A tenured college professor explains why they are quitting.
I’m done. I’m out. I’m giving up my tenure. I earned that tenure through endless nights and weekends in libraries, in front of screens, banging away at deep thoughts on Bakhtin that a few dozen people would read. I earned it grading countless papers and leading countless peer-review workshops. Now, for the first time since my early 20s, there’s no more students to shepherd. No more papers to grade. No more pointless department meetings to sit through. No more conferences or professional development workshops that I’m supposed to get reimbursed for, but never do.
It feels weird.
I’m leaving because my university, like so many others out there, refuses to get with the times. Six months ago, my dean promised to support my bid for a remote teaching position. Nothing would’ve changed. I’ve been teaching online for the last four years. Before asking me to quit, my dean scheduled a special phone call to ask if I was okay teaching a heavier course load for a lower salary, in exchange for this special concession. On top of that, I was already designing a slew of new courses they desperately needed. I planned those courses down to the day, and even wrote a free textbook for it along with videos for other teachers to use. I was also unofficially doing administrative work, and that was going to become an official job duty.
So much of that hits home. Especially that asking “if I was okay teaching a heavier course load for a lower salary.” I’m at a good university that treats the faculty a little better than that, but we do get some bad ideas from the higher ups, like at a recent meeting, an administrator announced that they basically had a predetermined target faculty:student ratio, and because our enrollments were down, they weren’t going to hire any replacement faculty until that ratio was reached. That’s a decision made without regard for the education we have to deliver.
Imagine that you’ve got a budget that can’t cover the cost of four tires on your car, so you decide to maintain three, but the fourth one…well, we’ll just let it wear out, go bald, go flat, maybe shred itself to pieces as you drive down the freeway. The car still runs, it’s maybe just a bit unsafe and kind of inefficient and making horrible noises while you drive. Is that a smart move?
It’s the same with a university. You might think you’re economizing by shutting down foreign language programs or letting the physics department wither away or shaving away at faculty salaries, but it’s going to destroy you in the long run. While deploring the reduction in student enrollment, it doesn’t help to take a knife to the whole reason students come to the university — and it’s not because we have such wonderful administrators. But the university administrators are in charge of the pursestrings, and the purse is filled by politicians and trustees and bureaucrats who wouldn’t be caught dead in a classroom.
The logical conclusion of this trend is summarized by a modest proposal from another college professor.
I will use Pomona College, where I have taught for decades, as a specific example of how easily my proposal might be implemented. In 1990, Pomona had 1,487 students, 180 tenured and tenure-track professors, and 56 administrators — deans, associate deans, assistant deans and the like, not counting clerical staff, cleaners and so on. As of 2022, the most recent year for which I have data, the number of students had increased 17 percent, to 1,740, while the number of professors had fallen to 175. The number of administrators had increased to 310, an average of 7.93 new administrators per year. Even for a college as rich as Pomona, this insatiable demand for administrators will eventually cause a budget squeeze. Happily, there is a simple solution.
Pomona’s professor-administrator ratio has plummeted from 3.21 to 0.56. A linear extrapolation of this trend gives a professor-administrator ratio of zero within this decade. This trend can be accelerated by not replacing retiring or departing professors and by offering generous incentives for voluntary departures. To maintain its current 9.94 student-faculty ratio, the college need only admit fewer students each year as the size of its faculty withers away. A notable side effect would be a boost in Pomona’s U.S. News & World Report rankings as its admissions rate approaches zero.
And just like that, the college would be rid of two nuisances at once. Administrators could do what administrators do — hold meetings, codify rules, debate policy, give and attend workshops, and organize social events — without having to deal with whiny students and grumpy professors.
I think it was supposed to be funny, but I didn’t laugh. It’s far too close to the actual strategy being implemented on college campuses right now.