Rutgers goes online this fall. Will students get the education they deserve? | Opinion

By Amy Higer and Bryan Sacks

On July 6, in one of his first decisions upon assuming office, Rutgers University President Jonathan Holloway announced that fall classes will be taught mostly online. Given the state of the country, this decision is a good one. It is impossible to ensure the health and safety of students and faculty while the COVID-19 virus continues to spread rapidly.

But what does a full semester of remote learning mean for the tens of thousands of Rutgers students, whose lives and education have already been upended by the pandemic? How will Rutgers ensure that students will get the quality education they deserve? As long-serving members of Rutgers teaching faculty — we are among the university’s 3,000 adjunct instructors (also called part-time lecturers, or PTLs) and serve on the adjunct union’s executive board — we have reasons for concern.

By moving fall courses online, Rutgers will be undertaking what amounts to a mass experiment in higher education. Although online courses at Rutgers are not new, they’re still the exception. Of particular concern is that many administrators who are making critical decisions for the fall have never themselves taught a college class, let alone one online. If these administrators had sought input from faculty members with online teaching experience, it might have inspired some confidence. However, at no time during the pandemic have any of the university’s COVID-19 task forces consulted those of us who do this work successfully. Instead, their decision-making process has been entirely top-down, insular and opaque. We fear this will have terrible consequences for students.

In its unbending commitment to a we-know-what’s-best approach, Rutgers’ top administrators have followed a decades-long trend at large universities. Upper management rarely comes from the ranks of the teaching faculty, as they did historically, but are appointed from above. The system of collegiate governance has disappeared. Rutgers today functions more like a private corporation than a public university.

The number of top administrators has grown substantially in recent years, and most earn enormous salaries. And, like their CEO counterparts in the private sector, they have prioritized money-making over education, in some cases making spectacularly poor financial decisions — for example, the $40 million debt incurred from their massive (now mostly dormant) athletics program. Their decisions are driven by the logic of austerity and efficiency, not the educational needs of students. Moreover, they proceed without meaningful faculty input, including adjunct faculty, who are among the university’s most experienced teachers.

Consider one particularly short-sighted decision. In early April, Rutgers imposed a hiring freeze on its employees, singling out all 3,000 of its part-time lecturers. It made this decision before there was any evidence of the financial necessity to do so. In any case, cutting the number of adjuncts will do little to help the university’s finances, as these instructor’s exceedingly low salaries make up less than 1% of the university’s budget. What this decision will do is make it much more difficult for Rutgers to deliver the kind of quality education its students deserve. Why? Because adjunct faculty, who teach over 30% of Rutgers’ classes, have a great deal of experience teaching online. Some of us, in fact, teach only online. Why is management laying off experienced online teachers when the university will be fully online this fall? We wish we knew. Here’s what we do know:

As any experienced online instructor will tell you, the single most important factor for student learning is a small class size; 12-17 students is optimal, and 20 is maximal. Class size matters because engaging students online is far more difficult than it is in traditional courses. Effective online teaching requires frequent writing assignments, timely feedback, and ongoing communication between students and instructor. In online classes of 30 or more, each additional student diminishes everyone’s learning experience, as teachers cannot possibly attend to individual student’s needs. It’s not surprising that courses with a large number of students show significant declines in student participation and learning.

And the truth is, there are people at Rutgers who know this. Prior to the COVID-19 emergency, most online courses were capped at 25. But the perverse logic of austerity, not quality education, has guided upper management during this crisis. Even while enrollments remain mostly steady, management has forced department chairs to cut part-time lecturer budgets by 20% to 25%. Students have already seen the effects in fewer course offerings. This fall, students will also see larger classes.

It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s still time to do the right thing by our students. We urge President Holloway to put student’s needs first and hire more, not fewer teachers.

Amy Higer is president and Bryan Sacks is treasurer of the part-time lecturers union, PTLFC-AAUP-AFT.

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