Faculty Problems in the Liberal Arts College

Abstract

IN one sense the assignment to discuss the faculty problems in a first-class liberal arts college is a difficult one. Faculty problems at liberal arts colleges are not very different from those at many other places. Nonetheless, there are a few important differences which might be worth mentioning. Before going into those, however, I would like to comment briefly on some aspects of Professor Harris' position which I feel are relevant. First, I do not yield to him in my enthusiasm for raising faculty salaries; I think that he has done Trojan work for that cause and I would back him in it. There is, however, one feature of the problem which I feel he has neglected. The general rise in wages which he talks about is a function of productivity. This is unarguable from the economic point of view, whether we are talking about farmers or about automobile mechanics. As I understand Professor Harris' position, he feels that professors have not participated in this rise in productivity. He has pointed out that when productivity is rising in some parts of the economy faster than others, and wage rises reflect these differences, people will shift from the positions of low to those of high productivity. He has argued that neither the college professors nor the colleges themselves are highly efficient or highly productive, and that as long as this continues to be so professional people will be inclined to go into more productive lines. If doctors get very high pay and college professors do not, then fewer capable people tend to enter college teaching. But this is rather unfair to college teachers. Although it is difficult to do, I think that the case can be made that the productivity of professors has been rising. Of course, the productivity of the physician has increased greatly in the last few years, too, in terms of the number of people he cares for and in the quality of medical treatment. The case of college professors is less obvious, but I think one can demonstrate an increase in their productivity in a rather roundabout way. The products that they are producing, the trained people of the country, are the ones producing the general rise in productivity. Their training presumably has a good deal to do with their ability to enhance productivity, and the training is received to a large extent in the colleges and universities. Hence, in an indirect way, much of the general rise in productivity can be attributed to the college professors. This is a case which Professor Harris fails to make. I also think that his comparison with other professions is perhaps misleading in that the real wages of all white-collar professions, even in the case of the doctors, have declined relative to those of the mechanical and industrial workers. There has been a relative rise in the remuneration for labor of a skilled and semiskilled sort. We as teachers are merely sharing in this general situation. There is another factor, emotional and historical, that we cannot ignore: namely, that teaching has long been thought of as one of the service professions -like the civil service, like the ministry, like medicine. It does have attributes like tenure, which we could argue about indefinitely. But there is in teaching a sense of service to the community which is real and important, and I think we ought not to lose sight of it. It is a feature we do not want to lose. The doctors have been in a wonderful situation. They have both had their cake and eaten it. They have exploited the shortage of doctors, which they created by limiting the output of the medical schools. On the other hand, they have kept their status as a service profession in two ways. First, through the remarkable progress of medicine, for which they are partly responsible, they do cure many more people much faster than they used to, and the public is aware of this fact. Second, even the highest-paid doctors quite openly and with considerable publicity give a great deal of free service in clinics and elsewhere. Since this is well known, it keeps people thinking of doctors as a service profession when they are really exploiting the public more successfully than any other profession. Professors cannot do so well, because they cannot both