college of education | fall 1998

Understanding the World of Higher Education

Jim Fairweather has delved deeply into the complex and quickly changing nature of academia in an effort to understand how colleges and universities serve society.
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Jim Fairweather has focused his research career on the powerful forces at play in the quickly changing landscape of higher education.

Fairweather has sought to study aspects of higher education not as separate entities, but as part of a broader effort to understand how they affect colleges and universities and their ability to serve society.

He has done much work, for instance, on faculty roles and rewards. He has done so not only because it sheds light on faculty behavior, but because it also provides insight into why universities and colleges choose to do certain things and not others. How faculty members are rewarded promotes certain behavior, Fairweather says, and that behavior ultimately has an affect on the larger institution and what it seeks to emphasize in its mission.

"If you want to value undergraduate education, for instance, then what you have to do is change how you reward faculty," he says.

In fact, faculty and teaching have been a focal point in his research.

In recent years, he has been working on a U.S. Department of Education-funded project that looks at faculty’s role in student learning and how to enhance student-learning productivity.

Fairweather says that the typical approach to increasing undergraduate education or attention paid to students is by mandating that faculty members teach a larger number of courses or students.

His research to date has found that this approach does increase student –learning productivity because it allows faculty members to generate more student credit hours.

However, the data he has compiled also have made clear to him that generating more credit hours "doesn’t mean students are learning more." In fact, by increasing teaching loads and especially class size, Fairweather says, universities decrease the amount of time faculty can spend with individual students. They also decrease faculty use of innovative instructional practices because of the time required to develop them.

"At the same time, faculty have to publish anyway, so you don’t affect their research productivity very much. If instead you asked the question, ‘How do you increase student learning?’ I think you’d get very different answers."

So it is already clear from the work he has done that institutional change is much more nuanced and complex than some high-level mandates would seem to indicate.

There are alternatives.

Fairweather believes that such things as allowing undergraduates to be involved in faculty research could be a powerful way to increase student learning. The idea is that instead of trying to reduce research to get faculty teaching more courses, the research itself can become an instructional tool to improve student learning.

Jim Fairwearth

We have much rhetoric on teaching and learning, but to be effective, reforms must go all the way down to the department chair and his or her decisions.

"I think what we are learning is that if you ask the question differently -- in this case ‘How do you increase student learning’-- you get a different answer as to how to organize academic work," Fairweather says.

And how academic work is organized has powerful implications on how universities and colleges ultimately function and serve society.

For Fairweather, it is a critical time for higher education. Already there are new players in higher education who have redefined the relationships between faculty work, student learning, research, and service.

Of particular note is the University of Phoenix, which has campuses all over the country and offers many of its courses during evening and weekends. It also offers a master’s in business administration and other degrees entirely through the World Wide Web.

Another interesting development is the creation of Western Governors University, which is a "virtual university" offering all of its programs through the Internet and other telecommunications and networking technologies.

The success of these kinds of institutions has forced traditional colleges and universities to take notice. With the strong economic and social forces reshaping society, Fairweather says, colleges and universities must begin to refocus their roles and missions.

"We have much rhetoric on teaching and learning, but to be effective reforms must go all the way down to the department chair and his or her decisions," he says. "You have to look closely when institutions say things like ‘We greatly value teaching freshman and sophomores.’ Look at who teaches these courses, if it’s mostly part-timers and non-tenure-track professors teaching them, then you can say ‘That may be your rhetoric, but your work assignments say something else.’"

In an era characterized by increased demand for higher education, higher costs for students, and limited institutional resources, Fairweather said successful academic institutions of the future must assess their strengths, judge the tradeoffs between their various activities, and invest in ways that enhance their unique contributions to society.

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