The chancellor of higher ed was on camera for his Big Exaggeration interview a few days ago, which means it’s budget time again. The script reads this way: If the university system doesn’t get more money, the quality of higher education in the state will decline, all the good professors will take jobs elsewhere, and the student-teacher ratio will become intolerable.

And each year the media run the story without the instant analysis you find with other news. Not one investigative piece in print or electronic media to determine if the chancellor is anywhere close to the truth or not. So we’re helping out here by telling the passive hacks that reasons one and two are standard bull stuff used by the chancellor each year. Nobody knows what “quality” means because the word is meaningless, especially in a state system where the teachers colleges decided to call themselves universities. The quality argument is bureauspeak for “We want a raise,” the “we” being tenured faculty in pursuit of that ever receding horizon of getting paid as much as the big girls and boys in private research universities.

Besides, pay has nothing to do with tenured faculty retention, which means reason two is nonsense also. In the humanities, given the PhD glut, tenured people are happy to have a full time job. Those with big reps as scholars (not teachers) usually get bigger paychecks (bonuses and “performance” increases) to keep them happy, or a job for the spouse to add another 50-80% to the paycheck, and a reduced teaching load. In the sciences, the money is in federal or private grants in any case, so a science prof can take his or her lab and move elsewhere no matter what state funding amounts to. And that power game is played only by a very few inflated and flatulent egos.

The biggest joke, though, is the student-teacher ratio argument. We’re not surprised the chancellor was grimacing when he used an argument that might be taken seriously in local school system politics, but has nothing whatsoever to do with university teaching. Most freshpeople and sophomores at tax-funded research universities are taught by grad students or temp teachers paid minimum wage, and the administration doesn’t give a rat’s rear about the class size in those intro courses. They’ll be filled next year in any case–retention is a concern only when tuition income drops sufficiently to threaten the pay of tenured faculty. And tenured faculty, when they do teach, do little more than lounge in a small grad seminar or lecture to a mass audience of 200-400 students (with a grad student or a machine doing the grading).

A few years back, we wrote a profile of a professor who reminisced during the interview about the good old days back in the ’60s student revolt, the cause of which, other than that war in Vietnam, was giant, impersonal lecture sections. Later in the interview, when he was complaining about students in the large history lectures he taught treating him like a television set (they’d wander out of the lecture hall and return with a Coke or Pepsi to scribble a few more notes), we said things hadn’t changed much since he was rebelling against large, impersonal lecture sections.

Well, his head just about snapped off when the recognition hit him for the first time–he had become the enemy. This professor with his Ivy League credential never made the connection until that moment, and then all he could do was sputter apologetic nonsense about discussion groups led by graduate students. These “groups,” he revealed after I asked another question or two, were actually classes of 30 students. These “discussions” were good practice for the grad student learning to teach on the job (college professors don’t have to endure rigorous classroom training as do licensed public school teachers)

So we guess the chancellor meant that not giving the university system more money would lead to lecture sections ballooning from 400 to maybe 410 or 420 students per tenured faculty member.

–the editors