Flexibility in an Age of Zero Growth: A New Type of Faculty Appointment

Abstract

Transition from rapid growth to the stationary state in universities and colleges is fraught with dangers. The one most often discussed is tenuring in, whereby one department after another quickly becomes frozen in with its present faculty. The perils are particularly grave for those institutions born in the sixties, which recruited a young faculty from the pool of fresh Ph.D.'s simultaneously produced in our graduate schools. But the problem of institutional ossification is compounded by an additional response to slow growth or retrenchment. The stagnation of enrollments in an institution usually signifies retrenchment for some departments, and continued expansion for others. Institutions then face the dismal situation of internecine struggles over faculty-line reallocations, a problem which further aggravates and compounds the dilemma posed by tenuring in. Everyone keeps a close watch over the barometer of the student-to-faculty ratio, and professors have to increase their offerings of large courses while temporarily abandoning their more specialized or innovative ones, or dropping them altogether. In a recent issue of this Bulletin, John B. Haney, under the guise of a piece of dark humor, has opened up a vista on what professors can expect to happen to them in the future when their universities are completely tenured in.1 What is offered here is a suggestion which could make virtue out of necessity by favoring institutional and departmental flexibility and rehabilitating interdisciplinary studies and curricular experiments in an environment that is inimical to them. In almost every area of scholarship, the great achievement of American universities in the 1960's was the development of interdisciplinary studies. This was the area of the frontiers of research, where revolutionary ideas have been germinated by cross-fertilization, where Nobel prizes were won, and where American university research took the lead over the much more compartmentalized research work carried on in older European universities. In many cases the teaching of interdisciplinary subjects has been made possible by tenuous interdepartmental agreements. These agreements over the sharing of professors, students, and courses in interdepartmental and cross-disciplinary ventures are now being jeopardized, in a period of retrenchment, by the normal practice of departmental accounting of student-to-faculty ratios. When departments' overall enrollments do not look good, they begin to reconsider such pre-existing arrangements, and they become resistant to the development of new ones, because the student-to-faculty ratio becomes the only ar-