By Frederick M. Hess
Thursday, March 27, 2025
After decades of campus decay propelled by
politicization, bureaucratization, and bloat, there’s finally cause for
cautious optimism. Legislators are dismantling DEI (that infamous trio of
diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs. Governors are appointing tough-minded
trustees. The Trump administration has hit the ground running on antisemitism
probes and free inquiry. Institutes of civic thought have been launched at
major universities. And practical strategies suddenly abound for busting the
accreditation cartel and overhauling federal student lending.
Together, these developments promise a restoration in
higher education. But there’s a fundamental challenge they don’t address:
America’s colleges and universities have lost interest in the work of teaching
and learning. This departure from their mission has led to distracted campus
cultures, where costs rise as expectations decline.
This problem isn’t new. I still recall walking across
campus during the summer as a doctoral student at Harvard three decades ago. I
was making small talk with a senior professor when he looked around the
sparsely populated grounds and said, “This place is wonderful, especially when
the students are gone.”
What’s changed isn’t this attitude but the way in which
incentives and institutions have exacerbated it. Even savvy trustees and public
officials don’t always realize just how peripheral teaching and learning have
become to the life of the university. Today, even at lower-tier colleges,
faculty have learned to regard teaching as a burden. They look with admiration
(or envy) upon those “successful” scholars whose grants or titles reduce their
teaching loads.
The consequences are visible in the daily life of
four-year colleges across the land.
Today’s students work a lot less than they used to.
Economists Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks have reported that, in the 1960s, the
average full-time student at a four-year college studied 24 hours a week. In
2010, the figure was roughly half that. By 2022, 70 percent of four-year
students said they were devoting fewer than ten hours a week to studying for
class. Full-time students are also much less likely to work for pay than were
their peers in the 1990s.
If students aren’t studying or working, what are they
doing? They’re spending more time on their devices: Researchers Abigail Bradley
and Andrea Howard estimated in 2023 that college students on average spend
close to seven hours per day on their smartphones and pick them up 113 times in
a day. Students are spending less time socializing than they once did, but
extracurricular commitments, too, often eclipse academic work.
Students are thrown by once-unremarkable academic
expectations. Last year, The Atlantic reported that students who
aren’t used to reading books “struggle to attend to small details while keeping
track of the overall plot” and tell professors that “the reading load feels
impossible.” Adam Kotsko, a professor at North Central College in Naperville,
Ill., took to Slate to share his frustrations. “For most of my career,”
lamented Kotsko, “I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a
baseline expectation. . . . Now students are intimidated by anything over 10
pages.” In 2023, more than 70 percent of freshman students reported that they’d
been asked to write nothing longer than ten pages. More than a third said they
had written nothing longer than five pages in their freshman year.
Some faculty members have leaned into student lassitude.
A professor of women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin explained in Business
Insider that she retained her “no questions asked” assignment-extension
policy after the pandemic because her students were “fatigued over the state of
the world.” A San Diego State University professor bragged to Inside Higher
Ed about incorporating three “mental health days” into the course syllabus
so that students could “focus on their health and well-being.”
If you tell professionals that taking it easy is a matter
of professional responsibility, they’re prone to take it easy. That’s one
reason why faculty report assigning less reading and doing less grading than
they once did. Meanwhile, I’m always surprised at how little insight even
reform-minded trustees have into faculty work. I recently spoke to a member of
a state board of higher education who was surprised to hear that each of his
campuses had data on faculty teaching loads and publication. “The staff told me
they don’t have that,” he said. I told him the staff was, well, lying — that
every department collects that data annually for tenure, promotion, and
compensation. This was news to him.
Tenure-track faculty devote roughly a third of their time
to teaching-related activity. In 2021, two assistant professors in the
humanities detailed their work routine, reporting that they spent a bit less
than 16 hours a week teaching (and completing tasks related to teaching, such
as preparation and grading) when school was in session. What takes up the rest
of their time? Committees, conferences, busywork, and the great publication
chase.
Over the past four or five decades, typical full-time
faculty teaching loads at elite four-year colleges have gone from roughly three
courses in the fall and three in the spring to one course in the fall and two
in the spring. In an admirable burst of candor, Notre Dame Provost John
McGreevy pointed out that colleges compete for faculty by promising candidates
that they’ll teach less than at other institutions.
When faculty members teach less, more faculty are
required. This is why colleges added faculty at twice the rate they added
students between 1999 and 2022. Adding full-time faculty, with full benefits,
gets expensive quickly, though. Colleges have thus pawned off more and more
teaching on growing ranks of adjunct faculty and teaching assistants. These
harried part-timers, regarded as dispensable fill-ins by the full-time staff,
have limited incentive (or opportunity) to mentor their charges or invest themselves
in students’ academic lives. Meanwhile, seeking to squeeze more “value” out of
the tenure-track faculty, college officials load faculty up with committee
assignments. And their professional profile depends on publishing papers and
chasing grants, which is why professors who teach one class per week can still
so convincingly insist that they feel overtaxed.
While some scholarly research obviously holds real value,
there’s reason to doubt that we need truckloads of mediocre case studies and
third-rate conference papers. Much of what’s published in academe today is
produced for transactional purposes, more about careerist routine than
contributing meaningful knowledge. Indeed, Measuring Research, a 2018
volume by Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Larivière, noted that 70 percent of
articles published in arts and humanities journals have never once been cited —
meaning that the article has never once been referenced by a single researcher.
The truth? More than a few of these articles have never been read by a solitary
soul. It’s hard to believe that the thousands of journal pages crammed with
jargon, banalities, and dubious screeds advance knowledge or contribute to a
scholar’s competence as a teacher.
What to do?
The answer isn’t to pick on faculty or gripe about
students. It’s to recognize that incentives, expectations, and institutional
norms have gone off the rails. Whether or not faculty are passionate about
teaching, it’s just not a big piece of how they get hired, promoted, and
recognized. So professors who take their teaching seriously wind up paying a
price — taking on additional work that is of little (or no) professional
benefit. This has been bad for students, faculty, and higher education.
It’s time to reboot the campus culture of teaching and
learning and raise expectations for student work. In accord with the Higher
Education Act, institutions that accept federal grants or aid already pledge
that each credit-hour of learning approximates “not less than one hour of
classroom or direct faculty instruction” as well as “a minimum of two hours of
out-of-class student work” each week. This means that a typical three-credit
course should entail a minimum of nine hours of student work each week.
So, students with a standard twelve-credit load should devote 36 hours per week
to school work. Leaders at colleges that collect federal grants or aid (which
is just about all of them) should revisit their faculty guidelines and internal
reports accordingly. Meanwhile, federal officials should monitor institutions
to ensure that taxpayers are getting their money’s worth. If they’re not, those
institutions should lose access to federal funds.
College leaders need to convince faculty to raise the bar
when it comes to assignments, mentoring, and grading. That includes supporting
faculty who step up and demanding accountability for faculty who don’t.
Professors have largely thrown in the towel, mostly because trying to hold the
line in isolation feels like a sucker’s bet. (More than two decades ago,
Harvard University’s legendary Harvey Mansfield, tired of trying to be the last
redoubt of rigor, announced that he would henceforth give students two grades:
a private grade reflecting the score they deserved and an official grade “based
on Harvard’s system of inflated grades.”) When individual faculty try to hold
the line, they invite student complaints, empty lecture halls, and the
intervention of split-the-difference administrators. That’s why there’s a need
for clear, uniform expectations set and overseen by those at some remove from
classroom pressures.
Campus leaders need to strike a new bargain with faculty:
Professors will be expected to devote far more energy to teaching and far less
to bureaucratic duties and publication. Four-year college faculty are generally
tasked with teaching 13 weeks in the fall and 13 in the spring. During those
terms, colleges should expect faculty to devote 30–32 hours a week to
teaching-related activity. Since a typical course requires perhaps seven hours
a week, this would permit the typical faculty member to teach four or five
classes a semester. (This could include multiple meeting times of the same
course, allowing for smaller classes and more options for student schedules.)
Faculty would still have substantial time for reading and
research. Faculty members are typically employed on a nine-month contract, or
close to 1,600 hours a year. Teaching 30 to 32 hours a week in the fall and
spring would total about half that. This means that tenure-track faculty would
still have much salaried time for reading, research, grant-chasing, writing,
and institutional work. And that’s setting aside the summer months.
The more that faculty teach, the greater their engagement
with students. Increased teaching loads would reduce bottlenecks that keep
students from graduating on time and would lower costs by shrinking the ranks
of adjuncts and teaching assistants. The average associate professor (on a
nine-month contract) earns $95,000. If that professor teaches five courses a
year, the cost per course (before benefits) is $19,000. At eight or nine
courses a year, it’s more like $11,000. The potential savings are enormous.
But back to that bargain colleges need to strike. The
institutional pressures on faculty are a serious matter, deserving of more than
snarky dismissiveness or vague invocations of the importance of teaching.
Colleges should recalibrate what they expect from faculty in terms of
publication and radically reduce the amount of time they expect faculty to
devote to administrative duties. This would require revamping hiring, tenure,
and promotion decisions so that they put more emphasis on teaching and mentoring
and less on a scholar’s curriculum vitae.
Might some faculty resist these new expectations? Sure.
In the lexicon of Silicon Valley, this would be a feature, not a bug. Outside
of the several dozen universities that primarily serve as research enterprises,
institutions of higher education should seek faculty who want to teach.
After all, there is no shortage of potential academics. There were 58,000
doctorates awarded in the United States in 2022; barely a third of those who
hold them work in academe today.
The critique here is directed not at individual students
or faculty but at campus culture, with its distorted institutional priorities
and lowered expectations. Raising the bar for students, with a supportive
faculty, can and will help them do better. Plenty of faculty would welcome the
chance to devote more time to teaching if they were confident that it would be
valued and that there’d be real reductions in the burdens of busywork and
nonstop publication.
College leaders routinely proclaim their commitment to
teaching and learning. It’s time for them to show that they mean it.
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