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The Grass Isn't Greener

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By Donald Hall

While I was away teaching in Austria during the spring on a Fulbright, my partner was asked often by our university friends if I was enjoying my stay in Europe. When he said that I definitely was, he would often get a return comment of something like, "I thought so. After all, everything is better in Europe."

Well, not everything.

The restaurants were definitely better in Graz, Austria, than they are in Morgantown, W.Va., where I live and teach. The wine was less expensive and also much better than our local vintages. Of course, the national network of public transportation in Europe is far superior to anything we have in the States. And the Alps are certainly higher than the Appalachians.

But when it comes to the conditions of academic work and life, most tenure-track and tenured professors in the States are far better off than their counterparts in Europe.

One of the most useful things about an extended stay abroad is that it allows you a different perspective on what you have at home. Sometimes you learn to analyze, in a new way, aspects of life that you have long taken for granted. Sometimes you learn to appreciate what you have, because you didn't know that it could be -- and is -- far worse elsewhere.

Of course, it is impossible to capture here all of the complexities of academic life in the United States, much less the entire continent of Europe. However, I did get a chance to meet and talk about professional matters with dozens of people from several countries. Because I taught on Wednesdays and Thursdays in Austria, I was able to accept invitations to lecture at and teach class sessions for universities in Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland.

I met administrators as well as students and faculty members in all of those countries, and because they knew that I had published on professional matters in the States, most were candid and interested in talking at length about their academic lives. I learned a lot, and drawing on those conversations, I offer here five points of comparison that might allow U.S.-based academics to appreciate better what they actually have and also understand the working conditions with which others have to contend.

Teaching Loads. American professors, especially at research universities, usually have a much more reasonable course load than their European counterparts. In Sweden, for example, the teaching load even at doctoral-granting universities is quite shocking: roughly 15 hours a week in the classroom. That is more classroom contact hours than one finds at many American community colleges -- with the added expectation that professors also will publish, serve on thesis and dissertation committees, and otherwise keep current in their fields.

The teaching loads at doctoral institutions in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Finland are lower than in Sweden, but still roughly that of many teaching-centered institutions in the United States: eight to nine hours a week in the classroom.

And while American professors have a limited number of designated office hours every week for meeting with students, in Austria (and to varying degrees elsewhere) you are expected to be in your office and available to students every day of the week, morning until late afternoon, unless you take an official vacation day.

The Path to a Full Professorship. While promotion standards and procedures vary across the United States, and some individuals feel stuck at the rank of associate professor, at least our rules are relatively fair and people make the move regularly.

In Austria, which follows the German model, promotion to full professor is a practical impossibility. In the American-studies department where I taught in Graz, there are no full professors now because you can never be promoted from within an institution. The only path to promotion to the top rank is to apply for a vacant chair at another university. Those may come open every decade or so after retirements, and sometimes not at all because of budget problems.

While some other national systems do promote from within, the availability of promotions is usually dependent upon money being allocated for a new full professorship, or an established position coming open because of a retirement or death. Far more academics in Europe feel trapped at the associate-professor level than in the States.

Faculty Pay. Salaries for American academics vary extraordinarily, from state to state and field to field, but are often significantly higher than salaries at European universities. In some parts of the continent, salaries for tenured faculty members barely reach 50,000 euros, or $60,000. Many of the people with whom I talked earned salaries well below that amount.

European universities are usually located in cities, where the cost of housing and food is similar to that in U.S. urban areas. While some costs, such as health care, are lower because of strong social-welfare systems, tax rates are proportionally higher. Time and again, I heard European academics marvel at the disposable income of U.S. professors.

Many European academics cannot afford to buy homes. Small cars are a luxury. Even in Switzerland, where faculty salaries are actually much higher than they are in the States generally, the cost of living is equivalent to that of the most expensive American cities. One colleague and I joked that working in Zurich is like trying to live in New York City on an excellent West Virginia salary.

The Value of Innovation: While some American universities are notoriously conservative, they are the exception, not the rule. In most parts of the continent, they are the rule.

Humanities departments in many parts of Europe still do not recognize film studies, gay and lesbian studies, and cultural studies as legitimate, or even germane to what they do. English departments, in particular, are often mired in the most traditional forms of inquiry: studies of form and theme directed toward the most canonical of writers (like Shakespeare).

A friend of mine teaching in Austria is finding it impossible get his Habilitation (the research portfolio necessary for promotion to associate professor) approved. He cannot find a single full professor, much less put together a committee, willing to recognize a research profile on film (including two books) as legitimate to the work of a humanities professor. He was told to go publish something "real."

The Professionalization of Administrators: Even though there is concern in the States about administrators at the dean's level and above being too far removed from the classroom and from the day-to-day lives of faculty members, there is much to be said for a clear path of career development leading to higher administrative posts.

Deans at U.S. institutions first learn to handle budgets and enrollment issues as department heads. Provosts get first-hand training in leadership skills and the setting of broad priorities for multidisciplinary units by serving successfully as deans. Whether or not we agree with their decisions and priorities, American administrators generally have a solid knowledge base upon which to draw in their work.

Europe is still far from adopting that model of administrative leadership. Deans are usually plucked from the faculty with no particular demonstrated skill set. Rectors are appointed because of connections and visibility but with no requisite previous administrative background. As one might expect, strategic planning is largely unknown in Europe. Fiscal policy and management can be chaotic.

Faculty members with whom I spoke repeatedly complained about the dilettantish nature of academic administration at European institutions. No one can guess where their institutions are going or how their work lives might change because no one trusts that well-skilled leaders are running their universities.

A few of the problems above may be addressed in coming years and decades through changes mandated under the Bologna declaration, a compact signed in 1999 that seeks to standardize European academic standards and degrees in order to compete more successfully with U.S. universities.

But even if that movement leads to better university governance, for example, it has largely curricular implications and will probably have little immediate impact on most academic careers. An Albanian professor told me that he hoped his country's recent signing onto the declaration would help bring down his 16-hour-a-week teaching schedule, but when I asked him "how," he couldn't say.

In fact, it seems highly unlikely that Bologna will bring up academic salaries or bring down teaching loads. When one guest lecturer in Graz, speaking to an academic audience, stated that the European system of higher education was in a state of collapse that Bologna couldn't even begin to address, the audience nodded and clapped vigorously.

Even under such conditions, I still met many intellectually vibrant faculty members, some writing books under teaching loads unheard of in American research universities, others desperately working to establish new fields in the face of institutional hostility.

And to be sure, comparison does reveal some professional advantages in Europe: When hired into a full-time teaching job, tenure is more or less guaranteed (though the job market for permanent positions is even tighter than in the States). Town-gown relationships can be much better at European universities, which do serve as the intellectual centers of their communities. And no one can argue with the fact that European academics live their daily lives in a context of superb cultural resources and wonderful cafes.

On the whole, however, I think I'll take my U.S.-based career over theirs. The challenges facing higher education in the States are daunting, but those in Europe seem exponentially more serious.