Cliff Edge did not have a religious affiliation and neither the faculty nor the administration had much sympathy for religion of any kind. That is, the faculty was dominated by a bunch of liberal-leaning types for whom religion was synonymous with superstition and hence an outright offense to all properly-educated persons. The administration had no commitment to anything, including education. They just wanted to keep their cushy high-paying jobs, which meant that they had to maintain some semblance of commitment to education, hence the humanities departments were allowed to stagger on, chronically underfunded. Nearly all the instruction was provided by contingent faculty, which were about half “instructors” who received benefits and, until the pandemic, multiple-year contracts, and half adjuncts, who were paid by the course. There were a few older tenured faculty, but almost no new tenure hires and the provost and president were constantly powwowing on how they might get away with eliminating all tenure-line positions and still maintain their accreditation. 

Pretty much every institution of higher education needs an English department, so the English faculty tended to be pretty checked out in terms of institutional planning. Such was not the case, however, with the Department of Philosophy and Religion. Both disciplines knew their situation was extremely precarious, hence they were constantly plotting ways to promote themselves in order to keep the department from being axed. 

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the philosophers loathed and despised the religion faculty. They’d have liked nothing better than to have shed themselves of that portion of the department. Not only did the philosophy faculty labor under the same simplistic conflation of religion with superstition that is pervasive among self-congratulatory pseudo-intellectuals, they were absolutely convinced that graduate training in philosophy was the most rigorous of any discipline in the humanities and that graduate training in religion was the least rigorous. 

The problem was that it was easier to get grants in religion than in philosophy and several of the religion faculty had actually secured small grants in recent years. Moreover, Cliff Edge was in the midwest. It wasn’t actually the Bible belt, but midwesterners tended to look more kindly on religion than people in many other parts of the country, and Cliff Edge was pathologically averse to negative PR. They feared that outright axing the religion program would inevitably generate some negative PR, so their less than subtle plan was simply to starve the program until it could no longer be justified. If the numbers of majors became sufficiently low, then it would be impossible to justify running any of the upper-level religion courses. Once those courses had been eliminated, they reasoned, then the religion major could be eliminated. It wouldn’t be long before they could get rid of the minor as well and once that was gone, it would be only a matter of time before the religion faculty would become superfluous. That is, the plan was the gradual elimination of religion as a discipline at Cliff Edge. No single step in this process, they reasoned, would be newsworthy, hence the program could eventually be eliminated with very little, if any, risk of negative PR.

What Cliff Edge’s administrators had not sufficiently appreciated was the ingenuity of scholars, that is, people with years of graduate training, who knew that if their discipline was eliminated, they’d be out on the street. That is, the faculty were keenly aware that higher education was in crisis, that no one was hiring and hence that any academic who lost his or her job would have to find another profession or be permanently unemployed. And if you are still paying off student loans, as many of the faculty were, then neither training for a new profession nor being permanently unemployed was viable option.

So faculty hit on all kinds of ways to make it appear their programs were doing better than they, in fact, were. Chief among the ways of bolstering enrollment numbers in religion classes, was simply to require no work of the students. The sciences, because they had objective measures of determining pedagogical effectiveness, tended to shy away from this tactic, but they weren’t threatened the way the humanities were. The religion faculty devised a plan they felt sure would protect their discipline from elimination. 

The plan had developed more or less organically. Dave was the first to figure it out. He’d been the director of the religion program for something like fifteen years, despite that he was only an instructor.

(People outside academia think that it is very stratified, with the tenure-line faculty holding all the power and looking down contemptuously on the contingent faculty. There were certainly plenty of tenure-line faculty who looked down contemptuously on the contingent faculty, but they didn’t have any power over them. Instructors were generally hired by committees comprised exclusively of other instructors, and adjuncts were hired directly by program directors, most of whom were themselves only instructors. Moreover, department heads were increasingly finding instructors made much more compliant program directors and committee chairs, etc., than did tenure-line faculty, so nearly all those position were held by contingent faculty. In fact, to be blunt, instructors had a considerable amount of power over tenure-line faculty, whereas tenure-line faculty had no power whatever over instructors.)

Dave had originally been puzzled when he noticed a gradual increase both in the enrollments in religion classes and in religion majors and minors as the proportion of contingent to tenure-line faculty increased. He’d assumed at first that this was merely a coincidence. The correlation continued, however, and, in fact, actually got stronger over time. The higher the proportion of religion courses taught by contingent faculty, the higher were the enrollments in those courses and the greater were the numbers of new majors and minors. 

Dave might never have figured it out had Constance not constantly been plagued by student complaints, complaints the students inevitably brought to Dave as he was the Religion program director. The complaints against Constance were myriad. She had a mandatory attendance requirement. Students were allowed to miss only three classes, more than that, and they automatically failed. She had regular writing assignments and tended to be fairly inflexible with the deadlines. She was also considered by students to be a pretty tough grader. Her classes, even her intro classes, always had lower enrollments than all the other religion classes, and students were constantly besieging Dave with complaints about her. One student vented his frustration to Dave with an outrage that suggested he believed himself to be the victim of a serious injustice. It seems the student had enrolled in REL 100: Introduction to Religion, on the assumption that he would never actually have to attend class or submit any work, at least not before the end of the term, and had been rudely surprised when he’d received an email from Constance informing him that he’d failed the course because he’d exceeded the maximum number of unexcused absences.

“The whole reason I signed up for the course” the student practically screamed, “was because I had a friend who took it last term and told me that it was an easy A, that I’d never even have to go to class.” (It is a sad statement on the quality of higher education today, that it did not even occur to this student that a program director might be disturbed to think there were courses in his program that required little if any work, no actual attendance, and were liberal in their distribution of As.)

A few questions to the student revealed that his friend had taken a section of Religion 100 that had been taught by an adjunct. Even then the situation wasn’t immediately clear to Dave. It was only after he began to read the student teaching evaluations with a more critical eye that he began to see what was going on. Contingent faculty, you see, had no requirement to publish scholarship. Instructors, because they did hold nearly all the lower-level administrative positions, were evaluated annually on both teaching and service, but adjuncts were hired and fired based on student teaching evaluations alone!

And how else would one evaluate the quality of adjunct instruction? Actually studying their syllabi and reviewing examples of graded assignments, etc., in their courses would have been far too labor intensive for administrators who busy attending meetings and jetting around the country to conferences with their peers at other institutions (unlike faculty, administrators had unlimited travel budgets because, in the words of Dean Debbie, what they did was “very important to the institution.”) When Dave began to study the teaching evaluations of adjuncts, he started to understand why adjuncts had the highest enrollments in their courses. Instructors were next, and tenure-line faculty dead last. 

Dave, who was consumed by a hatred of tenure-line faculty so intense that he could not admit the depth of it to himself, had always assumed that the differences in the teaching evaluations of tenure-line faculty and contingent faculty was a  result of the fact that tenure-line faculty were bad teachers, imperious and officious and unsympathetic to their young charges, so to speak. The student evaluations told the true story, though, to anyone who looked beyond the numerical scores to read the student comments. Students loved teachers who were “fun,” who understood how overburdened they were with coursework (because after all, the sciences did still require work of students) and hence didn’t assign much. They pilloried professors who they felt assigned too much work and who they perceived to be harsh graders. 

This situation was exacerbated by the fact that contingent faculty typically had approximately twice the teaching load of tenure line faculty. Instructors at Cliff Edge taught four courses per term, for a total of eight courses per year. The intro courses could have as many as 40 students each, so instructors typically had between 150-160 students per term. Instructors simply didn’t have time to grade much work, unless they could develop multiple-choice assignments that could be computer graded.

The situation was even worse for adjuncts. Cliff Edge wouldn’t allow adjuncts to teach more than two courses per term, for a total of four in a single year, because more than that would have made them technically full time, and Cliff Edge would have had to give them benefits. The thing is, adjunct pay was so low that it was impossible to to live on it, so most adjuncts taught even more courses per term than did instructors—just at different institutions. Most adjuncts had over 200 students per term, so they clearly didn’t have much time to grade either. 

Contingent faculty had this double incentive not to assign students much work and not to give much feedback on what little work they did assign, and yet despite this to give uniformly high grades. That is, there was the time constraint issue and the job security issue. They couldn’t give much work because they didn’t have time to grade it, but they were understandably afraid of low scores on their teaching evaluations because low scores would mean they might not have their contracts renewed.

It was unclear whether upper-level administrators, who were bent on getting rid of as many tenure-line faculty as possible, understood the implications of turning nearly all the instruction at Cliff Edge over to the overworked and underpaid contingent faculty. It’s unlikely they would have cared, though, even if they had understood how this was serving to undermine the quality of the “education” Cliff Edge was offering, because their chief concern was keeping enrollments up. They conceived of their students as customers and were determined to do anything and everything they reasonably could to do keep these customers happy. The issue of whether it is properly the students who should be conceived as customers or their eventual employers who were increasingly disappointed by the ill preparedness of Cliff Edge graduates, was one that received insufficient attention by Cliff Edge administrators who sat cheerfully sawing off the very branch they were sitting on, 

So that was it. Contingent faculty, and especially adjuncts, were popular with students because their classes were easy. In fact, “easy” was more or less a euphemism. Many of those classes were complete shams. There was always some sort of assignment or other listed in the syllabi of adjuncts, but it was usually a term paper, which was pretty much a useless exercise, not simply because the average Cliff Edge student couldn’t write well enough to do a decent term paper, but because the overwhelming majority of them would never see the instructor in question again, so they almost never bothered to read the comments on these papers, if indeed there were any comments on them, which there generally weren’t because the adjuncts knew that their students were not going to actually look at their papers unless they got what they felt was an unjustly low grade. But that eventuality could be averted by simply giving nearly everyone really high grades!

So that was it. Adjuncts assigned little if any work, had no attendance requirements, and gave uniformly high grades. Students loved them and enrolled in their courses in droves! The situation was analogous, if not quite so extreme, with instructors.

This realization was initially unsettling to Dave, until he self-interestedly decided that this sort of “casual, fun” approach to “learning” was exactly what Cliff Edge’s stressed-out students needed! In the past, Dave, in keeping with official departmental policy, as well as long-established convention in academia, had given the tenure-line faculty priority in scheduling. That had meant, of course, that they taught all the upper-level seminars. Because their courses were less popular than those of the adjuncts and instructors, though, these seminars often had to be cancelled due to low enrollment and their repeated cancellation actually threatened the major because many of these courses were required for the major. 

Dave figured out that if he could shift many of these upper-level seminars to adjuncts, that he could increase their enrollments. The problem was figuring out how to do this without violating department policy. He tried to encourage tenure-line faculty to teach more into courses by pointing out that these courses were gateway courses for potential majors and hence at least some of them needed to be taught by tenure-line faculty. That had had some mild success, but not enough to satisfy Dave. So he hit on the technique of scheduling too many upper-level seminars in a single term with the inevitable result that those assigned to tenure-line faculty would be cancelled at the last minute due to low enrollments. Tenure-line faculty were required to teach five courses a year, so if their seminar was cancelled, they’d be switched to teaching another course, usually an intro. After a few terms of having one’s seminar cancelled at the last minute and having to struggle to put together a syllabus for an intro course one probably hadn’t taught in years, and tenure-line faculty actually began to request to be assigned to intro courses. This then left Dave free to reduce the number of seminars he’d been offering and to assign the majority of them to contingent faculty. 

It took the tenure-line faculty awhile to figure out what was going on. Constance was the first to figure it out, but Dave had a justification at the ready. He explained that the contingent faculty needed to teach upper-level seminars to make themselves attractive on the job market. No tenure-line professor dared to point out what in fact everyone knew, i.e., that anyone who didn’t land a tenure-line position right out of grade school, but who was forced to accept a position as an instructor or adjunct, was never going to get a tenure-line position. For a tenure-line professor to point out that the contingent faculty were effectively condemned to labor forever in the coal mines of their overworked, underpaid, insecure positions, would have seemed the height of arrogance. Word would get out and the professor in question would be mercilessly bullied and ridiculed the contingent faculty who, it is important to remember, were vastly in the majority at Cliff Edge. 

No, Dave’s system was foolproof!