The New University: Human Resources

A third area to be considered in a new model is human resources, specifically faculty—the heart of the academic engine.  Faculty must embrace a new role.  This role used to be called the sage on the stage, or the guide on the side. But it is now much more than that. As mentioned, knowledge has, of necessity, been democratized, in its physical, geographical and curricular aspects.  These developments have been enhanced by technology, including online education.  Faculty must accept all of this and define a new unbundled role. 

Faculty work has traditionally been divided into Teaching, Scholarship (Research), and Service, including a variety of activities within each category, e.g., classroom instruction, course preparation, research and publication, and participation in university governance.  The ideal faculty member performs equally well in all of these roles as they are laid out in the work of Ernst Boyer in the 1990’s.  Of course we all know that the ideal faculty member does not exist.  Nonetheless, we structure our relationship between faculty and the institution on this model.  It is neither efficient nor cost-effective.

The answer lies in an unbundling the traditional system. Unbundling the campus, and the faculty role, involves accomplishing the work of the institution through a learning community that employs a division of labor based on the size, mission and limits of an institution, while providing a flexible framework that can allow the institution to grow and change.

Our current models involve some de facto unbundling of faculty, in that we have categories such as teaching faculty, research faculty, graduate assistants, and, of course, adjuncts to do what is left over.  In many instances, this situation leads to a hierarchy of importance of tasks that may overlook the value added of various stakeholders, ultimately ignoring the key stakeholder, the learner.

A new model must define the work of an institution, its function, and organize the work of the faculty (and others) around this function. Faculty would, accordingly, have a relationship with the institution that is specific to identified duties over a specified period of time that would allow faculty to contribute to a learning community according to their strengths.  Taken to an extreme, this model might involve establishing different kinds of institutions, perhaps similar to research think tanks as opposed to teaching institutions as we know them now.

But in the shorter view, there are a couple of basic ways that the faculty role can be reinvented.  First, we must acknowledge that the syllabus is no longer a cottage industry, developed and owned by individual faculty members. With the democratization of knowledge comes accessibility to multiple sources of information, and thus a necessity for some measure of standardization.  Further, faculty must adapt to anywhere, anytime education.  The structure of their work must accommodate accessible, self-paced, competency-based education. The reason for this is simple. The rest of society works this way.  Students expect no less from education.

Of course there needs to be structure, like start and finish times for courses, but they can no longer be defined by classroom hours or faculty availability.  Faculty will need to be plugged into their work the same way they—and their students--are plugged into social media.  That is to say, real-time interaction must become the baseline expectation, regardless of mode.  Moreover, developing online courses and virtual learning objects can no longer be looked at as desirable or prestigious add-ons to faculty work.  We should expect it of all faculty as a normal part of their job. 

Again, these changes reflect keeping higher education in step with mainstream society.  Faculty, and their institutions, cannot be excused from the mainstream of society, or they will become irrelevant to the education enterprise.