Customer Reviews

Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids---and What We Can Do About It

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This is an interesting, opinionated, anecdotal study of the current plight of our colleges and universities. I agree with about 80% of it, but disagree with some of its crucial elements. Education is indeed too expensive and far too much of its budget goes to `amenities' like luxury dorms, exercise facilities with rock climbing walls, professionalized athletics, and so on. The `top' institutions are not always providing value for dollar while many public, regional, and little-known institutions are.

The criticism, however, comes with a very broad brush. I would not, e.g., do away with tenure, because tenure is a form of compensation and salaries would probably be higher without it, so the efficiencies sought might not be recouped. I agree with the authors that tenure is largely unnecessary for protecting academic freedom; meanwhile, the contingent faculty's academic freedom is not being protected in that manner, since they're not on the tenure track. Tenure, however, helps protect faculty from their colleagues. For example, when I was deaning I once had a department chair try to force a senior colleague into early retirement. Why? Because he graded too rigorously and was (the chair claimed) hurting the feelings of his students. When two of us (another dean and I) looked at examples we were heartened to learn that the senior faculty member in question was grading accurately, fairly and in a helpful (i.e. an honest) manner. The department wanted somebody more soft, more politically correct, more touchy/feely. The presence of tenure also protects disciplines from corporatist deans and senior administrators. In the current, commercialized university (which I deplore along with the authors) there are many administrators who would quickly dissolve Classics departments, e.g., and put something vocational in their place. Once a few of those events occurred, students would stop studying Classics at the graduate level. There is continuing student interest in Classics but a sudden blip in enrollments is all that a corporatist administrator would need to take out the long knife. Tenure helps us in this regard and protects education (as opposed to training).

The authors also inveigh against research. There is no question that much `research' is white noise, but the answer is not to say (as the authors do), that `if a faculty member wants to write a book he can do it on the weekends.' Check out Jonathan Cole's book defending research universities and specifying all of the inventions, medicines and procedures that originated there. We all have moments of frustration with trivial research and inactive `researchers', but that should not lead us to damn all research, across the board. Also, one of the principal features of our higher education institutions is that one size does not fit all. There is a place for research institutions and students there can have very special experiences.

One of the huge failings of contemporary higher education is the erosion of general education and the teaching of core curricula (if at all) through the use of adjuncts and graduate assistants. At many of our institutions (especially those at the `top') students can graduate without studying crucial areas of human experience while remaining ignorant of fundamental human knowledge. I am surprised that the authors did not spend much more time on this issue.

The book is strong in its facts, its statistics and in its anecdotes. I love anecdotes in general and I love many of the authors' anecdotes in particular. Good anecdotes speak to major issues and that is how many of the anecdotes here function. On the other hand, anecdotes may not be representative of larger issues. In the `ten of our favorite schools' section, some of the anecdotes are limited in the extreme. The authors visit a campus, meet some people they like and conclude that that institution would be a good place in which to enroll. As I'm sure the authors know, every campus includes both heroes and villains, the inspirational and the embarrassing.

The book is lively, lucid and `personal' in the best sense of the word, but like the `anecdotal', the `personal' is not always a good indicator. For example, the authors praise my undergraduate institution, Notre Dame, and list it among their ten faves, for being faithful to its principles. The main example: inviting President Obama to speak, despite his stands on abortion (including support for partial-birth abortion). As the authors must know, many of the Notre Dame alumni have seen that decision as a failure to be faithful to the institution's principles. Faithfulness is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

The book has tended to evoke diametrically-opposed responses, with some people loving it and others dismissing it. As I said, I liked about 80% of it, but found parts to be simplistic. I do think we need more analysis here and more suggestions of ways to address concrete problems. Some of this book reads like the work of academic gadflies who have the courage to speak truth to corporatist power. Other sections read like the musings of a small town editorial writer.

A bit of context. I've just retired after 40 years of college and university teaching (including years spent at Williams College, a frequent illustration in your book). And for some years, I used Hacker's TWO NATIONS in a course on ethics and social responsibility.

So.... to HIGHER EDUCATION. I cannot find a false word or statment in the book. [It's rare for me to agree with much of anything.] Regarding the dumbing down of the curriculum; the careerism of so-called academic stars; the absurdities of the tenure process -- this book is on the mark. My gripes center on the often unexamined trend towards interdisciplinary studies. Nothing inherently dubious about looking at problems from many perspectives (e.g., neuroscience), but to expect undergraduates,who haven't read any Shakespeare, aside from high school assignments of Hamlet and Julius Caesar, to evaluate the concept of "leadership" from, say, the political, psychological, and ethical perspectives. Well, as they say, give me a break.

The tone of the book -- which ranges from acerbic to occasionally cynical, does not disturb me. But I do think it may gloss [ab bit] over those rare but real faculty members whose old-fashioned commitment to rigor remains a vestige. As for dumping the business school, my most recent employer just completed a new B-school building which rivals any Hyatt hotel in its grossly sumptuous features. And once that pile opens, there's no closing it.

Though I would not expect Presidents and Deans to grasp the reality captured in this book, one can always hope that such a wise and reflective text will reach a wide audience.

What struck me most about this book was the authors' faith that almost all students might learn to crave intellectual stimulation and that they have the right to receive it in their college classes. It is an utopian ideal: that we should be teaching everyone in institutions of higher learning, at a low tuition, and that all these students should spend their college years not in vocational training but in developing the life of the mind. This proposition is put forward along with a lot of data and facts about higher education and an acknowledgment that about 64 percent of undergrads are enrolled in vocational majors. "We wish this weren't so," declare the authors. "We would like to persuade them that supposedly impractical studies are a wiser use of college years and ultimately a better investment. ... The undergraduate years are an interlude that will never come again, a time to liberate the imagination and stretch one's intellect without worrying about a possible payoff. We'd like this for everyone, not just the offspring of professional parents."

I am a retired college teacher. Most of my fellow teachers also wished that their students were in college for intellectual development per se; however, we taught those who walked into our classes. Many students whom I taught not only wanted a bachelor's degree mainly as a credential for employment; they were also working close to a forty hour week to pay for both tuition and room and board, even at a state college. I have heard from my days at Cornell that Professor Andrew Hacker, who taught there, was a legendary teacher, making introductory courses in political science come alive. I can only assume he has had the same response from his students at Queens College, a commuter school with many students who are the first in their family to attend college. I myself never did find the knack for reaching all or even 80 percent of the students in my classes. So this book's focus on the intellectual development of all students as a goal struck me as highly desirable but not so easy to reach.

Lots of proposals that Dreifus and Hacker put forth in this book are controversial and I did not agree with all of them. However, the prose is lively and much of what could be dry data if presented by lesser writers takes on a life of its own. It was with a bit of wry irony that I read about monied professorships, since my colleagues all seemed to earn between $50,000-$60,000 a year, which has provided us with a comfortable life and retirement but is far from extravagant.

The book will be of special interest to those in the educational field, and I highly recommend it.

You ever have that feeling that something is terribly wrong, you think you got it right, but everybody else is thinking differently? Well that's the feeling you get when you read this book. You realize on your own that something is terribly wrong with the American educational system and then along comes a book like this, and it spells it out for you that you had it right all the time. It does it in such a way that is so compelling that you find you cannot argue against the central arguments of this book.


Here are some of the concepts clearly illustrated in this book that blow way what is believed to be commonly accepted thinking:


* The Ivy League survives on its reputation, not on performance. Top professors are teaching only 3 courses per year, if that. They spend the rest of their time doing so-called research that studies demonstrate, yields very little. If you send your child to a prestigious university on an undergraduate level, if that school has graduate programs, your child gets cheated. For the most part, the child will be taught by TA's or teaching assistants, more than 50% of whom do not speak English as a native language. What a joke.


* You pay for professors, you want professors. The child is infinitely better off going to an undergraduate college that caters to the undergraduate mind with small classes and full professors teaching. You do not get this at Harvard, Columbia, or Yale. You do get it at Princeton because Princeton has very little in the way of graduate education.


* Schools like Pomona in California, Carleton College in Minnesota as well as the smaller colleges in New England such as Colby, Williams, Amherst and others offer far superior undergraduate educations but are still too expensive for what they provide.


* Most colleges employ adjunct faculty, these are teachers who have full time jobs in the real world, but love to teach, so they get paid 1/6th of what a tenured professor receives, who cares nothing for teaching but everything for research. So the money goes to the research professor, and the fellow actually doing the teaching gets beat. What a system according to the authors. For most schools the adjunct teachers represent 70% of the teaching faculty.


* They actually did a study of over 3000 research papers written by these tenured professors at a 2007 meeting of the American Sociological Association and objectively found that only a handful of papers truly deserved to be written.


* The authors found that the best value for the money in America today can be found at schools like Ole Miss, Cooper Union, Berea College, Arizona State, and Western Oregon University.


If you have an interest in "best practices" as far as higher education is concerned, or if you have a child that is headed for college, you owe it to yourself and the your child to rethink your position as to what the possibilities are. Simply do not allow yourself to be railroaded into traditional thinking about what is best for your child. This book offers new possibilities along non-traditional paths and encourages out of the box thinking on our educational system today. Good luck.


Richard Stoyeck

In the tradition of Charles Sykes' Profscam (1988) and Richard Vedder's Going broke by degree (2004), Hacker and Dreifus' Higher Education? is what we call "a mixed bag." It is yet another attack on higher education that lines up the usual suspects: burned-out professors, tenure, presidents who want CEO-style salaries and athletics. Like Sykes and Vedder the authors begin with some biased assumptions focusing solely on undergraduate education and damning all of higher education with examples from elite institutions like Harvard, Princeton and Kenyon College. Outside of the University of Michigan both authors seem to have spent their formative educational lives at private schools like Amherst, New York University, Oxford and Princeton so perhaps one cannot fault them for their ignorance of the fiscal realities plaguing many public institutions. That said, they also raise some excellent and provocative points and I'll try to balance my criticism with coverage of what strikes me as noteworthy and makes the book worth reading.

Some Criticisms

The authors selectively choose their statistical media to support their biases for example when trying to exaggerate professors' salaries they use an average (pp. 22-23). When trying to minimize the salaries of Princeton graduates they use median salaries (p. 75). In any skewed distribution the relation between the mean and median can give a skewed summary statistic of what people actually earn (for example the minimum salary for a full professor at Cleveland State University is $67,000 - a far cry from the American Association of University Professors average of $108,749). Of course the full professors at Northwestern ($161, 800) and Emory ($153,000) (cited on p. 23) likely pull the average above what the median salary would be.

Another misrepresentation is calculating hours worked by professors by only counting those hours where they must be at a specific place (e.g. teaching and office hours). Using this whimsical formula the authors calculate that faculty at Kenyon college average 381 teaching and office hours per year and try to give the impression that this is all the professors do (while on pages 19-22 they decry the endless committee work that doesn't figure into their hourly formula). In addition the authors pick the most liberal sabbatical policies (Yale gives a full semester off with pay after teaching only five semesters or 2.5 years - p. 24) and deduct the time spent on sabbatical from the time spent teaching and holding office hours. This is akin to assessing the time writers work by only counting the minutes their fingertips are touching the keyboard.

Some Praise

As philosopher Ken Wilber has noted though, everyone is right about something, just not equally right about everything, so what are some of the substantial criticisms the authors make of higher education? I think that they have made a good case that student amenities (hot tubs, quality dorms and top notch food) have inflated the costs of higher education. They seem to have rightly put their finger on a consumer-driven inflation here but of course if that is what draws students, that is what universities are going to provide (with the exception of Spartan institutions like Notre Dame which earn the authors' praise - pp. 223-224).

The Thorny Issue of Tenure

While it may annoy my colleagues the authors rightly question the tenure system in its current form. On many campuses we have both tenure and collective bargaining meaning that professors who have been given "lifetime" appointments also collectively bargain for their salary, duties and benefits. The authors notion of tenure as a lifetime appointment (they write that you can stay in your job "well into your eighties" on page 132) is misguided though as several states have mandatory retirement ages that they enforce in public colleges and universities. The authors seem to be aware of mandatory retirement since they caution against it on page 150 but again their statements here seem to reflect ignorance of public higher education.

The best points these authors make about tenure is that while it is supposed to increase and preserve academic freedom, there is not much evidence that it in fact does. There is accumulating evidence that the tenure system stifles innovation in junior faculty if that innovation would displease the senior faculty who vote on the junior faculty members' tenure. Also they point to landmark cases where individuals with tenure were dismissed particularly during the McCarthy era (p. 137). The authors use the infamous Ward Churchill case to illustrate many of the problems with the tenure system noting "If a college wants to oust a professor, it will do so, with or without rationalizations, even if it has to mount charges on an entirely different matter" (p. 141). Hacker and Dreifus recommend some attractive alternatives to the current tenure system including the use of multi-year contracts and ten-year reviews like those used at Hampshire College.

The Abuse of Adjunct Professors

The authors bring to light again the abuse of adjunct instructors noting that the American Federation of Teachers estimates the average wage for adjuncts as $3000 a course. The authors however weaken their case in the way they compare adjuncts to full-time, tenure-track faculty. Because the authors give short shrift to duties faculty engage in other than teaching and office hours (e.g. research, writing, committees, advising, program coordination, accreditation reports, faculty meetings) they present an over-simplified image of adjuncts and full-timers doing the same work within the institution. Hacker and Dreifus portray adjuncts and full-time professors as "...working side by side at comparable jobs, and experiencing ...extreme pay gaps" (p. 49). First of all, the jobs are not comparable at all. Just add in the work that goes into advising; program, school or college accreditation and research and the full-time faculty member potentially has a deeper, broader view of the institution than any adjunct is liable to get.

Their best point is that teaching is important and the low rate of adjunct pay seems to reflect an institutional belief that teaching is not important at all. This is a good point and the idea of professor teaching more and being pressured less to write is one that I and many of my colleagues would welcome. If that translated into proper pay and treatment of adjuncts all the better. But of course, if institutions focus more of the professorate's time on teaching, there will be less need for adjuncts.

The Fiscal Black Hole of Athletics

Hacker and Dreifus make a good case that athletics is taking more and more money and responsible, in part, for rising tuition rates. Hacker and Dreifus suggest that the interpretation of Title IX as applying to college athletics has led to the proliferation of women's athletic teams and a correlating increase in the athletic budget. The authors claim that athletics do not diversify the campus in the ways typically asserted. In addition Hacker and Dreifus present data that challenge the idea that profits from well-attended sports either pay for the sport attended or other less popular sports. They also challenge the idea that sports teams at colleges inspire loyalty and bolster donations from alumni. According to their assessment winning teams (teams that score a bowl game or Final Four play-off slot) correlate with a 7% increase in donations but of course most teams will never get that far.

The "Top-Ten" and the "Golden Dozen"

In fairness the authors do present their own "top-ten" list of schools they feel are in alignment with their stated belief that all young people should have access to higher education (p. 3). Also these ten exemplify in some way a move away from vocational training (including nursing) and toward Liberal Arts as the optimal four-year degree program. They claim that vocational training is just that - not education (p. 98) and that education should be the emphasis of the Bachelor's degree. The Hacker/Dreifus top-ten are University of Mississippi, Raritan Valley Community College, Notre Dame, The Cooper Union, Berea College, Arizona State University, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, MIT, Western Oregon University, and Evergreen State College.

Hacker and Dreifus are also heavily critical of the schools they label the "Golden Dozen" (Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, Dartmouth, Amherst, Brown, Columbia and Williams - p. 64). They present the "Golden Dozen as behemoths who dazzle parents with promises of securing their child's future but who in actuality seem uncommitted to actually educating those children should they be accepted. Here the authors site high rates of adjunct professor, teaching assistants, and ridiculous policies on course-release and leaves.

Final Recommendations

The authors finally recommend the following 12 changes:

* The purpose of higher education is education and other activities should be made to justify why they exist.
* Costs attributed to athletics, excesses of administration, swelling ranks of vice-presidents and student amenities should not be passed onto the students in the form of increased tuition.
* All Americans should be given the opportunity for university study but professors must make more of an effort to reach students.
* Education should make students more thoughtful and interesting human beings. The impractical Liberal Arts are a better use of college years than vocational training.
* Lifelong tenure should be abolished and replaced by multiyear contracts.
* Professors should do more teaching, less research and have fewer leaves of absence.
* Adjuncts should receive the same per-course compensation as an assistant professor (they site MIT as a place where this happens).
* The "Golden Dozen" should be forced to deliver on their promises.
* Presidents of Universities should model themselves as public servants and say "thanks but no thanks" to CEO-level salaries (p. 241).
* Universities should cut ties with Medical Schools and Research Centers and spin them off as independent institutions.
* Give a hearing for technology in teaching but not at the cost of the live teacher.
* Finally benefactors should consider giving money to institutions that really need it rather than those that are well-endowed fiscally.

While many of the authors' points seem like biased conjecture overall I feel this is a book worth reading because it raises many issues in a short volume that should be debated in our institutions of higher learning.

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have taken a complicated and difficult subject and boiled it down to platitudes and anecdotes. Few would disagree with most of the truisms that underpin this book, including those who lead and work at the colleges they write about: that higher education is very expensive, that some of what passes as research is frivolous, that reliance on contingent (paid by the course) faculty is shameful and bad for student learning, that sports consume too much of the attention and budgetary resources on many university campuses.

But Hacker and Dreifus really offer no solutions to these problems, for they have not done the hard work of thinking about how to change the incentives that have led to them. They are particularly misleading on the pricing structure of a university education, making no distinction between need-blind institutions and those that are not need-blind (and thus chastising schools for not giving merit aid when their mission prohibits it, while cynically misstating the role that family income plays in admissions decisions) and wildly overstating the number of students who pay full freight. They repeatedly say that more than half of the students at elite institutions pay full tuition, while this is simply not the case; the most expensive schools routinely offer financial assistance to more than half the students who matriculate, and need-blind schools do not know family income when they review applications.

Further, and most importantly, they do not address the unintended consequences of the reforms they do propose: For instance, if universities stop supporting research, who will step into the breach? Do we really want a society with little to no basic research in the sciences? Even if some research can be made to seem a bit silly (as they suggest by easy shots at such phrases as "stochastic models" and "performativity texts" that are quoted out of context and not even attributed), would we be content with a society in which no new interpretations of the poets and philosophers were being proposed? Without the writing and research that are carried out on college campuses, who will take responsibility for preserving and extending the knowledge of past ages? Who will carry the scholarly conversation into the future?

Even the simple facts that support this analysis are lacking -- sometimes incorrect and often contradictory. For example, a faculty member's hourly pay rate is calculated as the number of hours in the classroom divided by the annual salary, leading to the shocking, but entirely specious conclusion that a professor at Yale has an hourly rate of $820; this is because even though the authors acknowledge that some time must be spent keeping up in the field, preparing lectures and new curricula, grading, directing independent work, etc., they have simply decided not to count any of this, because they can't "say with certainty" exactly how many hours are so occupied since professors, unlike lawyers, don't keep track of their billable hours (see pp. 24-25). Later, however, where a different argument is being made and where it suits the authors to make much of the labor of grading papers, they write: "As all teachers will attest, composing 90 ... commentaries is no small task, especially when they must be completed in a matter of days" (pp. 198-99). Well you can't have it both ways - either it's time-consuming work to grade papers or it isn't.

Finally, the high-handed tone the authors take becomes increasingly annoying. "Schools We Like" is the title of their final chapter. Well, who cares? Who anointed this professor and this journalist the gods of higher education upon whose every word the reader should hang? "We liked this," they write; "we particularly liked that." "We note x in sorrow and anger...." "Ah, the professoriate! It's an alternate universe," they quip snidely. Such opinions based on innuendo, anecdote, and pure assertion do not constitute an argument. I am confident that, if Hacker and Dreifus had looked closely and with an open mind, they would have found as much to admire at Williams (a school they love to hate) as they do at Arizona State, which they find it refreshing to love.

But really in the end they are not interested in the facts. As a final example of their habit of twisting and misleading statements, consider one of the bulwarks of their praise for Notre Dame - that its president, John Jenkins, gives his salary back to his institution (p. 224). Of course he does! He's an ordained Catholic priest, who is required by his vows to return his income. You wouldn't know that, however, from this book, which substitutes inflammatory rhetoric for inconvenient truths.

My family has just been through the college applications ordeal (twice), and this excellent book hits a raw nerve. We went through endless talks and tours about everything from branding to food courts, thinking, "Where's the education?" These two authors have taken a no-holds-barred look at the American university system, and what the result isn't pretty. It's just good solid reporting (so one question is, why hasn't someone done it before?)

They show us many of the problems "behind the curtain." One is the quiet scandal of the teaching industry, in which tenured professors minimize undergraduate contact, and underpaid adjuncts and ill-prepared graduate students shoulder the real teaching burden. Another issue involves the swelling, costly armies of administrators, serving ever-expanding categories of political correctness. (How many paid staff do you need to serve various communities on an individual basis -- minority, gay, part-time, etc etc etc? Are they really better served in the end?) Then there are the multi-million dollar sports facilities, along with the myth that they bring in revenue for the colleges. (Very rarely, report the authors; they're usually an economic drain.) Why isn't the "brand" of the institution associated with the quality of the undergraduate teaching? One reason, we learn, is that the big prestigious institutions place more emphasis on research, graduate schools and the comfort of tenured faculty over the undergraduate curriculum. (Yes, Ivies, they're talking about you. And as an Ivy grad, I can only agree.)

The real tragedy is that there are all kinds of crises in undergraduate education that aren't being addressed by colleges: legions of liberal arts grads facing a hostile job market. A binge drinking epidemic of historic proportions. The staggering loads of debt that burden many recent graduates.

This book is highly readable, provocative, and a much-needed reality check. My only real criticism is that occasionally the authors overreach themselves in terms of the issues they tackle. Online learning, for example, is a large and complex question, and their cursory chapter can't really do justice to the broader discussion of how and when it works. The book's real strengths are in the economic analysis, where it tracks tuitions and revenues and shows us where the money is going.

I'm sure Higher Education? will hit some raw nerves in the academic establishment -- but it's about time universities answer for the vast cost increases they've been imposing on middle-class American families. Overall, the book is not written to be a definitive scholarly assessment -- it's more of an opening salvo in an urgent national debate that must take place if U.S. higher education is going to remain solvent and competitive in the years to come.

As Wanda B. Red pointed out, "Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus have taken a complicated and difficult subject and boiled it down to platitudes and anecdotes." I wouldn't go as far as her in saying that this book was purely "preening drivel," though -- there are many important problems that need to be addressed in higher education, and Hacker & Dreifus identify many of the key issues (over-compensated, under-performing tenured staff, football teams that suck up more cash than they give back, etc).

They don't offer up terribly good solutions, though. One of Hacker & Dreifus' biggest pet issues is returning liberal arts to the forefront of undergraduate education, but this seems like 50% naïve dream, 50% contrarianism: if every college in the country suddenly began eliminating professional schools at the undergraduate level, you get the feeling that they would be writing about how ivory towers divorced from any economic reality are pushing an outdated classical notion of education on the nation. This book painted with too wide of a brush -- it's more of a "here's everything we think is wrong with schools" sort of read, rather than focusing in on the key issues.

Many of my friends are spending weekends traveling all over the country with their teenagers to tour colleges and universities. I want to press this book into their hands and implore them to read it before they make the big decision, and write that very big check. The subtitle says it all: the authors make a powerful case that far too many institutes of higher learning blow money like drunken sailors on ridiculous things that have nothing to do with teaching young people, from hideously overpaid sports coaches to lux dining halls. But the biggest message I took away, the one I'd want my friends to think about, is this: Don't buy the brand. Don't be swayed by the image. Do your homework and send your kid to the school that's going to give him or her a real education.

These authors attack what they consider the seamy and ever more pervasive side of US higher education. Their style is journalistic, clear, and hard to put down, with cogent illustrations and analyses. Although I like the book, I have complaints: questionable extrapolations from liberal arts to science and mathematics education, downplaying of marketable skills, minimizing the value of living on-campus, and questionable data regarding hours worked/workloads. These issues lead me to rate the book as only three stars.

The authors urge parents to question the value of high-status, expensive schools. "What you know" (learn) should be more important to students/parents than "Who you know." The latter, however, guides the actions of much networking, social clubbing and, of course, the flood of applicants to elite schools.

This is a useful book. Status quo academia needs rousing before it starves itself to death and impoverishes students and their families. As a former tenure-track assistant professor, visiting assistant professor, and adjunct professor - roles clarified in the book - I saw many of the practices criticized by the authors. Here are some.

Light teaching loads, defended by faculty even in the face of administration pressure for more courses. Comparisons with other universities (e.g., faculty in second-tier institutions seeking parity with Harvard) in demanding light teaching loads, research funding, and equivalent pay. Teaching subordinated to research and publication (even when latter receives little or no peer review approval). Tenured faculty who, even when no longer competent, remain on full salary until THEY choose to retire.

I once was offered an adjunct position which I declined, as too much preparation (to do a good job) for too little pay. The chairperson's response: "Don't worry about preparation. Just come in once a week and talk." Later that department lost its accreditation, for being a degree mill (to raise the enrollments and bolster their budget). This action was imposed by an outside review agency; neither tenured faculty nor the campus administration had been willing to confront the issue.

There are few incentives for entrenched senior faculty to change. Sitting in department meetings you will hear more talk about budgets (level and type of staffing) and faculty independence (control over working conditions and perks) than about education per se. Desirable educational practices for many faculty are what they themselves experienced as undergraduates and graduate students years ago; end of discussion.