Universities changed their business model without changing their HR strategies - Leads to fanatical ideologues

An interesting suggestion from How nutty adjuncts are slipping into local colleges by Melissa Klein. It is well established that academia is overwhelmingly left-leaning to the point of extinguishing free speech and normal views.

But the academy has always been left leaning. Why are there actions more extreme today than, say, forty years ago? As with student protests, I think professors are being tarred by a small minority of fanatic extremists. Yes, extreme things are being advocated but my suspicion is that it is a small minority of professors who are driving the perception. I suspect it is as low as 1 or 5% but perhaps it is 10-20%. Either way, a small subset.

The fact that universities can be a safe haven for radicals is, I think, what is new. Professors assaulting students, calling for the extinction of whites, leading physical charges against speakers to whom they object, advocating violence against students and administrators, vocal anti-semitism, and sustained and violent efforts to impose speech controls would, in the past, have led to a quiet separation from the institution. Now-a-days, nothing is done and violence breeds violence, and knowledge is suppressed. This is an administrator's issue as much as it is an issue of the professoriate. As far as I can tell.

Klein adds an additional hypothesis which I had not considered. Universities over the past thirty years have become huge commercial enterprises rather than institutes of knowledge transmission. There are the rain-maker researchers (grant applicants), there are the huge departments focused on driving continuing alumni donations, there is the assiduous effort to manage brand, and of course the whole commercial and lucrative enterprise of collegiate sports.

Klein notes that part of this commercialization of higher education has entailed a change in the business model in terms of the professoriate. In the past, teachers are universities were either full-time professors or lecturers on their way toward becoming tenured professors.

The CUNY system has for years relied on an army of lower-cost adjuncts — currently 12,500 out of an overall teaching staff of about 20,000 — who are paid far less than permanent faculty and don’t have the same benefits. The adjuncts get about $3,500 per four-month course.

Adjunct lecturers need no more than a bachelor’s degree, but anyone with the title of adjunct professor is required to have a Ph.D.

By comparison, a full professor is someone with a permanent, full-time appointment, a Ph.D. and an annual salary up to $129,000. The university system, which enrolls 272,000 students, has just 7,500 full-time faculty members.

This is not unique to CUNY. Universities across the country are increasingly dependent on part-time, non-tenure track, contract lecturers.

According to the Association of Governing Boards, in 1969, 78% of university teaching positions were tenured or tenure track. In 2009, the corresponding figure is 34%. The great majority of professors today, 67% are non-tenure track, part-time professors. This changed business model makes sense from a cost perspective; contract lecturers are factors cheaper than full-time professors.

In terms of workforce management, it is common for HR departments to overwhelmingly focus on full-time employees. That is where you focus on performance management, retention efforts, selection criteria, etc. In a winner-take-all system, it is natural to focus on the winners, the rain-makers, the long-term employees who will be around to build the culture of the organization, etc. Managing contractors is an entirely different process, with much less investment, especially if contractors are only a small portion of the labor force. When you have at-will contracting and can fire anyone under any pretext, you don't invest as much due diligence and don't demand as high standards.

The implication of Klein's observation is that universities have changed their labor force business model from a full-time employee base to one which is dominated by contract laborers but that they haven't changed their labor force management processes accordingly.

When in need of an adjunct to teach a course, “You’ll look in your pile of résumés that you have in your desk or you’ll call some friends,” said a Brooklyn College professor, describing the offhand process.

He added, “I assume that there’s something that happens in HR to make sure that they have to fill out a W2 and they have to probably give a diploma and a résumé.”

A retired John Jay professor said a department head would have the most influence in hiring an ­adjunct like Isaacson.

“If anyone’s to blame for hiring this guy, it’s the chair who really didn’t vet the guy thoroughly enough,” the source said.

[snip]

“CUNY is so underfunded that it uses underpaid, temporary workers to teach more than half of its courses,” said a source. “Almost all of CUNY’s teaching adjuncts are hired anew each semester.

That means that every six months, CUNY is hiring or rehiring [thousands of] instructors with little hiring infrastructure. Department chairs, on whom most of the work falls, receive zero support from the administration for the hiring process.”

A Brooklyn College professor lamented that when it comes to hiring full-time professors, the ability to weed out oddballs has become more difficult with a process that is guided by bureaucrats and ­diversity mandates.

He said all job candidates must be asked the same set of questions and that all reference checks must be done by the Human Resources Department.

“In the past, we were able to make calls to references,” he said. “I used to call and ask, ‘Is the guy normal?’ If they hesitated and said ‘What do you mean by normal?’ I knew the answer.”

All hiring is overseen by a college’s diversity officer, who monitors whether job candidates reflect the enrollment at the campus, the professor added.

“You’re being watched at every step,” he said. “Mostly they’re looking at diversity. That’s what they’re really looking for.”

Of course what is true for CUNY may not be true elsewhere.

What is true is that virtually all universities used to have an employee base that was primarily full-time long-term employees and now virtually all of them are in the business of managing a high-churn temporary, part-time workforce. It would make sense that many universities might be failing to adjust their HR processes accordingly and that therefore, perhaps, most of the 1-5% of fanatical ideologues who tarnish university brands are primarily related to failing to take into account the changes necessary to HR compliance and workforce management strategies attendant to a change in the business model.