Comments on: Trends in Faculty and Administration

By: Floccina

Floccina — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 20:29:50 +0000

To me it seems that state subsidized schools should not market and yet they do. Also I do not think that it serves the taxpayers when state subsidized schools try to raise their status by limiting entry in order to become a top tier state school. I think that tax payer would be better served if students entry criteria were more equal across the system.

By: Michael P

Michael P — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 16:27:39 +0000

I would classify tenure-track faculty as people who build organizational capital — in the form of research expertise, labs (both the equipment and the people), and relationships with grant-issuing organizations — rather than front-line production workers. I think shifting them from teaching to research is a recognition of opportunity costs and a desire to improve economies of scale, even with a probable loss of marginal quality. (That is, most students will probably learn as much from a good adjunct as from a good tenure-track professor, but the best students will probably learn a little less.)

I agree that proficient use of IT in education is trailing other sectors, but there is reason to hope that better IT adoption will *increase* the ratio of research-focused/tenure-track faculty to others, relative to today’s ratios: As the lessons from MOOCs and other innovations percolate through, I expect that courses will be created and managed by teams consisting of one subject-matter specialist (a tenure-track researcher) and one, or at most a few, IT/teaching specialist(s) who help organize the subject matter and teaching materials in a way that works for the class structure. For small class sizes, this presumably means that more core material will be reused over time, but that it will also grow into something like the “adaptive textbook” you mention in your column for The American.

By: R Richard Schweitzer

R Richard Schweitzer — Sun, 09 Feb 2014 15:56:37 +0000

That is what is known as “institutionalization” as inferred by Mancur Olson and further delineated in its maturation by Gordon Tullock.

It is the “story” of the “evolution” of the community schoolhouse, created, maintained and guarded by the community members into the “Educational System” shaped and directed by Guildmasters of the institution to match their determinations.