By now, faculty, staff, and administrators across US higher education are waking up to the realization that this crisis is definitional: however we come out of this mess, it will be permanently and fundamentally changed. Our institutions, our professions, and our craft will never be the same.
Predicting exactly what will happen is difficult and uncertain but tracing the general outlines of change is possible not the least because much of what will happen is dictated by the structures and constraints that we’ve built in our institutions over time.
One of those constraints—potentially the most practical and relevant in the short term—is budgeting practices and, more particularly, the way they moved from the incremental models from the past into the revenue and activity centered models of the present. Expenses are now “aligned” with revenues, goes the metaphor, with considerable consequences for how our institutions will tackle and readjust to the storm in years to come.
Consider the future of teaching. Traditionally, institutions were differentiated along degrees of teaching and research intensity: very research active institutions tend to require their faculty to teach fewer classes than institutions that are primarily devoted to instruction. This gradient was partly based on the fact that some of the expenses associated to maintaining teaching units (academic departments, programs, colleges, and the like) were covered through centralized pots of indirect costs moneys associated to external grants (the recurring trope of research subsidizing teaching). As part of this budgeting model, the gap between the teaching necessary to serve students and the teaching offered by tenure track/tenured faculty was covered through contingent instructors—including lecturers, visiting professors, and all sorts of other precarious job titles. These instructors allowed institutions to expand student numbers while maintaining relatively stable numbers of costly, long term tenure track/tenured professors.
Without the central indirect cost revenues, subsidies are gone. Budgets will be increasingly compartmentalized and aligned with teaching units becoming ever more self-sustaining. You eat what you kill, in extremis. Given that some contracts (and costs) are more flexible than others, recalibrating budgets to align revenues and expenses will mean initially cutting contingent instructors. The number of students served by teaching units won’t go down—quite the contrary, they are now the most stable revenue stream on campus. And to serve these students, units will have to recur to some combination of increased teaching loads and larger class sizes. Whatever the solution, tenure track and tenured faculty will have to teach more.
How much more depends on a number of variables, but it can be considerably more. The fact is: faculty have often been heavily subsidized by contingent instructors. Consider the following: an imaginary medium sized social science department with about 25 faculty members and a 2:2 teaching load. Using AAUP remuneration data for top 20 R1 institutions in 2024, this department would expend around $5.2M dollars in faculty salaries and benefits—a figure estimated with the average distribution of ranks based on a non-representative of 10 departments. Staff, graduate program support, and additional instructional support (lecturers) would add to this about an additional $3M dollars. In revenue centered models such as those in operation at UC San Diego and UCLA, the revenue per student taught per course amounts to about $900. Sustaining such imagined department would require around 9100 students in seats or about 350 students taught per faculty member. With leaves and graduate classes (which reduce the number of undergraduate classes taught per faculty member) this goes up to about 400 students that would need to be taught per faculty member to balance the budget. The average is actually lower, at around 150-200 students taught per faculty.
The new R1s will look very different than the ones we knew. Teaching will be higher. Staff positions will be scarcer. So will in-class support. Some things will change to compensate the new workload expectations: some institutions are now reviving the conversations they had in 2020 around Achievement Relative to Opportunity to account for our new collective circumstances. The change is not altogether bad. There will be less time for research and thus fewer publications—this may not be too terrible a thing, at least in some fields. It might give us space to reflect on where our time investments should be made as well as what kinds of research productivity should be valued. It might allow greater recognition for mentorship and service. Heck, it may even be the end of the publish or perish culture as we know it (look at me, optimistic!).
For all the slivers of optimism one can find—about rekindling teaching in universities’ missions, changing pressures on productivity, and giving value to invisible work—this structural transformation is taking place in the context of a rapid adoption of AI language models by students and instructors. Budgetary pressures to ‘scale up’ teaching, along with the and the ostensible (though false) capacity of LLMs to automate certain cognitive tasks makes the situation more precarious. (I’m surprised that most of the people interviewed in the NY Times piece are business professors; business happens to be the most successful major in the country). The first ones to go may be contingent instructors. But tenure track and tenured faculty are next in line: if their work can be reduced to prompt optimization, university spreadsheets start to look much more favorable. I had already alerted (some lucky folks at SASE Limerick) about the way ChatGPT was transforming the economies of administrative expertise in universities, by de-skilling the expert work performed by staff. Now is the turn of faculty. What a way to make academia utterly mid.