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Morehead State University's new Center for Regional Engagement puts a greater focus on the relationships between the campus and the surrounding communities. The goal is to eventually have at least one project in each county of MSU's service region that spans across Eastern Kentucky.
The new center has the chance to influence how the university is seen across the Commonwealth. Through each successful project the center helps to establish, the community will be better connected to MSU.
Administrators proudly point out that the new center will not put additional financial strain on the budget, because resources were made available by reshuffling available capabilities and through state funding.
But this could create a problem in the future. The new center will do only limited community work on its own; it mostly will coordinate and support.
In the end most work will fall on faculty and students volunteering time and energy to the community.
This is a great cause and will help many. It also will put additional strain on MSU faculty who have seen their numbers dwindle while being asked to deal with numerous new policies, plans and procedures.
Faculty last year put significant effort into the curriculum audit, general education review and new assessment procedures. While still dealing with those efforts, they are now also working on MSU's reaccreditation process and other new administrative plans that include everything from writing course and program proposals to coordinating service-learning projects.
Some students are now saying they are encountering less effective teaching, low morale among their instructors and faculty who seem stressed and who don't seem to have enough time to adequately prepare for their classes.
Soon the remaining faculty could be asked to do even more by being encouraged to help start and coordinate community projects. While the new Center for Regional Engagement can help with the initial contact between the university and the community and provide funding assistance, the bulk of the work will fall to faculty.
Certainly, community projects can enrich the college experience, but MSU administrators need to remember that the main focus of this institution is teaching. Overwhelming faculty members with more and more additional responsibilities will not further that goal.
If regional engagement is to become a successful venture, additional resources and personnel have to be made available by the university to ensure teaching quality does not suffer under the strain.
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I appreciate the editorial “Faculty under pressure” in the September 10 Trailblazer. It is gratifying to realize that students are aware of the increasing responsibilities and expectations put upon faculty. As your editorial suggested, regardless of the virtue of any particular extra obligations, these will cause diminishing returns over time.
The perpetual expansion of job duties used to be referred to, quite accurately, as “speedup” or “stretchout.” Now it is usually called something innocuous like “continuous improvement,” a management practice conjured up in the 1970s to require workers to do uncompensated work. It should be noted that as stressful as this is for university faculty, it is even more acute in the larger arena of wage and professional work outside of academics, particularly in private sector employment. And it is universal.
The community-based regional engagement initiatives undertaken by MSU faculty can be valuable additions to the services that a public institution should provide---I have participated in many of them. The various assessment, audit, and curriculum reviews that faculty undertake are often necessary and generally helpful to the university and the broader community. But as such non-teaching obligations relentlessly expand, without a regional and national commitment to enhance resources and personnel, the academic speedup will cause the erosion of morale and effectiveness among faculty and staff at our country’s schools, colleges, and universities.
Sincerely,
John Hennen
Professor of History
Department of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Legal Studies