Klarinet Archive - Posting 000087.txt from 2004/11

From: Adam Michlin <amichlin@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] re: Clarinet vacancy
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 13:58:11 -0500

Ed,

At 10:45 AM 11/3/2004 -0600, Lacy, Edwin wrote:
>This is a fairly commonly-held viewpoint among people who are looking at
>the higher education field from the outside without much real insight
>about how it works. The fact is that in many universities, including
>the one in which I have been teaching for 38 years, a certain percentage
>of the faculty (but not all of them) will teach in an applied area, and
>also may have other duties. These might include teaching academic
>classes in music literature and history, music theory, music education,
>conducting ensembles, etc. However, it is not true that these
>assignments are made willy-nilly without taking into consideration the
>qualifications and interests of the faculty member to teach them.

What you describe may accurately represent your university, but there are
plenty of other universities where what I describe is the case. Possibly
even the rule for collegiate music programs hit hard by budget cuts (which
I suspect is not the case in your midwestern college).

Seniority both in terms of tenured faculty and length of employment as a
lecturer does take priority over qualifications to teach. This does not
mean the people are *unqualified* (in some cases, they are, in others they
aren't). It means they are teaching the classes over other teachers with
lesser seniority who are more qualified to teach the classes.

I know you're going to say "by who's definition of qualification". To give
you an concrete example, the school I just finished my masters work at now
has the fully tenured clarinet teacher teaching the flute and saxophone
methods class previously taught (quite well, I might add) by the adjunct
saxophone professor (who is also a fine flutist).

This is particularly a problem in California where the budgetary problems
have caused *huge* cuts in post-secondary education. Classes are being
slashed left and right and whatever classes are left go to the tenured
professors first, the long term contract lecturers second, and then (if
there is anything left) the short term contract lecturers.

>What is the alternative? It seems that would be for each and every
>music department to have at least one faculty member for each and every
>applied music area, and for all the academic areas and ensembles to be
>covered by still other faculty members. That would probably amount to
>at least 40 or 50 faculty members, and in the real world, a large
>percentage of schools are not going to be able to have that large a
>faculty in the foreseeable future.

The alternative is to have performing musicians who are also good teachers
teaching the private lessons and have people with PhDs and DMAs teaching in
the classroom.

My assumption is that anyone who is qualified to teach applied clarinet is
also successfully performing enough to make a living with a combination of
performance and adjunct collegiate private instruction. Maybe I live in a
dream world, though.

>The reasons why the doctorate is becoming more or less routinely
>expected of university faculty members are long, complicated and
>involved, and it would require a book-length missive to go into detail
>about it.

No arguments from me here.

-Adam

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