ustxtxb_obs_1987_05_01_50_00010-00000_000.pdf

roughly another $100 per year per person, which nobody, incidentally, expects to come from income taxes. Administrators like Vice Chancellor Gerald Hill call the expectation of an individual or corporate income tax unrealistic and instead urge an expanded tax base for the sales tax, as if the universities which serve the entrepreneur must in any event get more money, if necessary by regressive taxation. In harmony with their leaders, faculty members complain that salaries are too low and they have to teach too much. They show their loyalty to the state by threatening to leave it if they don’t get more money. The average faculty salary at UT-Austin is, now over $36,000. Fulltime teaching for “regular” faculty there is defined as the equivalent \(liberally courses each long semester. It doesn’t trouble the faculty conscience that advanced graduate students, teaching two courses, get an annual $8,750. So the powers that govern UT-Austin are in step, with the powers in the rest of the state and nation, but the tradition of Texas populism leads university administrators into contradictions. The University wants to be “a comprehensive research-oriented institution,” says Vice President W.S. Livingston, whose domain is graduate studies, but “we at Texas are very much concerned about undergraduate education.” President Cunningham quotes Liberal Arts Dean R.D. King, a conservative ideologue from Mississippi: “No university can be first rate without having a first-rate College of Liberal Arts.” Yet “Liberal Arts,” says Livingston in the University Council, “is in a dreadful pickle.” Liberal Arts, to put it more plainly, is losing out. Government, history, and literature don’t have the powerful patrons that engineering, computer science and business have. Part of the difficulty in Liberal Arts administration’s long-standing policy of teaching lower division courses like English on the cheap. While the University holds over $100 million in Department of Defense research contracts, and while the millions for Star Wars research and “new-wave weapons” get headlines in the local press, the staff of the Department of English includes 20 or 25 more graduate students \(assistant “regular” faculty. Many other departm ents, not only in Liberal Arts, use graduate students to grade papers, conduct discussion sections, teach elementary courses, etc. Larry Temple, as chairman of the Select Committee on 10 MAY 1, 1987 Higher Education, reports many complaints that freshmen and sophomores see “a bevy of teaching assistants” but have to wait until their junior year for instruction by experienced, full-time faculty. Too frequently students are unable to find places in courses that they are required to take. The History Department doesn’t offer sufficient classes to allow all UT-Austin students to satisfy the legislative requirements in American history. According to the chairman of the History Department, perhaps half the students take their required American history elsewhere, “and the same is true,” he says, “with regard to the legislative requirement in American and Texas government.” In the ’70s, teaching assistants complained that they themselves were required to register and pay for courses with no substantive content because the requirment brought the University millions of dollars by the legislative funding formula; and as recently as last November a graduate student in engineering reported that the requirement of registration for a set minimum of hours led some engineers to take “research” courses which required no work by the student. Such abuses are made almost inevitable by the research fetish, the University’s unending quest for more and more money, and a legislative formula which makes funding dependent on hours of registration. Oddly, however, the “pickle” in Liberal Arts was publicized by complaints from faculty, not students. Because some colleges and schools have higher standards of admission and retention than others, and because some departments “want only the cream of the crop for specialized programs” something of a dumping ground for students unwanted elsewhere. This led Professor W .0.S . Sutherland of the English Department to complain, in UT’s Faculty Senate last November, that “the University admits more students than it can handle” 7,500 freshmen in the previous year, according to Sutherland, of whom “70 percent will never graduate.” “Most faculty,” Sutherland said, “feel no responsibility” for such students. “They are brought here,” he continued, “in such numbers and under such conditions that without special help they flounder and fail.” And presumably these thousands of Texas’ most promising young people will not get that special help because \(according “the large professional schools” and “a large part of the faculty” have fled from lower-division teaching in unconcern. Yet three-fourths of UT’s freshmen graduate in the top 20 percent of their high school classes, nearly half of them in the top 10 percent. The consequence of faculty contempt for the ordinary freshman and sophomore is visible in the drop-out rate: 70 percent, if Sutherland is accurate, at least half that according to the professionally optimistic reports of more official number-crunchers. Similar consequences can be predicted from such educational “reforms” as high-school exit examinations, proficiency tests for college entrants, and required non-credit remedial courses for those lacking the required proficiency. The great defect of all such moves for “excellence” is that they only punish the less fortunate unless society and its educational system give all students a genuine chance to meet the requirements. The tests and the supposed remedies add to education’s expense in time and money, and when at last the baffled students give up and exit through the revolving door, they exit bearing the stigma of personal failure. “The price of access,” Chancellor Mark calmly told the UT Faculty Senate in December, “is that some people will fail.” But who are the failures, the students or the faculty and administrators or the society that encompasses them all? The presumed conflict, in such matters, between equity and excellence is no conflict: excellence without equity is not excellence. But in the United States in 1987, in Texas, and at Austin, the prospects for educational equity in our invaded and conquered universities are dim. The best education is for the rich, the most money is for research, and there is little or no resistance to the corporate executives who demand that higher education be reshaped to make and keep the United States “competitive.” The populist tradition is not yet extinguished. Though Hobby wants “to enhance revenue” by more sales taxes, not by the necessary taxes on corporate and individual income, still he talks of “a higher education for every qualified student.” Though the powerful in the UT System seem entranced with scientific and technological research for making profits and war, still President Cunningham insists on the “responsibility to provide basic education to thousands of undergraduates.” Certainly the citizens of Texas, who love their “flagship” universities, would insist on that responsibility just as strongly if they could make themselves heard over the corporate propagandists’