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Week 6: Faculty Careers Faculty represent the capital stock of the university. Following an industrial model, we might imagine that the buildings, equipment, books, and other tangible goods represent the university's capital stock, but in fact these assets are simply overhead costs related to the support of the faculty. Students like to believe that they are the reason for the university, but of course this is not so. Students come to the university because of the faculty, and without the faculty, no university exists. Moreover, faculty drive the largest part of the cost of any institution of higher education. Some costs appear directly through salaries and fringe benefits, but many more come indirectly through libraries, laboratories, classrooms, offices, staff support, and other elements required for faculty productivity. The corporate model does not accurately capture the importance of faculty in the university's productive activity, seeing faculty primarily as labor. Faculty, in this view, simply represent some form of knowledge worker, and in response to economic difficulties many faculty take advantage of this misconception to construct labor unions and other structures that reinforce this mistaken notion. While it may certainly be the case that faculty require a union under some circumstances to protect themselves against corporate style labor and wage policies, the existence of the union simply overlays the cost of another bureaucracy on top of the cost of managing faculty capital stock. The reason capital is the best way to regard faculty is that most faculty represent a long term investment not easily transferred or disposed of. Once they achieve tenure after their sixth year at most institutions, faculty hired to teach and do research become as permanent an investment as any building. Faculty careers may run for thirty or forty years, and the institution carries an obligation to pay for this asset at some reasonable level regardless of its productivity or its contribution to the institutional mission. As is the case with many physical assets, management cannot easily transfer faculty functions from an original purpose to a new purpose. If the original purpose becomes un-economic, obsolete, or otherwise unneeded by the institution, the faculty assets associated with that purpose do not simply flow into another more productive use. As would happen for buildings constructed for a now obsolete purpose, a change in function for faculty imply significant new costs if the retooling of the faculty member is even possible. Like many buildings on the historic register, faculty who no longer serve an economic purpose cannot be reconstructed without substantial new investment. It is often more efficient and cost effective to buy a new faculty member rather than pay the costs of reconstructing an old one. In this circumstance, the institution pays the extra cost of maintaining obsolete professors rather that incur the political and social costs of removing them from the payroll. This characteristic of the faculty comes from the specialized nature of their expertise. Historians do not teach chemistry, Elizabethan scholars do not teach Spanish, engineers do not teach sculpture. Each faculty guild, especially in research institutions, has such strict requirements for entry and permanent status that generalists tend to disappear from the employment stream before receiving tenure. In most cases, the investment in the capital stock of faculty proves wise, and the faculty continue to deliver high returns on any investment made in their careers throughout their useful professional lifetimes. Nonetheless, no one engaged in the management of universities should ever think of faculty as a work force, they are the university's capital stock. Finally, faculty serve as institutional capital stock because the research university's mission, purpose, and goals succeed or fail on the basis of this investment. The administrators, staff, buildings, students, and alumni do not create the value of the university. They contribute to it, they support it, but it is the astute investment in the capital stock of faculty that produces the institution's value to its constituencies and owners. Being highly individualistic in temperament and each possessing a specific and virtually unique set of skills, individual faculty do not much appreciate the perspective that sees them as part of an aggregate capital asset. And they are right in this attitude, for the management of faculty is an individualized art, as any department chair will only too eagerly explain. Our interest in this section of the course is to identify the structure of faculty life and careers. Only by understanding the way faculty interact with their institutions and their guilds can universities improve their operations. The first group of readings provides some background on faculty careers. Boland's review essay gives us an understanding of the state of the academic conversation about the purpose of academic life. Fairweather talks about the markets for faculty talent, for like the capital stock of a corporation, faculty talent is bought and sold in an active market. The US Department of Labor offers an interesting view of the labor market for academic positions and indicates what specialties are on the rise. The career tracks of faculty elicit much interest and research, and the National Research Council piece worries about the early careers of life scientists. Toutkoushian, et. al, analyze the differences in faculty profiles traceable to gender, race, and family; and Heller's sequence of news profiles focused on what he describes as a lost career of a permanent faculty member recounts a poignant case study that along the way provides ample evidence of the perspective we take in this discussion. Faculty, along with their supporters and critics, spend time and energy on the analysis of promotion and tenure. These topics elicit much controversy but often for the wrong reasons. Promotion recognizes cumulative accomplishment at various levels of guild-established productivity and quality. Tenure, represents the institution's and the guild's investment in the future productivity and accomplishment of a faculty candidate. While many critics worry that tenure protects the incompetent and subversive, this is not the major issue for the university and its guilds. Very few tenured faculty prove to be incompetent. Instead, the issue is more subtle and complex. Universities have only a fixed amount of capital stock to spend on the production of quality. Every faculty member whose productivity and quality proves less than optimal represents a less than optimal use of the institution's resources. The test of optimal use is whether, using the same amount of money invested in a current faculty member, you could get a better faculty member in the market. The tenure decision represents a bet by the guild and the institution that the capital investment in faculty members considered for tenure will deliver value over their professional lifetime that is as good or better than any other investment in faculty members that the institution could make. Taken in this way, then, the decision about tenure is much more important than the decision about promotion. Promotion sets standards of performance for all members of a guild, but tenure makes a one-time long-term investment of scarce capital in an asset that we expect will produce quality. The importance of these decisions (one that sets the standards of cumulative performance through promotion and one that makes the institution's capital investment in future performance) motivates faculty and administrators to create elaborate procedures to validate these decisions. The process of promotion and tenure represent for the academic world a form of due diligence that corporate actors employ when deciding whether to acquire a new asset in the form of another company, new plant, or new equipment. In the academic world, the process is no less formalized, no less rigorous, and overall, no less effective in making good decisions. The added complication in the academic world is that these decisions involve not inanimate physical or financial objects but real people. Tenure in particular represents a life-challenging experience for the candidate. For this reason faculty advocates tend to develop complex bureaucratic measures to protect candidates against negative decisions in these processes. Only the most rigorous research universities use a decision process that measures a tenure candidate directly against quality available in the marketplace. In most universities, the process is biased in favor of the candidate. This bias works through the mechanism of satisfactory continuous work. In the event a faculty member does a good job, a job that meets the minimum or at best the average standards of the guild, then the presumption is that the institution will make the permanent investment in granting tenure. In the most rigorous research universities, mostly private, the presumption measures the candidate against the market. These institutions ask this question: "Is a lifetime investment in tenure for this candidate the highest and best use of the institution's funds." Or, more specifically, "Can the university find a better person in the marketplace for this position than the candidate before us, regardless of whether the candidate before us has performed up to the generally accepted standard for the profession." The readings provide a perspective on these issues through the formal documents that support and define the tenure policies and practices of American colleges and universities as well as the commentary and representations of the principal organization that defends the tenure rights and responsibilities of faculty (American Association of University Professors) and one of the more aggressive trade union representatives of faculty employees. The significance of this investment and the risks it entails often encourage universities to rent faculty rather than incur the risk and future costs of tenured faculty. While few universities support a permanent cadre of non-tenured full-time faculty, most rent part-time faculty in ever increasing numbers. The readings provide some commentary on this phenomenon. Given the significance of tenure in the cultural, intellectual, and financial structure of universities, consider the following issues:
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