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BY MATTHEW FITTING

In print | Published October 23, 2003 — Updated February 09, 2009 15:20

In the future of the curriculum, the history of professor Steven Hopkins’s employment with Swarthmore might be of particular note.

When Hopkins, whose teaching focus includes religions of India and the comparative study of religions, received tenure two years ago, it was the end of a long road of, ultimately, job insecurity. It took him six years to go from visiting professor to a tenure track position, including his first two years at Swarthmore, when he was a leave replacement for professor Don Swearer.

In those six years, Hopkins was repeatedly told by the administration that he had a future with the college, while teaching where he could, including at Haverford from time to time. And when a retirement occurred in the religion department, he received the tenure track position. This, however, was only after another national search; Hopkins had already submitted to one for a position as a leave replacement.

Toward the end of those six years, but before the tenure-track spot opened up, Hopkins had other job offers come across his desk, and he had discussed with his family whether it would be better to take a position that offered more permanence. In the end, Hopkins said of Swarthmore, “it worked out.”

The story gains significance in light of the Council for Educational Policy’s (CEP) decision last semester to begin a broad review of allotment of faculty resources. This will include a close look at each department’s policy for hiring leave replacement faculty as well as an inspection of courses that consistently have a smaller enrollment and team-taught courses.

What might come of the review is unclear at this formative stage. Possible changes that could result include a reduction in the number of leave replacement faculty hired or a reduction in the time they can spend at Swarthmore (from a year to a semester, for example). This would lead to a slightly higher enrollment in more general courses across the curriculum.

But Provost Connie Hungerford said it was clear from the outset what the review does not mean.

“I want to be very emphatic that we are not talking about cutting out classes that don’t meet a certain enrollment threshold,” she said. “We are emphatically not talking about slowing down the hiring of tenure track faculty.”

Maurice Eldridge ‘61, vice president for college and community relations, added, "I don’t think there’s any thought that we should not have small classes or seminars. And I don’t think that anyone has an optimum idea of what small is." Hungerford added that first-year seminars, which the CEP decided to make mandatory last year, are part of ensuring that a small class experience is part of everyone’s time at the college and that this philosophy was at the core of a set of understood fundamental values CEP does not seek to change.

The motivation for the review, almost all interviewed for this article agreed, was not entirely financial. Still, as Hungerford said, the issue comes down to “putting our money where our highest priorities are.” And if resources are being used unwisely, “maybe we can recoup the money to do what we’d rather do.”

But the need to efficiently deploy resources was in part fueled by the college’s budget deficits and the current unstable economic situation.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Eldridge said, “when the economy shifts from one way to another, to make sure: Are we spending our resources well.” Hungerford added that the need “to make sure” comes around every so often; the present economic worries were only a timely reminder.

Formative stages

Hungerford emphasized that nothing had been finalized, and that the process was only beginning. Above all, the provost said, for the CEP and everyone involved, this will require large amounts of learning, in terms of each department’s logic for the hiring of leave replacements and enrollment caps, before any decisions are made. “We really are trying to learn what practice is, rather than having a sense of what it should be, and a need to enforce that,” she said.

According to professor Tim Burke, who sat on the CEP for the last two years, “one of the permissible outcomes of any committee investigation is that everything is fine.” Based on his experience with the committee, Burke said the danger “may not be so potent” that those involved believe a change — any change — must take place.

When it comes down to it, he added, academically speaking, "I don’t think there’s anything weighing on us that says, ‘You better change or else.’ "

Right now, each department decides enrollment caps for its courses.

“There might be perfectly good reasons for capping enrollment” that each department holds, and those reasons might differ across the college, Hungerford said. “Developing guidelines that everyone might agree are appropriate,” however, is one potential major change the review is considering.

She added that departments might present rationales that are “wholly pervasive” and that all that will come outof the review is an affirmation of those rationales. “When you’re looking at very small courses,” Hungerford said, “it’s useful to ask what part they play.”

Those courses that are writing-intensive or meant to be capstones are understood as requiring more professorial attention, she added.

Overall, the provost sought to downplay the maximum effect the review could have. “At this point, we’re just trying to inform ourselves. But I don’t really think it’s going to have a noticeable impact on the curriculum,” she said, adding that avoiding a reduction in academic quality was “paramount.”

In the end, “I don’t think it will be apparent where we find the savings,” she said.

Leave replacements, not replacing leave

According to a recent study by professor Paul Rablen (see story, pg. 5), Swarthmore professors maintain a higher course load — five credits a year — than their colleagues at comparable institutions. The college’s leave policy, however, where tenured and tenure-track faculty members receive a year of leave for every four they teach, is more generous than at similar schools.

Instead of looking to change that system, the CEP review decided to focus on the college’s current, loose policy on hiring leave replacement faculty.

Burke said CEP, first of all, took up the broad category of allocating faculty resources. “Anything that fell under that heading was of interest,” he said. Leave replacement and class size issues have since become the main focuses of the review so far.

In the case of some departments, it would be all but impossible to exist without leave replacements or visiting instructors and professors. The theater department lists seven faculty members as visiting in this year’s course catalog, and the same is true for four of the six faculty members in the linguistics department.

Hopkins’ story is representative of those professors who started off as visiting the college, then were found to offer something Swarthmore lacked.

It is this aspect of the current leave replacement faculty policy — the diversity of ideas and people that visiting professors can infuse and the option departments have to retain those people if it wishes — that Hopkins is most worried could suffer if the review calls for a significant change.

Looking again and again for more and more leave replacements, Hopkins acknowledged, can be exhausting, and Hungerford recognizes that every department should be understood on its own terms.

Hopkins agreed, as well, that Swarthmore’s curricular offerings match that of many larger universities, and the need for smaller groups for research, the honors program and other core values demand resources. But, on the whole, the ability of the current leave replacement policy to infuse diversity was what Hopkins emphasized most.

“That remains, I would think, an important aspect of this whole system,” he said. “The opportunity to draw someone into the college who has something we didn’t have before.”

In a possible attempt to tighten leave replacement policies, CEP runs the risk of passing on professors such as Hopkins and situations like the one he found. For both the professor and the college, the fit proved right in a long-term setting, not just in the short term. Often, however, longer, more drawn-out periods, such as Hopkins’ six years in a hiring limbo, would be more difficult to maintain in a setting with tighter rules on visiting professors.

Burke pointed how pervasive the issue of leave replacement faculty actually is. It stands as a pedagogical, financial, administrative and philosophical question all at once. In most respects, he added, the college had done well in handling it up to now, and that indicated well for the future.

“We don’t rely on temporary adjunct-type professors as a pool of cheap, experienced labor,” Burke said.

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