Response to Rome Hartman

Rome Hartman can rest easy. No student was shortchanged, and student teaching evaluations continue to rank me as “excellent.” The research and writing of my essay was conducted during the summer months when I do not teach and for which I receive no salary. What troubles me in Hartman’s flippant remark, however, is the tacit assumption that the professoriate should go on with business as usual while standards of academic freedom are imperilled, when tenure is in jeopardy, and when our conditions of employment are deteriorating to the point that we cannot serve our students well. Not to write and speak out about these dangerous trends would be both professionally and ethically irresponsible.

To be sure, I used the “Get Real” segment as a frame for my defense of tenure. That said, let me be clear that my essay was never intended as an attack on either Lesley Stahl or “60 Minutes,” both of which have performed heroic service in uncovering news stories of major importance. As the essay indicated, my underlying concern was with the right wing’s successful campaign to capture the public conversation over education in general and to undermine public confidence in higher education specifically. As a result, even a distinguished “60 Minutes” investigative team appeared to accept simplistic and inherently inaccurate explanations for the problems now plaguing academe. But the real purpose of my essay was to alert readers to a far more disturbing story.

The story that needs to be reported is the story of the steady dismantling of this nation’s public higher education system through underfunding and defunding. Let me give you some sense of what that means—not in statistics but in human terms: Each year, I encounter more and more undergraduates who are holding down thirty to forty-hour per week jobs. In some cases, these are the brightest students in the class, but too often they are overwhelmed by exhaustion and do not consistently perform to their capacities. These students are neither foolhardy nor greedy. They are poor. And they are the victims of policies that, since 1980, cut federal student aid and effectively eroded the nation’s commitment to equalizing access to higher education. Nowadays, according to a special report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, of the approximately “$35 billion that the government spends each year on student aid, 70 per cent goes to loans and only 30 per cent to grants” and direct scholarships. ¹ The problem is that the poor cannot afford the middle-class luxury of accumulated debt. And so the children of the poor work long hours in order to contribute to their family’s maintenance and go to school at the same time. Many never make it.

Let me offer just one more example: My essay discussed the desperate situation of the growing ranks of underpaid and overworked part-time faculty. My point was that schools might save dollars by shrinking the size of full-time tenured faculty but that educational quality would suffer. A recent two-year study in Arizona followed undergraduates taking sequenced math and English courses. The study asked “how well students do in follow-up courses if their initial (prerequisite) course was taught by either a part-time or full-time instructor.” ² The answer sadly reinforces my argument. The study’s summary states unequivocally that “when the initial course was taught by a part-time instructor . . . the students did not do well in the follow-up course, with a significantly lower percentage of students completing the second course, and a significantly lower percentage earning a ‘C’ or better” (3). The study concludes that “prerequisite or initial courses taught by part-time instructors do not seem to prepare the students for follow-up course work as adequately as the initial courses taught by full-time residential faculty members” (3). Given the tenure review’s relative success in ensuring academic quality in faculty ranks, this study strikes me as a powerful argument for increasing the numbers of full-time tenure-eligible faculty with decent salaries and reasonable teaching loads on the nation’s campuses. But the nation’s...