Switching Modes

I’m switching modes. The fall and spring semesters are over. Summer sessions have begun and effective with the Memorial Day weekend, the rhythm of my job changes. The number of meetings is reduced, the contact with faculty and students is unfortunately more limited, preparing personnel recommendations becomes the central focus, and our official work week is reduced by one hour.

The one hour reduction is that we close Friday’s at 4 PM instead of at 5 PM. Psychologically, if I am able to take advantage of the change, the hour does make a difference. I just feel that I have more of the day available to me and that the pace has actually moderated.

More importantly, I actually have the time during the summer to prepare key tenure and promotion recommendations. On one level my job in this area has become easier and on another level much more difficult. What is easier is a result of a tenure and/or promotion review process that works very effectively in most cases. Individuals who deserve tenure are recommended and in other cases, the individuals are not reappointed after 3 or 5 years or they leave of their own accord, recognizing that their skill set and the needs of Hofstra aren’t a good fit.

Where the job has become more difficult is when needs change and a person stands for tenure in an area where the student enrollment has declined substantially. Shifts in enrollment continuously happen over time. In my years as a business school dean, enrollments were very robust, they since have declined nationally, increased, declined again (undergraduate) and increased again (graduate). These are shifts in national trends. The classic example has been engineering where often the supply of engineers was most robust, at a time when the demand had declined. The key, of course, is the time lag – when a student decided to major in engineering is typically before or in the first year of college and when the student graduates 4 or 5 years later, the business climate and the need for engineering can have changed dramatically. The same is true of a faculty position. When a person starts his or her faculty appointment, there is a need and another tenure track position is fully justified. Five or six years later, the enrollment picture in a particular major or majors can change dramatically. A much needed line turns into a line that really isn’t needed.

What do you do in situations like this? Do you tenure a good person in an area where there is no need and perhaps even no likelihood of need for a significant number of years? Or do you not tenure the person and reallocate the line to an area of growing and robust demand. On a theoretical economics level, the choice is clear. Resources should be allocated as efficiently as possible and lines should track demand whenever possible. On a personal level, the decision is tougher—the faculty are not interchangeable and moving a line to an area of greater demand, requires a change of faculty. In some cases there is no choice, the demand is not there and there are more than enough tenured faculty to meet existing and even increased demand. In other cases, there are significant retirements in the area, or signs that demand is increasing, or new programs that attract new students and a new develops where initially no need was anticipated. And then there are the areas in between. Faculty in a department with declining needs often know what is happening in the moment. It manifests itself in fewer majors, in reduced class size or in courses that don’t run due to insufficient enrollment But since none of us come with a crystal ball and the ability to tell the future in precise detail, we don’t know for certain where these are trends about to change or that will continue to worsen. And yet the decision needs to be made.

The End of Summer Sessions and the End of Summer Sessions

We are wrapping up the third summer session on campus.  We have three summer sessions and we also have a very active and heavily enrolled day camp which helps utilize our facilities during a time when there are fewer students on campus.  In addition to there being fewer students there are also fewer faculty, and summer classes which are typically held early in the day or in the evening tend to leave afternoons free of classes and also unfortunately free of faculty and students on campus.  Yes, there are certainly some faculty on campus in the afternoons and there are some students as well, but the environment lacks the intensity and dynamism present during the fall and spring semesters.  Most student clubs are dormant, few speakers visit the campus; governance slows down and a campus has a very different feel.  In the early weeks of the summer I welcome this tempo since it allows me to both catch up and also provides time to write personnel recommendations for tenure and promotion.  As the summer progresses, I more and more miss the faculty and the students.  I miss the collegiality and the collaboration and I am anxious for the fall semester to begin.  There is no life to a campus without the continuous presence of faculty and students.

The history of summer sessions going back to when I was an undergraduate always had classes clustered in the morning or in the evening.  Two reasons for this split scheduling.  Originally, when classrooms were not air-conditioned, holding classes either early or late helped assure that classes were not held when temperatures and  classrooms were at their hottest.  Second many students worked during the summer and others wanted to take advantage of the beach and other recreational activities.  Holding classes in the evening and the morning allowed students to combine work/recreation with furtherance of their education at off times.  But the winds of change are descending on summer sessions for just the reasons listed above—work and recreation – and these winds will remove more students and faculty from campuses during the summer.

There is no substitute for the fall and spring semesters educational experiences for our undergraduates.  Distance learning will always be a second best alternative during these time periods and the overwhelming majority of undergraduates and faculty will demonstrate with their presence the value and the popularity of this experience.  The summer, however, is very different.  I may be trying to accelerate my education or I may be trying to catch up but most likely I am doing this in addition to working or just relaxing and having a good time.  If I can take these credits via distance learning, it will be attractive – and more and more the norm – for me to do so.  I believe we are entering the twilight of summer sessions.  In not too many years, we will end a summer session and it will also be the end of summer sessions as we know them.  On some level this is progress—education will be a better fit with a student’s needs.  When this happens, a campus in June, July, and August will make today’s summertime campus look like a hotbed of activity by comparison.