Higher education and faculty in particular came in for some pretty harsh attacks during the 1990s. With many states in recession at the beginning of the decade, legislators identified public universities as a good target for the budget ax. Then critics trained their sites on faculty--questioning their workloads, productivity, tenure prerogatives and even their politics.

So it comes as a relief to hear from an organization representing state policymakers that the new millennium has ushered in a new attitude. Early last year, the State Higher Education Executive Officers association completed a survey of all the chief academic officers of statewide coordinating and governing boards of higher education. With responses from 45 states and Puerto Rico, the report, "State Perspectives on Higher Education Faculty Issues," provides a reliable look at what higher education officers view as the most significant issues their institutions and states face today.

SHEEO asked officers to rate 17 issues relating to faculty by how important they were to governing boards. The top five issues were:

• faculty use of instructional technology;
• attracting and retaining faculty in the state;
• maintaining competitive faculty salaries;
• faculty role in economic development; and
• intellectual property rights.

The issues of teaching loads and productivity standards fell to 10th place on the list. Concerns about tenure ranked even lower. The report's authors speculate that the declining interest in how much faculty are working stems both from having accountability mechanisms in place and reliable data-gathering procedures. Those data must surely be revealing, because instead of trying to figure out ways to make faculty work harder, state legislatures are trying to find ways to pay faculty more. In almost half the states, legislation relating to faculty compensation has been passed or is under consideration.

Technology use is another significant concern for faculty and governing boards, the survey shows. For administrators, the focus is on promoting technology in instruction and providing adequate professional development.

The report also shows that state boards are concerned about the changing makeup of the professoriate, which is aging and retiring. On one hand, the boards worry about losing the most experienced and highly recognized faculty. On the other hand, with a new body of employees, the boards see an opportunity to create a more diverse teaching corps with expanded areas of expertise. Over-reliance on part-time faculty is a growing issue, the report notes.

A full copy of the report, which is in pdf format, is available at www.sheeo.org/network/Faculty-Issues-Report.pdf.

A whopping 42.9 percent of this year's college freshmen report that they earned A averages in high school, according to The American Freshman, 2000, UCLA's annual fall survey of freshmen enrolled at four-year institutions. This percentage keeps going up. Last year, it was 42.7 percent, as compared with a low of 17.6 percent in 1968.

You would expect to see such averages correlate with study habits, but no. The majority of students--64 percent--report studying fewer than six hours a week. In 1987, when the question was first asked, only 53 percent of students said they studied fewer than six hours a week.

Faculty across the country may find this to be one of the more illuminating insights into the expectations of the new students who appear in their introductory courses. The percentage of students who believe that there is a very good chance they will earn at least a B average in college rose from 52 percent in 1999 to 58 percent in 2000. In 1971, only 26.7 percent of students had expectations that high.

UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute has been conducting this national survey of freshman attitudes and plans for the future for 35 years. This year's cohort included 404,667 full-time students at 717 institutions.

Other findings:

• Incoming students are highly computer literate--78.5 percent used computers regularly in their last year of high school. Female students tend to have less confidence in their computer abilities than male students do, which translates into fewer women going into computer-related fields as a career. Females also spend less time than males spend in chat rooms and playing computer games.
• Freshmen have little interest in politics--even in an election year. Only 28.1 percent say they are inclined to keep up with political affairs. This compares with 60.3 percent in 1966, for example.
• Today's young adults are interested in being affluent, but are not avid to achieve status, recognition or positions of authority in their chosen career fields.
• Cigarettes and alcohol hold less allure for the Class of '04--reflecting a decline of some years' standing. Only 10 percent of the class smokes and less than half (48.3 percent) say they drank beer frequently or occasionally in the past year.

A summary of the survey can be found at www.gseis.ucla.edu/heri/heri.html.

The annual AFT Higher Education National Issues Conference is being held in San Francisco, April 20-22. Featured speakers include AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and Elaine Bernard, executive director of the Harvard University trade union program. The theme is "Gathering Steam: Advancing Academic Values, Quality and Professionalism." In addition to exploring how unions maintain core campus values in a time of flux, sessions will be given on part-time faculty concerns, shared governance, distance education, and media and political relations. For more information, contact Carol Clemmer in the AFT higher education department, 202/879-4426.