Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Forbes, who is the president of United Academics at UVM.
As president of United Academics, the faculty union of the University of Vermont, I sometimes worry that most Vermonters have little contact with or understanding of our faculty. As we enter negotiations with UVM’s administration for our next contract, I’d like to get some things straight.
UVM’s faculty did not get into this profession to get rich. We do it because we believe in the magic of the classroom and the research lab, because we genuinely love the pursuit of truth and the arts, and because we believe that a good education and free inquiry benefits everyone.
The failure to hire new professors is not the typical behavior of a major university and it jeopardizes UVM’s future as a flagship research university.
We are worried, however, that UVM’s administration is not as committed to those beliefs as faculty. Administrators have been shifting money away from what the university does best, teaching and research, towards administration and other pet projects. In fact, UVM has brought hiring of new professors to a near stand-still. Since 2007, there has been a precipitous 62 percent decline in hiring of assistant professors, mostly by replacing them with poorly paid instructors who do no research and have to do their jobs with much less security. The largest college at UVM, Arts and Sciences, is hiring no tenure-track faculty at all this year. The college housing Engineering and Computer Science has fared no better. While its majors have more than doubled — from 592 in 2006 to 1,261 in 2016 — the number of professors (not including administrators) remains stalled out at 46. Students have requested and need more advising, research mentoring, and curricular improvement; that is work largely done by tenure-track faculty, and if current trends are not reversed the students will not get what they need. The failure to hire new professors is not the typical behavior of a major university and it jeopardizes UVM’s future as a flagship research university.
Administrators like to say that times are tight, and that we’re no different than other universities. But our analysis of the budget shows that if UVM brought its spending on instruction and research into line with the average of other schools that the administration dubs UVM’s peers (schools similar to UVM), that would add $11.7 million annually to spending on instruction and research. Flagship universities elsewhere are not systematically replacing professors with lecturers. The UVM administration’s priorities are simply out of whack.
UVM’s charter describes the university’s mission as “providing public higher education.” The key word there is public. However you interpret the term, it says that UVM should serve the public as a whole, it should be part of something larger than itself, it needs to serve all citizens of Vermont and beyond, even those who may never set foot on its campus. Teaching and research for the good of all, we believe, is how that mission gets served. UVM needs to shift its priorities back to those goals, and United Academics is committed to helping make that happen.
