Declining and shifting enrollment trends raise critical questions for trustees, particularly at tuition-dependent colleges. How will faculty resources be successfully reallocated to new programs with revenue potential, and can tenure commitments continue in programs attracting fewer students than in the past?
The year 2018 was a tough one for small, tuition-dependent colleges. In New England alone half a dozen four-year nonprofit institutions closed their doors and several more merged in the face of financial pressures. The forecast for 2019 is not good, either. It is anticipated that even more schools will shut down entirely or cease to admit new students.
Such closures and mergers are hardly peculiar to the Northeast. At least a dozen colleges were shuttered nationwide in 2018. The rating agency Moody’s has observed that the growing gap between revenue and expenses is worrisome and that about one in five small tuition-dependent colleges across the nation are struggling to cover their costs with revenue. The demise of these financially pressed colleges is very likely to pick up pace, particularly as the pool of college-ready high school students with the capacity to pay declines with each passing year.
Some colleges will seek to avoid closure by investing in new pro-grams with curricula that attract students and their tuition-paying parents. Search online for “hot” or “new” undergraduate majors and you will get dozens of hits with lists that include behavioral analysis, biometrics, computer game design, construction management, cybersecurity, digital media, forensic science, informatics, robotics, pop culture studies, and sustainability. But with new programs and majors comes the need for qualified faculty who can teach to the degree requirements.
Some schools can and will deploy faculty already within their ranks to teach new courses in new programs; but many colleges may not have that talent in place. These schools will need to recruit faculty who can attract and retain students while building an institutional reputation in these areas of study, sometimes from the ground up.
Other institutions will take a different approach in search of fiscal health. Rather than focusing on adding new programs, they will take steps to eliminate older ones—minors, majors, and programs for which demand has fallen steadily over the course of many years. These schools will need to engage in painful discussions about future commitments to divisions and departments where there is decreasing demand and declining numbers of graduates.
Ignoring either problem—insufficient faculty to teach in popular degree programs or too many tenure-stream faculty in concentrations that are dwindling—is not an option, particularly for four-year tuition-dependent institutions.
Trustees can and should play an important role in navigating the complex intersection of faculty staffing and institutional need. As stewards, it is entirely appropriate for trustees to seek information from presidents, provosts, or deans on the institution’s plans to address faculty needs and faculty deployment as student enrollments shift.
Concerned trustees, particularly those who serve on academic affairs committees, should be asking senior administrators questions along these lines:
- What expertise is in our institution’s tenure pipeline for emerging programs?
- Is it possible to redeploy current tenured faculty from a stagnant program to one that is growing?
- Can the board responsibly continue to grant lifetime employment in the form of tenure to candidates without regard to these institutional needs?
Each of these questions could consume an entire agenda of an academic affairs committee meeting, but each question is worthy of trustees’ time and attention, particularly when your institution faces financial challenges.
The first question is relatively easy for provosts and deans to answer. Whenever a new program or degree is developed, trustees should be apprised of the academic program’s course sequence design and the plan for recruiting faculty to teach the requisite courses. It is incumbent upon trustees to do more than scratch the surface when inquiring about faculty staffing plans for new academic initiatives.
Trustees should expect more than a simple assurance that the needed faculty will be sourced and hired. Trustees should ask follow-up questions about the faculty who will be responsible for producing the new revenue stream(s). A substantive conversation with senior leadership about the budget that has been developed for faculty resources for emerging programs is a good first step. A budget for a new academic enterprise can reveal much about the numbers and preferred credentials of the faculty that the provost or dean deem necessary to launch or expand a new degree successfully.
Smaller colleges often depend on a squadron of adjunct faculty to teach in young programs. While adjuncts bring technical expertise and relevant professional experience to new academic ventures, these programs need tenure-stream faculty if they are to thrive. Available accreditation should be sought for new programs, and in the process accreditors will examine the professional ranks of the faculty who teach in the program. A dependency on adjuncts may boost early returns on investment, but it may also put accreditation beyond a new program’s reach. When that happens the new degree will become less attractive to students and their parents, thereby imperiling the new revenue stream in the longer term.
New programs, like traditional ones, need faculty who excel in the classroom, who are scholars in these emerging areas, and who will advise and mentor undergraduates for employment and graduate school. Such scholarship and service are often beyond the core duties of an adjunct faculty member who is hired primarily to teach and evaluate undergraduates. When schools pin future revenues on programs delivered mostly by adjunct faculty, they may be risking long-term financial success, reputational damage, and student retention.
Much attention is being paid these days to understanding why undergraduates persist in their studies, transfer elsewhere, or abandon their pursuit of a degree. There is no simple answer, but we know that students who are healthy and have means to continue their studies remain at their institutions if they believe that faculty and administrators care about them and are invested in their long-term success. That kind of focused attention and dedication to student outcomes is often beyond the reasonable expectations of an adjunct faculty member who may also be teaching elsewhere but is still earning far less than a full-time instructor or professor and is often without access to benefits.
For all of these reasons, trustees should monitor the balance between adjunct and tenure-stream faculty in any new program and insist that the balance reflect a reasoned strategy for long-term sustainability.
The second question about redeploying tenured faculty typically doesn’t receive much attention. Faculty members are granted tenure within a “locus.” That locus may be a department, a division, a school, a college within a university, or in the college or university at large. Asking where the locus of your faculty members’ tenure lies is an “inside baseball” question typically left to members of the academy. But trustees of small colleges facing financial challenges may want to raise this question and explore the answer’s potential implications.
When the locus of tenure is in the university or college as a whole, the promise of lifetime employment can be fulfilled by deploying the faculty member wherever his or her talents are most needed over time. When tenure is granted in a specific department, school, or college within a university there is more potential for recalcitrance—and sometimes even objections—by tenured faculty to move to where enrollments are growing. Some schools have prepared for this circumstance by adding language to their faculty handbook policies to ensure the rights of academic leadership to move tenured faculty to where they are needed with or without their consent. For example: At the discretion of the vice president of academic affairs, in consultation with the appropriate dean, department chair, and faculty member, the locus of a faculty member’s tenure appointment may be changed to meet the curricular needs of the institution.
There is no correct or incorrect locus for faculty tenure. But where a faculty member’s tenure lies can limit the discretion of provosts and deans to reallocate faculty resources. Experienced trustees will want to know what their faculty handbooks say about the locus of tenure and the right to relocate it to meet shifting enrollments.
The third question is the most difficult to ask and answer: What is your institution’s plan for tenure-track faculty who are serving in academic areas where student enrollment is not growing?
If trustees want more attention paid to need in tenure decisions, and there are legitimate educational and financial reasons to do so, that topic must emerge from the shadows and onto board agendas. Too often, institutional need is treated as a footnote in tenure evaluation. Much attention is paid to a candidate’s teaching, scholarship, and service, leaving long-term institutional need in the candidate’s area of expertise as an afterthought.
When student enrollments in particular programs are declining, what should be the reasonable expectations of tenure-track faculty in those programs? At many schools, faculty and deans recoil at the suggestion that the criterion of need may be invoked after a faculty member has toiled six years on the tenure clock. A better approach for all concerned is to frame the question as: When and how should schools consider institutional need so that tenure candidates and the school’s long-term interests are both treated fairly?
One approach is to require provosts and deans to track and share data about institutional need—with candidates, with tenure and promotion committees, and with trustees—both earlier
and more regularly than is now common. Posing the question of institutional need in the last year of a probationary appointment may be unacceptably harsh, but the way to mitigate its harmful effects is to pose it sooner, not to ignore it entirely.
Deans can use the annual appointment letter process to remind tenure-track faculty that institutional need will be considered in their tenure bid alongside their personal success in teaching, scholarship, and service. These annual letters can also share such critical data as:
- Where are teaching needs growing and where are they not?
- What combination of full-time faculty (with and without tenure) is needed to deliver the academic offerings effectively?
- What are the graduation trends since the time of the initial appointment?
- How many tenured faculty members are working past traditional retirement age thereby impacting the need for more tenured faculty generally and for the present candidate, specifically
- Does the institution expect to need more tenured faculty who are willing and equipped to teach nontraditional students in online and other nontraditional classroom formats?
Trustees should also ask whether their schools’ tenure policies include a statement about need and whether the statement is sufficient in these turbulent times. A statement about need that was enacted in the 1970s may not serve the institution well today.
At my institution the requirement to demonstrate need in a tenure application is expressed this way in our faculty policy manual: “Those making tenure recommendations shall consider the needs of and constraints affecting the university, the applicable college, school, division, and department and/or programs.” The manual goes on to direct faculty committees to assess need within the college and for the board, president, provost, and dean to focus primarily on the needs and constraints of the university as a whole. (For examples of “need” language in faculty handbooks at other institutions, see the box on page 32.)
Transparency early on can also inoculate a college against a lawsuit from a candidate denied tenure on the basis of institutional need. There are only a handful of reported cases, but courts that have grappled with the issue have ruled that it is permissible for a college to base tenure decisions on factors beyond, or in addition to, the traditional core criteria of teaching, scholarship, and service.
Courts will, however, examine whether the importance of institutional need was messaged clearly and delivered throughout the course of the faculty member’s probationary period, and whether data regarding institutional need supports the university’s case for denial. As long as the institutional need criterion is properly documented, and the tenure candidate was sufficiently notified of its potential significance, courts will respect a college’s use of the need criterion.
Tenure has been a hallmark of American higher education since the start of the 20th century. It has not lost its purpose or usefulness, although the voices of those urging its abolition grow stronger with each passing year. As with so many things, however, the wiser course may lie somewhere between the total abandonment of the tenure system and the stance that the system is inalterable. When trustees consider long-term institutional need when awarding tenure, they pay respect to both viewpoints while effectively exercising their stewardship duties.
Shifting student enrollments call for heightened scrutiny by trustees. How precious faculty resources will be successfully reallocated to new programs with revenue potential, and whether investments and tenure commitments can continue indefinitely in programs that no longer attract students, are appropriate stewardship questions, particularly for those overseeing tuition-dependent colleges seeing steady declines in their enrollments.
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