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“Robert Van Order, the chair of the school’s finance department, said because courses for the [masters in finance] degree are taught exclusively on Fridays and Saturdays and are ‘more technical and time-consuming’ for faculty than teaching other courses, the elevated pay is a reasonable incentive to teach the courses.”

Tenured American university professors have a kind of built-in public relations problem. Many people view them as rather unpleasant entitled sorts — they’ve got permanent jobs with enviable conditions, they’ve got a remarkable amount of time to themselves (including paid sabbaticals), they are highly respected and pretty well-compensated, and they don’t seem to have bosses or supervision of any kind, etc., etc.

We can quibble about how accurate this description is, but there’s no denying that a lot of people think it’s accurate. And there’s some truth in it.

Given this problem, it seems to ol’ UD that tenured professors should make at least teensy efforts not to play right into the stereotype.

Among the academic units at her own George Washington University, there’s one that seems to your blogger to engage in this play — and with reckless abandon.

The business school.

There’s the reckless abandon of its last dean having overspent his budget. By thirteen million dollars.

How shall it be repaid?

Robert Van Order, the chair of the school’s finance department, said the about 60 faculty members at the meeting discussed where the burden should fall. Some faculty thought the University should forgive the $13 million budget deficit altogether because it was incurred two years ago.

UD understands that this was some faculty. She’s just saying that it’s real unfortunate any faculty at all said Hey ancient history fuck it. Make someone else pay.

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You’ve got a dean who just spent the school into the ground. You’ve got some faculty there who think the school shouldn’t have to pay anything back. So far, so bad.

It gets worse. Tenured professors who teach in the business school’s masters in finance program have now refused to teach in it (it’s not clear whether all, or many, have refused) because, as part of paying back the money the last dean overspent, they’re taking a pay cut. Here’s how it works, as the new b-school dean explains.

[The full time] professors who teach [masters in finance] courses were paid “a rate substantially higher than their counterparts” in other masters programs. She said faculty, who were teaching two-credit courses for the program, were compensated the same amount as faculty who are paid for three-credit courses.

Okay, so that’s already pretty amazing. Three-credit compensation for two-credit courses. That’s a lot more money.

But look again at my headline. The chair of finance explains that, first of all, faculty have to teach on Fridays. And Saturdays! No self-respecting professor will teach on those days without extreme compensation…

But wait. Let’s look at the program’s website.

In the first year, classes are held all day on Saturday; and in the second year, classes are held on Thursday and Friday from 6 to 10 p.m.

Okay, so the chair of finance forgot about the Thursday classes. And in the second year there’s no Saturday teaching at all.

Does this seem to you hardship duty? I mean, virtually all Americans work a full week, including Fridays. Millions and millions of Americans work on Saturdays.

And then there’s the chair’s “more technical and time-consuming” argument. What does this mean? Are some of these on-line courses (more technical)?

UD has trouble following the chair’s reasoning about these courses, as reported. (It’s possible that the journalist got some of this wrong.)

“From the standpoint of just thinking about the market, from the standpoint of faculty, for the same credits and the same credit hours, it’s easier to teach a core course than to teach an MSF course,” he said. “And so a lot of what’s been the debate over the past few years is how much extra should people get for teaching it.”

He added that the program was originally created to give faculty in the finance department more time and pay to do research – which officials have historically said is key to boost the school’s reputation. But without the original benefits from the program, there’s no motivator for those faculty to participate.

So these courses are harder to teach than core courses – though the chair doesn’t really say why this would be true… But okay. In all departments, some courses are harder and some easier to teach. UD has never heard of faculty getting paid more for harder courses. Perhaps it is a common practice, and UD didn’t know about it.

But if these are harder and more time-consuming courses, why does the dean go on to say that the program (she assumes he means here the masters in finance program itself rather than the financial incentive ‘program’ set up to attract tenured professors to the program) they’re in was created to “give faculty … more time and pay to do research”?

I mean, put aside whether it’s a bit tone-deaf to say a program was created to give faculty more time and pay to do research…

I mean… UD doesn’t see this in the program’s mission statement… We created this program in order to free up our staff for more research and pay them more…

Ask in any case why a program whose courses are more difficult and time-consuming to teach was designed to give faculty more time for their research…

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So to pay back some of what’s due back from the b-school to the university, the decision’s been made to start paying faculty at the two-credit rate.

“We have now aligned the credit hours compensated for with the actual number of credit hours taken by students in the MSF program,” [the dean] said. “This alignment matches the MSF faculty compensation with that of our other specialized master’s programs in a reasonable and equitable manner.”

At this, virtually the entire tenured faculty (it appears) resigned from teaching in the program, leaving it in the hands of less qualified adjuncts, and the quality is apparently going down the tubes.

Keep in mind that these programs charge students a fortune. If you start taking the program now, taught by adjuncts, some of whom have never taught in the program before, you are paying $77,280 for the privilege.

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And oh yeah. If you design an expensive degree and you can’t get your own faculty to teach its courses without amazing incentives, a degree program your faculty dump in seconds if you take any component of those incentives away, you need new degree designers.

Margaret Soltan, October 19, 2015 1:42PM
Posted in: professors

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9 Responses to ““Robert Van Order, the chair of the school’s finance department, said because courses for the [masters in finance] degree are taught exclusively on Fridays and Saturdays and are ‘more technical and time-consuming’ for faculty than teaching other courses, the elevated pay is a reasonable incentive to teach the courses.””

  1. Contingent Cassandra Says:

    Finance *may* be a bit different, but it always amazes me when professors go on about the “difficulty” of teaching more advanced classes. Admittedly I’ve had limited opportunity to do so, but I’m pretty sure those professors have had limited opportunity to teach intro/gen-ed classes (and/or have some selective amnesia about same, except, of course, when negotiating their teaching schedules).

    I have to wonder how those courses came to be 2-credit in the first place. Maybe there’s a rationale (working students, and all that), but I’m inclined to suspect that maximizing tuition dollars (because yes, graduate degrees, especially those for which employers will pay at least part of the freight, are often seen as cash cows) played a role.

  2. Anon Says:

    Why don’t these b-school boys just walk down to a humanities program and learn how it’s done? You put the cheap TA drones in the hardest core courses, and you put your tenured faculty in the tiny graduate seminar. You require students from other programs to take your courses for “General Education” taught by the TAs, and then you sit back and let the dollars roll in (whether your faculty do research or just sexually harass the TAs).

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Anon: Yes – that explains why humanities programs are rolling in money…

    But you do accurately describe the unconscionable situation in many literature programs which retain the PhD, including my own.

  4. Derek Says:

    I’m thinking Anon has no idea how actual humanities programs work.

    dcat

  5. Jack/OH Says:

    As a non-prof, I’m out of my league here. But UD’s first paragraph bitch-slaps even people who are higher education-friendly. To wit: you gotta a lifetime job, mo’ fo’. Exactly how does that rock my world, or my community’s world?

  6. david foster Says:

    In organizations I’m familiar with, budget vs actual reporting is done on a monthly basis…so if some sub-organization is repeatedly exceeding its expense budget, that issue can be surfaced and addressed in a reasonably timely manner. Is that not how it’s done at GW?

    And if it’s not, maybe a business school…especially a finance department…should take the lead in encouraging “best practices”

  7. Margaret Soltan Says:

    david: Yes, there’s the irony of it happening at a business school.

  8. Dr_Doctorstein Says:

    In my own experience, these programs are *only* about the money.

    When I was a humanities dept. chair at a small, rural, second-tier state university, my ambitious, entrepreneurial-minded dean would periodically hound me to whip up a new MA program. What he had in mind did not involve actually hiring new faculty who were actually qualified to teach at the graduate level. That would cost money, and the idea was to make money, pronto. His idea was, and is, that teaching in the new program would be covered by the existing undergraduate faculty. They would teach graduate courses as “overloads,” that is, as an extra course or two on top of their existing 4-4 undergraduate teaching load. For each such extra course they would be paid at the adjunct rate of $3,000.

    Never mind that, though the existing undergrad profs do have PhDs, and are great at what they do, what they do is teach undergrads. They have all been hired, retained, faculty-developed, evaluated, tenured, promoted, and otherwise incentivized specifically to excel at teaching undergrads. Never mind that their research output, while appropriate for an undergrad program, is minimal by grad-school standards and would presumably decline under the strain of a 5-5 load. Never mind the insulting notion of graduate-level faculty teaching a community-college load. Never mind all that. All the dean could see is the money we could be making with graduate tuition $$$ flooding in and adjunct pay trickling out.

    Said I, when this was first proposed to me, What about quality?

    Said he, Are you suggesting your faculty are not good enough?

    F*ck you, said I. Then, out loud: I’ll run it by the faculty and we’ll see what we can do.

    That was five years ago. Last year I retired, and it’s now my successor’s job to drag her feet.

  9. charlie Says:

    A bigger point needs to be addressed, imo. The most important job of tenured faculty is to be the academic and social conscience of the nation, a notion that apparently has become defunct. Given that I grew up in the Bay Area, I was dimly aware of the Free Speech Movement that erupted out of UC Berkeley in the mid 60’s. That student uprising sparked a national debate, and altered a generation’s thinking. It would have never succeeded if it weren’t for the UC Faculty Senate demanding that the administrators stop suppressing dissent, quit demanding the arrest of students, and ratifying that the institution is exactly where vital dialogue must occur.

    http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Free-Speech-Movement-at...

    So what the hell has happened over the past thirty years? Where is the debate, the outrage, any god damn thing, to question the degradation of the university into a cash cow for vested interests? I’m sorry, but sympathy nor understanding is appropriate if FSs seemingly refuse to mount any concerted challenge of the inequity and stupidity of administrative policies. Maybe I am wrong, and FS have been doing as much, but I certainly haven’t seen anything that resembles what the UC FS did back in the mid 60s….

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