Departments and the "Academic Ratchet"

Economic troubles have hit higher education hard several times over the last few decades. This has put the higher education system on the defensive each time. Each time, colleges explain why they are “neither privileged havens of waste nor institutions so out of touch with reality that they are on the verge of losing their relevance” (Massy and Zemsky, p.1). Public funding has generally declined each year, resulting in fewer services, yet students must pay more in tuition. The result of this is that “students are being asked to pay more for less” (p. 2).

The net effect of this is that undergraduate education has “destructured”, which means that “the undergraduate curriculum over the last two decades [has been reorganized so that it has] fewer required courses, less emphasis on taking courses in an ordered sequence, and greater reliance on students to develop their own sense of how the various bits and pieces of knowledge they acquire in the classroom fit together into a coherent picture” (p. 3). Massy and Zemsky believe that destructuring “derives in part from the faculty’s own pursuit of specialized knowledge” (p. 3). The authors believe that this destructuring phenomenon has created economic consequences, such as increasing the number of courses offered by a department and the number of faculty hired.

The second effect of the economic troubles is that of the “academic ratchet”. This occurs when “faculty members increase their discretionary time (tie for pursuing professional and personal goals) largely by loosening their institutional ties and responsibilities” (p. 3). In other words, as more professors spend time on their own projects, they spend less time teaching courses. The problem with this that this does not always result in better teaching, and even if it did it wouldn’t increase someone’s salary or other compensation. There are too many other things that are high stakes, such as “research, scholarship, professional service, and similar activities, that a professor must do in order to remain employed—yet these activities aren’t as valued by those who pay for education (students, parents, government). The end result is that the professor spends more time on the high stakes activities, less time on actual teaching, thus resulting in students paying more for less all over again. This results in what the authors call “output creep”.

Source:
Massy, William F. & Zemsky, Robert. (1994). Discretionary Time: Departments and the “Academic Ratchet. The Journal of Higher Education (Vol. 65, No. 1), p1-22.