Some faculty members are reaching their breaking points.
English professor James Burbank said that, in his department alone, more than 10 percent of faculty members are retiring — three members out of frustration with the administration. He said budget cuts have affected the administration, but it’s nothing like what the faculty faces.
“We are top-heavy with administrators and more and more funds go to Athletics,” he said. “I mean, this is what’s causing a great deal of anger — when we can’t do the job of educating, and when our budgets are cut to the point that every day there’s a new problem. These are thrown at us again and again, but then we have this bevy of vice presidents.”
The Office of Institutional Research’s UNM Fact Book for 2009-10 shows that the number of tenure/tenure-track professors shrank by 2.1 percent between 2005-09, while non-tenure track faculty increased by 0.2 percent. Temporary faculty increased by 4.6 percent.
Provost Suzanne Ortega said in an e-mail that she is not aware of an unprecedented number of faculty leaving after this semester, but the office won’t know for sure until fall when resignations and terminations are processed.
Gary Scharnhorst, a distinguished professor of English, said he is retiring after 24 years of working at UNM to instead work pro bono in Heidelbeck, Germany.
Disgusted with the University, Scharnhorst said he was disenchanted when he didn’t get a raise with his distinguished professor promotion.
“I’m often embarrassed and occasionally ashamed to go to work here,” he said. “The University has become an institution where there is very little shared purpose and certainly no shared sacrifice. … The University is increasingly a joke. … The academic mission of the University has been neglected by the administration, and Athletics have prospered.”
Vice President for Enrollment Management Carmen Alvarez-Brown, who is leaving for position at Cleveland State University, said in an e-mail that the administration, despite its flaws, has faculty and students’ interests at heart.
“All attempt to do the best work they can,” she said. “The biggest problem with the University is the revolving door of top-level administrators that consequently brings about lack of accountability in the area of performance, service to students and support to faculty and their academic mission.”
UNM’s Council of University Presidents released a report in November 2010 showing faculty-to-student ratio increased from 18-to-1 in 2000 to 21-to-1 in 2009. The report said that the average undergraduate lower-division class size increased by five students from fall 2005 to fall 2010.
When the Board of Regents reviewed potential presidential candidates in 2007, the regents made an effort to include faculty in the process said Wanda Martin, retiring professor of English.
However, despite faculty’s rejection of David Schmidly, he was chosen. She said it became clear to faculty that nobody was listening to them.
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“It’s very much shouting into the wind to try to raise any questions about the educational quality of academic programs with administrators,” she said. “As long as the regents have such a disdainful attitude toward faculty members and shared governance to have so little interest in faculty points of view, I don’t see improvement on the horizon.”
The sacrifices the faculty has been asked to make financially, while performing at the same level, is pushing them beyond what they’re capable of, Burbank said. Administrators aren’t suffering; instead, students and the value of their education are.
“The cumulative effect of the degrading of the academic mission — I would say it has a geometrical multiplier,” he said. “Negative consequences will happen faster and faster and have greater and greater impact, and the impact it will have is on students and the diminishment of quality in terms of the degree and what it’s worth.”
The solution to their grievances begins with downsizing vice presidents and paying them realistically for what they do, Burbank said. He said tension between the administration and faculty is at an all-time high. To relieve the tension, he said, there then must be shared governance, and the University needs to prioritize the academic mission.
“Right now, the Faculty Senate can advise, and then that advice is oftentimes tossed aside and then the administration does what it wants,” he said. “If we really want to have shared governance, the faculty really has to have a voice in this place.”
