… I’ve spent the last six years of my life at Florida State University, first pursuing my master’s and now my doctorate in English literature. The English Department enrolls more than 20,000 students each year, teaching every university student — regardless of major — how to write and think critically. We’re the biggest department in the College of Arts & Sciences, with 1,600 majors, so if you want a marker for how healthy FSU is, the English Department is a good place to start.
Over the past three years, the Legislature has slashed some $80 million from Florida State’s budget, cuts that translate to — among other things — one of the worst faculty-to-student ratios in the nation. Only 48 faculty work to support those 1,600 majors, to say nothing of enrollees from other departments. FSU is expected to cut $56 million this year.
… Already, graduate students teach nearly 75 percent of classes at FSU. This previously silent labor force recently unionized in an attempt to protect our rights during these difficult times.
Why? At an average salary of around $11,000 per year (one of the nation’s lowest), without health care, graduate students teach packed classrooms and lecture halls full of undergraduate majors and nonmajors. What would Mom and Dad think if they knew that their son or daughter had never taken a class from an actual faculty member until they were seniors? But that’s the reality…
June 18th, 2009 at 8:18AM
I don’t know why, but this post brought home to me the utter futility of a lot of complaining about higher ed these days. Here’s the thing that our columnist missed: nobody cares, and nobody has any incentive to change things. Administrators? They like the fact that they are getting a lot of classes taught on the cheap, instead of having to commit significant resources to a tenure-line appointment. The faculty? They might "deplore" the situation, but changing it would require that the actually teach more classes, so they won’t be doing anything to alter the status quo. Parents? Don’t really care that much, either; few actually believe in the importance of a degree in English (philosophy, sociology…take your pick); they just want to ensure that the kid gets a college degree, and an inexpensive one at that (thanks, FSU!). Current undergrads? Essentially powerless; most aren’t paying the freight, and those who do sense that they have been deprived of a first-rate education will graduate and leave soon enough. Oh, and our graduate student and his/her peers? Powerless again, and just one more soul who is only now waking up to the harsh realities of graduate education; maybe 20 years ago s/he would have an excuse for ignorance, but who today can go to grad school without having been warned?
Sorry to be such a downer–but nothing in this post is remotely surprising to anyone who has kept an eye on graduate education since the early 1990s, and reading (roughly) the same complaints again and again just drives home to me the fact that nothing is going to change.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:02AM
monboddo: You need to add, in the case of FSU, bread and circuses to keep the fools happy. Sports galore, so people stay drunk and stupid.
OTOH: I disagree that things can’t change. They can. And they do.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:10AM
Every faculty adviser should have a heart-to-heart meeting with undergraduates planning to pursue advanced degrees in the humanities and social sciences with the idea of a university teaching career–preferably one that ends with fear, trembling, tear-stained cheeks, and a wastebasket full of snotty tissues. The first five times that Lucy pulls the football out from Charlie Brown, I blame her. After that, Charlie Brown gets the dope slap. The business plans of the big research universities have been transparent for a long time. Things won’t change until more students say "no."