Academia: Faculty Development and Curricular Change

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

I had a good and challenging conversation recently with colleagues about ideas for curricular revision. (I may have vowed to stop jumping as a demiurge, but I’m not dead yet.)

The perennial problem of how to reallocate labor to new kinds of courses came up, and equally, of how to compensate faculty for developing courses that require them to study in a new field or acquire new methods or skills. Many faculty like to think that this sort of work is its own reward, and on some level that’s true, but that’s also the kind of professional ethos that some universities and colleges have exploited to fuel the casualization and deprofessionalization of faculty labor—in some cases managers end up dictating the terms of new curricular designs (often curricular cuts) from the heights and then require faculty to inhabit those designs.

That’s not the case here where I work, but if we did create a new structure within the existing curriculum that asked faculty to invest time and effort in making it work, we’d still want to find a way to pay people for that labor. The problem here is that scholarly work produces forms of reputational compensation outside of one’s own institution, generally in conversation with one or more disciplines or fields of specialization, but design work on teaching and curriculum usually doesn’t have a trans-institutional payoff of that kind (except in the rare case where an institution’s administrative leaders choose to underscore and celebrate distinctive faculty leadership in this sort of labor).

I’ve come to the point where I think messing around with more abstract ideas of recognition and reward isn’t helpful in reference to this kind of work. If a faculty help to design a new curricular structure and seek to implement it through genuinely shared governance, then that represents a request from leaders (both administrative and faculty) to their labor force that they undertake a particular form of labor that is likely to require the acquisition of new knowledge or expertise and some intensive focus on designing and maintaining new kinds of pedagogy and course design.

Ask for new work that is also more work? Pay anybody who says “yes” more than anybody who says “not now, thanks”.

My colleagues, like many faculty at similar institutions, have historically been wary of merit pay. I’m with them on that: I think most merit pay structures are corruptible and corrupting, or they produce perverse and inexplicable outcomes depending on the way merit is defined and measured. But I’m ok with more pay for more work—though there’s the danger there too that you can see in something like the way police unions sometimes manipulate or abuse overtime. There’s got to be a cap—a sense that the basic job can’t be done well past a certain point of accumulating overwork.

I also think you have to pay somehow to support the serious undertaking of new skills or knowledge. When the work of faculty development goes beyond the normal professional amount of re-engagement with particular fields of study, it’s something that institutions shouldn’t just support with funds for the retraining (and retrainers) but should compensate. The problem here is that when there is support for more extraordinary or protracted forms of faculty development, the money that is made available is just to off-set the costs of the training or design work, not as additional income designed to reward the undertaking of that labor.

I’ll never be able to shake the sense that I have obligations as an intellectual to keep thinking in new ways about new things, and that this social and cultural role overlaps the job that I do. But I do recognize that at a large structural scale across American higher education, that overlap has created an expectation that faculty will undertake more and more work of more and more kinds for free, as part of the baseline expectation attached to their jobs. And yet consultants issue recommendations for structural change that administrations across the sector then endorse that are taken up tepidly if at all by faculty, and afterwards they sometimes wonder why (and complain) that the recommended changes never really took hold. When we look for people to do more work and unfamiliar work, we should pay them to do it commensurate with the time and difficulty of that labor.

Image credit: Photo by Mirza Babic on Unsplash