Faculty: Balancing Teaching and Research -- Salaries Lag Behind Our Comparison Schools

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Tory Ault

At a recent talk with students in a class, President Dan Sullivan told a story about Dwight D. Eisenhower’s early experience as the president of Columbia University.  Apparently at his first faculty meeting, Eisenhower began by saying, “Fellow employees of Columbia University…”
Suddenly, I.I. Rabi, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist leapt to his feet and said, “Mr. President, we are not employees of the university, we ARE the university!” 
While there is often much to appreciate about the staff of an institution, if a faculty member at St. Lawrence claimed that the faculty was the university, Sullivan would politely disagree and reply, “You are very important to the university, you are essential to our excellence, but the students are the university.” 
This principle of the students being the university has been the guiding theme that has shaped Sullivan’s legacy. He placed the emphasis of a St. Lawrence education on being a unique educational experience, tailored to providing the best quality of instruction, the most opportunities both curricular and extracurricular, and the highest quality of life. 
Providing the highest caliber of education relies first and foremost on assembling the best and most accomplished professors in the various fields of study. Sixty percent of the current St. Lawrence faculty has been hired since Sullivan took office, but when he tells you that he has “personally interviewed 97-98 percent of them,” you begin to grasp his involvement.
In the academic world, where a premium is placed on achieving the highest degree possible--usually a PhD--before seeking a job as a professor, the fundamentals of teaching are sometimes underdeveloped in the process.  The most highly credentialed candidates can very well be lousy teachers.  This poses no problem for many of the larger universities who hire professors explicitly to do research and either use teacher assistants (TAs) to teach the courses, or hire other, less research-oriented and often part-time professors.   
The challenge for a smaller school like St. Lawrence is to find those candidates who are both accomplished researchers and scholars and excellent teachers.
Dr. Michael Temkin, the co-chair of the biology department at St. Lawrence and chair of the Faculty Council, said, “The notion of teaching versus research is probably a false dichotomy. We’re not really an institution where we have people who only teach and people who only do research.” At St. Lawrence, this is especially true for assistant professors “working towards tenure who have to maintain scholarly activity while teaching three classes per semester,” Temkin said. 
Temkin credited Sullivan with creating and expanding the St. Lawrence University Fellows program, where individual students pursue funded research projects. The students gain valuable practical experience in their chosen fields, with the professors teaching not in the traditional classroom sense, but as mentors. “Sullivan has been a real leader in changing the way we teach, both here at SLU and at liberal arts colleges as a whole,” Temkin said.
In his class visit, Sullivan said that in hiring and evaluating faculty at St. Lawrence “we stress engaged learning pedagogies with commitment to student advising.  Also, they must be continuously improving scholars ... They cannot foster an atmosphere of lifelong learning without doing it themselves.”
While the university does expect a great deal by asking teachers to be both researchers and educators, Temkin said that “the faculty receive excellent support from the university; there’s money for courses, money for research, money to go to conferences, etc. There’s complete academic freedom in teaching our courses. Basically, we get to do what we want, how we want, with the kind of students we want to work with.”
This does not mean, of course, that the almost 200 St. Lawrence faculty members don’t have some serious concerns and complaints.
For one thing, faculty salaries have remained below the mean of the colleges in St. Lawrence’s peer comparison group.
The good news is that while many other liberal arts colleges are cutting faculty positions, St. Lawrence is not. Sullivan also said that a “comprehensive plan is set in place for compensation increases,” which guarantees that faculty will continue to see normal increases in their pay.
Concern has also been voiced over St. Lawrence’s 3-3 teaching workload, where professors are responsible for instructing the equivalent of three sections per semester. The expected research and continued scholarship occurs above and beyond this workload. A number of SLU’s comparison schools have adopted the 3-2 system with success, and according to Temkin, “we lose some quality candidates because comparable schools offer a 3-2 load which is perceived as more appealing,” even though those schools may offer their faculty less resources and support than SLU does. 
The university has been considering a 3-2 system, and as Temkin put it, the faculty are trying to determine “how [they] could restructure our teaching load to allow us more time to pursue scholarship in ways you can’t do in a traditional classroom setting ... not as a research university, but an opportunity for students to be a part of research work with mentoring.”
If the university were to introduce the 3-2 schedule, it would have to reduce the number of classes offered, which would increase the number of students in each classroom. Clearly, this would be an unacceptable result for an institution that values the learning experience of its students above all else. The university could also hire a significant number of new faculty members, but given the current budget crunch this is not a viable option. “Currently, we don’t have the resources to restructure and hire the necessary faculty,” Temkin said.
Perhaps when the economy recovers the issue of transitioning to a 3-2 workload will enter back into discussion.
Sullivan is confident that new St. Lawrence president William Fox will continue to work to foster learning opportunities, including student fellowships. “He [Fox] understands the importance of student-faculty research,” Sullivan said.