist in each of these areas.
Again, these countries are divided with vastly different cultural regions, which may call for specialists in each one of them, ad infinitum. What stops my addition of more and more faculty members is the needs of the rest of the university. And it is the administration, the presidents, who arbitrates these needs.
The administration, taken as a whole, has needs too! Vice-presidents of student life, of admissions, deans etc. But who is there to arbitrate these needs if the president is the ultimate power and the senates have none, at least, in this area? Really, the only political body a president must answer to is the Board of Regents, and the chancellor.
If he decides that he needs a new vice president and the chancellor agrees, we hire a new vice-president. If the president decides we need a new building, and the chancellor agrees, we build.
If the chancellor doesn’t provide enough money to build a building adequate to the needs of the university, and the president doesn’t want to displease the chancellor, then the inadequate building is built anyway. What binds a PASSHE president so closely to the will of a chancellor and, by extension, the board of regents, is the simple fact that the chancellor is in charge of the purse strings. He decides what universities get what money, and he sets the criteria by which a university will get its allotment.
In many cases this allotment is decided by how many new students a university attracts. I don’t remember ever hearing about academic excellence, especially in a small departments such as Modern Languages or Physics, being a criterion.
The system hasn’t always worked this way. Indeed, the same order existed of president, senate etc., but on some levels it was realized that the real structure of a university consists of two entities: the students and the instructors.
This was the setup of the Greeks starting with the early philosophers and their students, and is the model even Jesus Christ followed when he chose apostles and disciples.
Between these two entities a dialogue develops, and from this dialogue the needs of furthering the educative process emerge: what classrooms are needed, what the size of the classroom should be, what the best hours for learning are, what housing arrangements must be made. In fact, out of this dialogue emerges what subjects are to be taught in the first place. Both students and professors have an idea of what should be taught and learned.
What is taught today is not what was taught 50 or even ten years ago. And this is because of the constantly changing nature of the dialogue. On some level administrations realized that from this dialogue the needs of a university arose and that their duty was to facilitate answering these needs and also to arbitrate between the various disciplines making these needs. This was a while ago.
I remember it from the sixties. I also remember the student and faculty uprisings when administrations were deemed not to be basing their decisions on the student/faculty dialogue.In the years I have been at Clarion, however, I have seen a new model arise, not only in Clarion but across the PASSHE system. It is a model based on business (a model that is rapidly failing in business if we compare GM to its Japanese counterparts, in which, at least formerly, workers’ concerns were included in management’s decisions). The business model consists of a CEO who defines the goals of a company and his subordinates carry these goals out. But there is a difference even between this model and the one we see within the PASSHE system. If a CEO does not turn a corporate profit, the share owners will have a say in his tenure. He may be a dictator within the company, but he is still responsible to meet the needs of that company. With a PASSHE, again, this is not the case. His greatest responsibility is to the chancellor. In this sense, he is more like an old Russian commissar than a CEO. These commissars were sent to the Soviet hinterlands with orders direct from Moscow. What happened in those hinterlands, the failure or success of their agricultural, industrial, educational endeavors were never as much a concern as making sure that whatever Moscow ordered was carried.
Will this system ever change? I don’t think so.
Students today are not the students of the sixties, urged to action for a myriad of reasons from the Vietnam War to the crass social inequalities that existed at that time for minorities, gays and women. Students today, with a minority of exceptions, have turned off from all of these issues. At the same time, they are too young and inexperienced to understand in what ways their education is being jeopardized.
However, faculty fall into different categories; ones who are content with the system because it facilitates their promotions, because they are afraid to rock the boat etc.
In both camps, student and faculty, there are a few who will risk rocking the boat. Unfortunately they are few.
So, once again: What is right with PASSHE? It was established to see that rural Pennsylvanians could have access to a college education.
What is wrong with PASSHE? Rural Pennsylvanians no longer play any meaningful role in the planning of their education.
Right or wrong, management makes all the decisions with the consent of Harrisburg.
The Clarion Call is Clarion University’s student newspaper since 1913.
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