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A two-tiered faculty system – are you kidding?
I expect by now, just about everyone in academe has heard about the recent think tank report addressing the “perfect storm” threatening quality and access to universities.
According to the report, it is quite possible that we may never again see funding to universities at levels we saw in the past. The report describes a series of unnerving scenarios that we may be facing in a “Peak Post-Secondary Era,” referencing the phenomena the oil industry is facing of declining oil reserves once the maximum levels of extraction have been reached.
One of the scenarios suggests a permanent two-tiered faculty system:
“This will see some faculty paid to concentrate more on research and teaching graduate students, while others will be paid primarily to teach – and in some cases teach an increasingly standardized curriculum.” (On the Brink, pg. 29)
Is it just me, or is this report essentially saying, that in the future, we will have a system where undergraduate faculty will not be doing their own research in their fields, or even developing their own courses? I find that alarming, to say the least.
While there are certainly PhDs I know who would applaud this possibility, how well will it support students wanting to continue on to graduate school? If our brightest students never engage with active scholars, or develop relationships with prospective supervisors, how many of them will be realistically prepared for graduate level studies? Does this really mean that the only way undergraduate faculty could engage in research is on their own time, and only if it doesn’t interfere with their teaching duties? Rather than a PhD, maybe these faculty really just need a BEd?
“Traditional undergraduate education was indeed a more elitist, hands‐on and intimate form of education. This type of educational experience will continue to exist in the future – at the graduate level, where students will be taught by a different type of faculty who are paid to both teach and perform research. The undergraduate experience, precisely because it has been democratized and made available to almost anyone, will look increasingly like secondary school. Many professors, when speaking honestly and off the record, will tell you that it already is. We just haven’t started paying for it that way yet.” (On the Brink, pg. 30)
This acknowledges the detrimental effects funding cutbacks have had on the quality of education, in spite of governments assuring the public this wouldn’t happen. It has – most of you can attest to that. But rather than making an argument for restoring the intellectual integrity of our universities, this report essentially throws in the towel. The BA will be like the old grade 13, an MA will function like a BA used to.
Where does that leave PhD education: deep, analytical research? Where will this “elite” faculty come from? You’ll be able to scratch the surface of the disciplinary research in an MA, but where will PhD-level training actually happen? According to this report, that will be the ultimate sacrifice of the “Peak Post-Secondary Era.” The report implies this is a level of education we simply can no longer afford – except for our elite research scholars. I wonder, can our society really afford that loss?
I’ve got a question for you. If the two–tiered system was implemented as described in this report – would you continue to pursue and academic career? Leave a comment in the forum below.
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2 Responses to “A two-tiered faculty system – are you kidding?”
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In Quebec, we already have an institution–the cegep–that works like a second tier system in a way. This is where I teach, after having “suspended” work on my PhD dissertation forever.
Of course funding cutbacks worry me, and so does quality of education, and that may be why some elements in the idea of a two-tiered system in university actually sound somewhat sensible to me.
I’d like to answer every single question you ask in this post, but to be succinct I will only address that one:
“I wonder, can our society really afford that loss?”
Yes, I really think so. the PhD is a “level of education” that was meant for “elite research scholars” in the first place. My experience as a PhD candidate in the humanities is that many (I’m tempted to say most) of my fellow scholars weren’t doing very ground-breaking, original, or even relevant research. In other words: they shouldn’t have made the cut.
Call me cynical, but most of the work I produced during those years wasn’t all that valuable, and I was a fully funded “elite” PhD student. Completing a PhD should require more than perseverance, dedication, and a high tolerance to impoverishment.
I know I seem to be exploiting some easy stereotypes we associate with grad school, but my career as a grad student proved none of them wrong.
This by itself is not such a bad idea. To some extent, it has already happened and will become more common in the coming years. Today, on one hand we have primarily (if not exclusively) undergraduate universities such as Wilfrid Laurier, U of Winnipeg and Mount Allison as well as primarily research universities such as UBC and U of T (which have a large undergrad population, no doubt). Institutions such as York U and Carleton U fall somewhere in between and might have to choose one or the other other model. Nor surprisingly the much-maligned Macleans survey highly rates the primarily undergraduate universities for a better undergrad experience, which might be telling something!