Congressman Frank J. Guarini Library Blog

The 2019 Inside Higher Ed Survey of Chief Academic Officers has some revealing key points:

• Most provosts are skeptical of the way some colleges have eliminated departments based on low numbers of majors.
• More than three-quarters (78 percent) of provosts believe that colleges are prioritizing technology and professional programs over those that support general education.

• 90 percent of provosts believe that high-quality undergraduate education requires healthy departments in traditional liberal arts fields such as English, history and political science.
• A majority of provosts are concerned about the impact of cuts to academic programs in higher education, and at their institutions.
• Only 31 percent of provosts believe that their students understand the purpose of general education requirements.
• Most provosts report pressure from presidents, boards and deans to focus on academic programs outside of the liberal arts.
• Provosts — more than faculty members — are willing to make changes in the way textbooks are selected to save students money.
• A majority of provosts believe that students feel comfortable in classrooms, but some doubt whether this is the case for minority and conservative students.

Me Too

The Me Too movement initially drew attention to harassment endemic in the entertainment industry, but it found no shortage of harassment in academe as well, with students and faculty members (especially graduate students and junior professors) reporting that senior academic colleagues had harassed them. In many cases, complaints concerned patterns of behavior — sometimes widely known at institutions — in which the abuses of power by prominent professors were tolerated for years. And as in the entertainment industry, many of the victims felt powerless to bring charges against people who could make or break their careers.

More than two-thirds of provosts (69 percent) agreed that “higher education has tolerated sexual harassment by faculty members for far too long.” More than a third (36 percent) strongly agreed with the statement, with the strongly agreeing view most likely to be held by those at doctoral institutions. (Among all the provosts who responded to the survey, 48 percent were women.)

But asked about their own institutions, only 13 percent agreed that their colleges and universities had tolerated sexual harassment by faculty members for far too long. Six percent strongly agreed with that statement, with provosts at public doctoral institutions most likely (11 percent) to strongly agree. Some of the most prominent cases of harassment findings in academe have been found at research universities (with some of those cases involving graduate students), and many fit the pattern in which punishments were not viewed as harsh enough.

On the issue of punishment, provosts strongly agreed that a finding of harassment by a tenured professor should be grounds for dismissal. But only a minority agree that such findings should be made public. The lack of publicity of findings has led some advocates for women in academe to circulate lists of those found to have engaged in harassment. (Summary)