Do college teachers work hard enough? It’s a question you’re likely to hear asked more and more in the future, as the cost of a college education (already too high, one might argue) continues to grow.
A guy named David Levy recently asked this question in a Washington Post opinion piece (http://goo.gl/2Bw1o) and answered it “no.” In Levy’s opinion (unbiased? We’ll get to that), many college teachers are slackers, and their light workloads and high salaries constitute “an abuse.”
Levy is not talking about research faculty, whose jobs mandate a significant amount of research or creative activity. He’s talking about teaching faculty, especially at community colleges.
As an example, he takes the case of Montgomery College, a 2-year community college in Maryland, where the average full professor’s salary is $88,000 a year. Levy claims that this is a lot of cash for 15 hours of teaching during 30 weeks (two semesters).
That is a pretty good wage, especially for a 30-week year. I would certainly be willing to scrape by on $88,000 a year, at least until I got a better offer, or prices rose dramatically.
But then, I’m not a full professor. Most academics who teach full time are not full professors. Levy’s example is not a representative example — and that’s not the only thing wrong with it.
Levy misrepresents the actual workload in question.
In addition to teaching, prep for teaching, and grading, there is committee work for college governance, curriculum development (someone has to design the courses that get taught; at a good school, that’s in the hands of the people teaching the courses), college service generally, and an increasing amount of administrative work that is being shouldered by faculty as administrators cut the budgets for college office staff. (A brief but decisive debunking of Levy’s erroneous assertions about Montgomery College in particular can be found at the Crooked Timber blog here: http://goo.gl/IsOQq.)
How could someone who claims to be concerned about a topic write an opinion piece on that topic which is so uninformed and misrepresentative of fact?
Well, maybe he had reason to. His bio at the end of the piece says that he is president of something called “the education group at Cambridge Information Group.” That certainly sounds impressive. Very educational, certainly.
But I got to wondering: what’s a “group” in this context? It’s a pretty vague term, which appears twice in his job description, so I did a little Googling.
The Cambridge Information Group is a business that runs a bunch of information related companies, including a number of for-profit schools.
One of the newer projects that Levy is overseeing for CIG is a for-profit music school called “Bach to Rock.”
You know who has music programs, frequently with outreach to the community at large? Community colleges. You know who has a particularly vibrant music program, and a partnership with area public schools? Montgomery College in Maryland. You know who just opened five schools in the Maryland-North Virginia area, is looking to open more and could be seen as a potential rival to Montgomery College? That would be the “Bach to Rock” operation that David Levy is running.
So Levy isn’t a thoughtful academic, sitting in his office and looking with patient but stern scrutiny at his own profession.
He’s a businessman smearing his commercial competition.
His piece is indeed “shoddy and misinformed” (as Henry Farrell writes at Crooked Timber), but the misinformation is unlikely to be accidental. There’s a motive here.
And that’s something worth keeping in mind. When somebody starts talking about college workloads, they may be raising questions worth asking.
In fact, they are raising questions that must be asked and answered here at BGSU, as the faculty union and the administration negotiate their first contract.
But check their facts. And check their motives.
And definitely check how deep their hand is in your pocket.
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