Arts and Sciences Newsletter (Spring 2005)

What has been called a "silent revolution" is reshaping American higher education, replacing many tenured and tenure-track positions with part-time, adjunct, and other transient faculty jobs and, arguably, diluting faculty commitment and quality.  ¹ Cornell has taken a different path, maintaining the quality of its instruction and research by keeping the numbers of tenure track faculty high -- and also by retaining a long-term, predominantly full-time corps in lecturer and senior lecturer titles whose job it is to teach. So doing, the school has joined, or perhaps led, an emerging trend documented by Jay Chronister and Roger Baldwin's 2000 study Teaching Without Tenure, which tracked full-time off-tenure- track hires at a number of campuses: Cornell was one of 13 studied intensively.  ² "Based on what we saw, I think the two-tiered system is here to stay," Chronister told the Chronicle of Higher Education; "Some people have developed instructional areas of expertise that the tenured faculty, working in research areas, don't have time to develop."  ³

Who are these faculty, and where do they work at Cornell? The Arts College is home to the University's largest group of continuing lecturers and senior lecturers, roughly one-sixth of the College faculty of 600. Most lecturers in the Arts College work in disciplines needing special teaching and performance expertise, especially in time-intensive areas. The largest number teach in the modern languages, followed by Theatre, Film and Dance; by the Knight Institute for Writing and the English Department; and by Physics, Mathematics, and Chemistry -- with outliers in Music, Economics, Psychology, Comparative Literature, History, Plant Biology, and Science, Technology, and Society. Among them are seasoned classroom teachers, experts in the pedagogy of many subjects, artist-teachers and other practitioners in the performing arts, supervisors of lab sessions and tutorial courses, and teacher-administrators who direct programs and centers and sometimes fill such departmental roles as Directors of Undergraduate Study. They include filmmakers, choreographers, webmeisters, poets and translators, authors of textbooks and novels, experts in instructional technology and stage lighting design, the production manager of the Schwartz Center, the director of the Digital Music Studio, the editors of the Knight Institute's magazine Discoveries and the English Department's magazine Epoch, and writers of numberless letters of recommendation.

Over the last two years a group of senior lecturers, designated by former Associate Dean Jonathan Culler and aided by Planning and Policy Director Kathleen Gemmell, has reviewed the work and status of people in these titles in the College and found
     •   That their numbers are almost flat since the last study of lecturers (124 in 2004-05 as against 117 in 1990-91), new hires having kept pace with retirements and retrenchments. Their average length of service at Cornell is over 14 years.
     •   That today's cohort is significantly better credentialed than the 1990-91 group, with 44 holding doctoral degrees and 55 masters degrees.
     •   That the majority (103) have reached or been hired into the senior lecturer title.
     •   That nearly all have full responsibility for their courses and many supervise other teachers or team-teach in collaborative instructional settings.
     •   That many lecturers, first appointed for one teaching function, have grown professionally and institutionally, assuming administrative jobs at Cornell and contributing to writing, pedagogy and practice in their disciplines.

Teaching in the modern languages involves the largest number of Arts College lecturers and reflects one model of their activities - in small classes, in a large number of languages, and with lots of ancillary and administrative functions that go beyond the nine to fourteen hours a week teachers typically spend in the classroom. Because the major modern language programs are largely run by lecturers as well as staffed by them and those they supervise, their administrative tasks are complex. Each year in Romance Studies, for example, lecturers, collectively, either directly teach or coordinate close to two hundred courses and subsections. According to Eleanor Dozier, senior lecturer and Associate Chair for Language Instruction in the department, they are responsible for the curriculum of the language programs, for producing, teaching, and supervising all language courses, for TA development, as well as for University-wide services like placement testing, maintaining lists of available translators and tutors, assessing candidates for Fulbright and other grants, evaluating undergraduate transfer credit, and serving as Faculty Fellows for the Language House.

Much the same distribution of responsibility obtains in Asian and German studies; in these and Near Eastern Studies, a multitude of less commonly taught languages entails great autonomy for lecturers who teach them. Asian alone offers lecturer-taught Bengali, Burmese, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Nepali, Tagalog, Thai and Vietnamese in addition to Japanese and Chinese. Ed Gunn, Chair of Asian Studies, is most struck by how far out of their way these lecturers go to accommodate students' educational goals, often adjusting their own workloads: "the relationship between students and teacher becomes highly personal and intense, a very individual thing."

Across other units in the College, lecturers' roles differ widely -- from the lecturer-led Writing Workshop of the Knight Institute, where staff work intensively with students taking "An Introduction to Writing in the University" and supervise the undergraduate tutors who staff the Walk-In Service and a tutorial program for non-native speakers, to English, where lecturers teach writing and literature at several levels and share the supervision of graduate teaching assistants with professorial faculty, to Mathematics, where a comparable structure of supervision exists, and to English for Academic Purposes, a language support program without departmental affiliation. In the performance departments, lecturers' work is again distinctive: "What's noteworthy about lecturers in these units," says Marilyn Rivchin, a senior lecturer who teaches filmmaking, "is that they combine teaching and supervision with an enormous number of production, rehearsal, and performance hours every semester." Their teaching may combine studio courses in costume, set, or lighting design with production laboratories in which they mentor students working on scenery, costumes, lighting, or stage crews of Schwartz Center productions. They teach choreography and dance technique while organizing dance concerts; they teach jazz and symphonic band while directing the Jazz and Percussion Ensembles and Wind Bands. In many areas of practice, she says, they teach at advanced levels where no (or few) other faculty positions exist. From the public theatre and dance performances, film screenings, and music recitals that they shape, "the whole community benefits."

Along with supervising other teachers go training and informing them. Here are some projects of differing scope and scale typifying many put together by lecturers, which cross the line between preparing people to be better teachers to creating environments where colleagues can talk about and study pedagogy in and across the disciplines.
     •   The Knight Institute offers a six-week course each summer and fall which prepares roughly 80 graduate student instructors to teach writing seminars in their fields of specialty. It is taught in lively discussion sections by Katy Gottschalk, senior lecturer and Walter Teagle Director of First-Year Writing Seminars, senior lecturer Elliot Shapiro, and other Knight Institute lecturers and graduate students.
     •   The GoodQuestions project in Math, being developed by Maria Terrell, senior lecturer, under a Faculty Innovation in Teaching grant, uses web-based technology and an in-class polling system to shape the flow of class activity in math classes and help graduate student and postdoc teachers develop their skills. "We're having a lot of fun and learning a lot about how teachers teach and how students learn," says Terrell.
     •   The Language Resource Center, directed by senior lecturer Richard Feldman, provides a multi-media language lab for students and each semester hosts a series of workshops and seminars for language teachers: the spring 2004 schedule included presentations by Frances Yufen Lee Mehta and Stephanie Hoare, senior lecturers in Asian Studies, of their video materials; Elvira Sanchez-Blake, senior lecturer in Romance, on her new course in Spanish in the Media; and Ute Maschke, lecturer in German Studies, on the computer environment she is designing for task-based multimedia class activities. The major event last year was a two-day conference on Visual Literacy and Language Teaching, featuring keynote speakers from Berkeley and London, and attendees from Cornell and 10 sister schools.

Large expectations for service and research do not automatically accompany most lecturers' jobs, and the work of lecturers in these areas isn't uniformly well documented. But as they have grown with the jobs they do at Cornell, they increasingly advise undergraduate students (or students in special language programs), give independent studies and honors tutorials, and serve on hiring and review committees and College standing committees. They are advisors to undergraduate clubs and activities and Faculty Fellows in student residences. Many lecturers report that they have presented or published papers in a variety of professional contexts -- in marine biology, sleep research, film studies, local history, rhetoric, applied linguistics, and foreign language teaching. As elsewhere, the pedagogic contribution is particularly strong. Cornell senior lecturers have authored such textbooks as College Physics, by Alan Giambattista and Betty Richardson and Professor Robert Richardson; The Art of the Essay, by Lydia Fakundiny; Elementary and Intermediate Arabic by Munther Younes; Manual de Gramática by Dozier and Iguina Zulma, and Gottschalk's and Keith Hjortshoj's The Elements of Teaching Writing. All of these books draw on and contribute to their work as teachers at Cornell.

At Cornell, the "silent revolution" is not happening, and what has happened has not met with silence; recognition has come on the individual and the institutional levels. Continuing lecturers have won half the distinguished teaching awards given in the Arts College to faculty since 1991; 24 now on the faculty hold Clark Awards dating from the last two decades, and three have received Paul Advising Awards. Since the mid- 1980s, the College has fortified lecturers' career paths by standardizing promotion procedures and enhancing their roles in college and department decision-making. Not being University faculty, they have not benefited from the multi-year faculty salary improvement plan begun in 2001-2: their current salaries stand at around two-thirds of their professorial colleagues' on the assistant professorial (for lecturers) and associate professorial (for senior lecturers) levels, and this disparity has not passed unnoticed.

As urgent as salary improvement in the eyes of many is adequate funding for professional development and research. The 1991 lecturer report recommended the creation of a paid leave cycle for senior lecturers to enhance their currency in their fields and prevent burnout; none has been established, although individual departments have created various opportunities for professional development on an ad hoc basis. The importance of opportunities for sustained study and creativity can't be exaggerated, Rivchin believes, pointing out that her department's promotion guidelines create a "strong expectation" of creative work from lecturers but treat it as service and not research for which released time is granted. In all areas where lecturers play a role, excellence is expected, and pursuing it requires a chance to step back, to study (and contribute to) the literature of their fields, to devise new approaches, and to cultivate the mind that will help others learn. Support for such endeavors is badly needed in the form of professional development moneys and release time. One lecturer who has joined the faculty last year and seeks to enhance her teaching repertory and her list of publications finds that her research budget is one-sixth of that of assistant professors in her department and that study leave is not available to her. "We lecturers need significant research funds to provide students with a sound and informed pedagogy," she remarks. "It's not just right; it's good for Cornell."