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Hiring hospitality faculty:
Hiring Hospitality Faculty: Erudition and Experience
by 34ichael M. Lefeuer att(t Gletm l/Vithiam
rom its inception in 1922, college-level hospitality education has brought to the classroom instructors drawn both from industry and academe. Indeed, the founding director of Cornellg hotel program, Howard B. Meek, was an academic (a professor of mathematics) who also had hotel-operations experience, and the backgrounds of Meek's early faculty members likeMichael M. Lefever, Ph. D., is department head and professor in the department of hotel, restaurant, and trauel administration at the Uniuersity of Massachusetts-Amherst. Glenn Withiam is executiue editor of the Cornell Quarterly. © 1995, Cornell University
August 1995 •
wise represented a mix of the academic and the practical. The practice of drawing hospitality educators from the ranks of academics and the industry continues to the present day. By combining industry-based instructors and academically educated professors, hospitality-education programs can offer students knowledge developed from academic research and from direct experience. In this article, we examine the mix of credentials offered by recently hired faculty members for hospitality programs. The size and composition of hospitality faculties have changed considerably over the years. Early hospitality-education programs directly employed a small group of professors and of necessity drew a large proportion of lecturers from the ranks of industry executives. Meek constantly entreated such NewYork-based industry experts as accountant Louis Toth, attorney John H. Sherry, and Lucius Boomer, manager of the WaldorfAstoria, to come to Ithaca to teach all or parts of hotel-related courses. Indeed, Toth and Sherry traveled to Ithaca weekly to teach their hospitality courses and were considered to be members of the faculty. Meek's tiny staff was also augmented by the faculty of what was then known as the School of Home Economics, of which the hotel program was then a part. Over the years the balance has swung largely toward hotel schools' having a large standing faculty compared to the early days, albeit some faculty members may still be part of a related business or homeeconomics program. Today's courses are primarily run by academically trained professors who invite individual guest lectures by industry practitioners and managers. In the 70-plus years that U.S. colleges have taught hospitality management, the nature of that
94
HOTELANDRESTAURANTADMINISTRATIONQUARTERLY
management has evolved from a strong focus on hands-on operation to one of strategic thinking and planning. Likewise, the credentials required of faculty members have changed from a focus on knowledge of hands-on techniques to one of management and conceptual knowledge. Research has also gone beyond a hands-on focus (e.g., mattress testing) to a more scholarly approach using socialscience survey methodologW and statistical testing.
Toward Discipline The changes in the credentials required for employment in hospitality education--and, indeed, the changes in hospitality programs themselves--were highlighted in the early 1980s in a series of articles appearing in academic journals, including this one? The authors of these articles took note that hospitality education seemed to be on its way to becoming either a subdivision of business education or a full-fledged academic discipline in its own right. At issue was the appropriate balance between scholarly accomplishment and industry experience for newly hired faculty members. The last of the Cornell Quarterly's series of articles in this vein appeared in 1986, when E.C. Nebel III,Thomas Calnan, and Harsha Chacko, t See, for example: Denney G. Rutherford, "An Analysis of Career Determinants and Publishing Patterns among the Hospitality Professoriate," The Jol~rnal of Hospitality Educatiot~,Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 1983), p. 10; Jeffrey M. Wachtel and DavidV. Pavesic,"The Doctorate Dilemma," Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administratio~ Q~artedy, Vol. 24, No. 2 (August 1983), pp. 35-37; Thomas Powers and Carl 1<.iegel,"R. (for IKesearch) and D (for Doctorate): An Affirmative Definition of Hospitality Education," Cornell Hotel and Restam'ant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2 (August 1984), pp. 43-48; and E.C. Nebel Ill,Thomas W. Calnan, and Harsha Chacko, "Desperately Seeking Doctorates: The Hospitality-Educator Shortfall," Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 2 (August 1986), pp. 36-38.
reporting on a 1985 survey, warned that expansion of hospitality education and a focus on the doctoral degree for hiring professors might cause a shortage in faculty members with appropriate credentials. 2 One of the early salvos in the discussion came in 1983 from Jeffrey Wachtel and David Pavesic. They were concerned that the doctorate was overbalancing industry experience as a credential for hiring hospitality professors. They wrote: "It is the opinion of the authors that hospitality educators with industry experience are better teachers than educators without industry experience.''3 And they added their view that hospitalityeducation programs should have hiring requirements different from those of other departments. One year later Thomas Powers and Carl Riegel suggested that industry experience remained a highly desirable credential for hospitality faculty members, and they proposed that the Ph.D. may not be absolutely necessary. However, they asserted that a knowledge of how to conduct research and teach at the college level is essential for anyone on a hospitality faculty. They scoffed at the common view that theory is somehow useless to hospitality educators: "Theory is absolutely essential to teaching and research," they wrote, "because it determines which questions we want to ask.TM Therefore, they suggested that an advanced business or other technical degree combined with a knowledge of research methodology (and industry experience) would constitute excellent credentials for a would-be faculty member. In their study of hospitalityprogram directors, Nebel, Calnan, 2 Nebel, Calnan, and Chacko, p. 37. 3 Wachtel and Pavesic, p. 35. 4 Powers and Riegel, p. 45.
and Chacko reported that 40 percent of full-time faculty members held a doctorate as of the fall of 1985. 5 More to the point, 70 percent of the 82 program directors surveyed said that they were either "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to hire people holding doctorates when openings occurred in their faculty.
Ten Years After: Still a Balance? A decade has passed since the Nebel study. Both the hospitality industry and hospitality education have experienced considerable changes in that time, not the least of which was an industry shakeout and a reconsideration or restructuring of many academic programs. 6 We wanted to find out what effect, if any, that turbulence might have had on hospitality programs by getting a sense of how many faculty members had been hired in the past three years and determining what credentials were held by those newly hired professors. To that end, we sent a brief survey to the directors of 202 fouryear hospitality-education programs in the United States and Europe that are members of CHRIE. Names and addresses were obtained from the C H R I E list. We received 78 completed questionnaires (a 39-percent response). O f those 78 respondents, 30 indicated that they had not hired a new faculty mem-
5 That finding was at variance with a 1982 study of l i R A faculty that found 52 percent holding the doctorate. See: Denney G. R u t h e r ford, " W h o Teaches Hospitality Education?,"
Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vnl. 23, No. 2 (August 1982), pp. 38-41. ¢' For example, see: R o b e r t Ford et al., "A Customer-Based Approach to Hospitality Education," and Carl A. Reigel, " W h e n the Budget Ax Falls: A Tale of Survival" in this issue of ComelI Quartedy; and Cathy A. Enz, Leo M. Renaghan, and A. Neal Geller, "Graduate-Level Education: A Survey of Stakeholders," Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4 (August 1993), pp. 90-95.
ber in the past three years. Consequently, the following survey results are based on the responses of the directors of 48 hospitality programs, or 24 percent of the original sample. As Chris Paxson notes elsewhere in this issue of the Cornell Quarterly (pp. 66-73), such a relatively smallpercentage response is typical in hospitality-related surveys. The reader is left to determine the extent to which these results can be generalized to the academy as a whole. At minimum, the results give an indication that hospitalityprogram administrators still look for at least some balance between academic accomplishment and industry experience in hiring new faculty members. The doctorate degree is important--almost essential in most areas--but at least some amount of hospitality experience is also valued. The responses represent 97 faculty members hired between 1992 and 1994 by 48 program administrators in four-year institutions in the United States and Europe. O f the 97 new hires, 49 held a doctoral degree (Ph.D., 35; Ed.D., 9; "ABD," 5). Three others held a juris doctor degree. Thirty-nine held a master's degree, and the remaining six were hired with a bachelor's degree. C u r r i c u l u m vitae. At the time of their appointment, the newly hired faculty members had a mean of 3.4 years of teaching experience and had already published two or three papers in refereed journals. The mean length of hospitality experience for the new hires was 3.8 years, the median was two years and the mode was one year of experience. Consequently, a graph showing length of hospitality experience among the new hires would be heavily skewed. If the x-axis is length of service and the y-axis is number of individuals, the curve
August 1995 •
Exhibit I
Research or teaching area
Restaurant or foodservice management Human-resources management Tourism Hotel operations Accounting and finance Marketing Recreation Service management Foods and nutrition Computers Strategic planning Beverage management Psychology or consumer behavior Culinary arts Convention management Gaming Law
Number hired
Percentage
13
16%
10 8 7 7 7 4 4 3 3 3 3
12% 10% 9% 9% 9% 5% 5% 3% 3% 3% 3%
3 2
3% 2%
2 1 1
2% 1% 1%
Total responses = 81
would peak near the origin and show a long "tail" along the x-axis. F o o d service. We asked the program directors to list the research or teaching areas of their newly hired faculty. Although not all directors did so, this open-ended question drew a total of 81 responses, some of which we were able to group. Even without grouping, however, positions in food-service management constituted the largest number of new hires (see Exhibit 1).When "culinary arts" and "foods and nutrition" were added to "restaurant and food-service management," foodrelated hiring accounted for 18 out of the 81 positions about which we had information (22 percent). That result is intriguing because our casual observation suggested that some hotel-administration programs might be following the industry's lead in focusing more on rooms management and general business and less on food production and food service. Based on the results of
96
this small sample, it appears that hospitality educators maintain a fairly strong c o m m m i t m e n t to teaching food preparation and service as a core topic. An alternative explanation is that our small sample may have been biased toward programs that still have a large food-service component. The growing importance of human resources to the industry is also reflected in hospitality-education programs' hiring. H u m a n resources management was the number-two hiring area. The long list of other specialties demonstrates the diverse nature of hospitality education and is a reflection of the complexity of the hospitality industry.
No Shortage The fact that nearly 100 new faculty members were hired by just 48 programs in the past three years testifies to the vitality of the hospitality academy. The relatively low means for teaching and industry experience indicate to us that the retirement-related turnover in the hospitality academy predicted by Nebel, Calnan, and Chacko is occurring. While some of the hiring may involve relatively experienced professors moving from one program to another, most of the new hires appear to be in the early stages of their teaching career. There is little indication, however, of the shortage of doctorates that concerned Nebel et al. in 1986. Moreover, in keeping with the position articulated by Powers and Riegel and Wachtel and Pavesic, the combination of a master's degree and industry experience remains an acceptable credential for employment as a hospitality professor.
HOTELAND RESTAURANTADMINISTRATIONQUARTERLY
Because we sought to keep our questionnaire simple, we did not provide a means to cross-tabulate teaching area with degree level. Consequently we cannot report or speculate on whether the master's degree is more c o m m o n in one teaching area or another.We also cannot indicate whether the six new teachers holding only bachelor's degrees offset that absence of academic scholarship by offering considerable industry experience, although that is our expectation. We would encourage further research that employs more intricate statistical methods on the issues we raise here. In closing, we note the mean dollar amount of funded research reported for the 97 newly hired faculty members--S9,400. This figure indicates to us a fairly strong emphasis on research among these new hires. T h e credential p r o b l e m . The lesson in the material we present here is not in the numbers so much as in the principles underlying the figures.We applaud the apparent emphasis on research, because it is a key to the future of hospitality education.What is missing in our survey--and hard to assess--is the connection between credentials, research, and actual excellence in the classroom. An advanced degree does not ensure teaching quality, although a strong research record undoubtedly goes far in that direction. Creating and transmitting information is not about credentials, whether academic or practice-based. The goal of hospitality educators must be to develop and present the materials students need to be effective participants in the hospitality industry. Regardless of the credentials, hospitalityprogram deans and directors must seek out the instructors who can accomplish that job.
by 34ichael M. Lefeuer att(t Gletm l/Vithiam
rom its inception in 1922, college-level hospitality education has brought to the classroom instructors drawn both from industry and academe. Indeed, the founding director of Cornellg hotel program, Howard B. Meek, was an academic (a professor of mathematics) who also had hotel-operations experience, and the backgrounds of Meek's early faculty members likeMichael M. Lefever, Ph. D., is department head and professor in the department of hotel, restaurant, and trauel administration at the Uniuersity of Massachusetts-Amherst. Glenn Withiam is executiue editor of the Cornell Quarterly. © 1995, Cornell University
August 1995 •
wise represented a mix of the academic and the practical. The practice of drawing hospitality educators from the ranks of academics and the industry continues to the present day. By combining industry-based instructors and academically educated professors, hospitality-education programs can offer students knowledge developed from academic research and from direct experience. In this article, we examine the mix of credentials offered by recently hired faculty members for hospitality programs. The size and composition of hospitality faculties have changed considerably over the years. Early hospitality-education programs directly employed a small group of professors and of necessity drew a large proportion of lecturers from the ranks of industry executives. Meek constantly entreated such NewYork-based industry experts as accountant Louis Toth, attorney John H. Sherry, and Lucius Boomer, manager of the WaldorfAstoria, to come to Ithaca to teach all or parts of hotel-related courses. Indeed, Toth and Sherry traveled to Ithaca weekly to teach their hospitality courses and were considered to be members of the faculty. Meek's tiny staff was also augmented by the faculty of what was then known as the School of Home Economics, of which the hotel program was then a part. Over the years the balance has swung largely toward hotel schools' having a large standing faculty compared to the early days, albeit some faculty members may still be part of a related business or homeeconomics program. Today's courses are primarily run by academically trained professors who invite individual guest lectures by industry practitioners and managers. In the 70-plus years that U.S. colleges have taught hospitality management, the nature of that
94
HOTELANDRESTAURANTADMINISTRATIONQUARTERLY
management has evolved from a strong focus on hands-on operation to one of strategic thinking and planning. Likewise, the credentials required of faculty members have changed from a focus on knowledge of hands-on techniques to one of management and conceptual knowledge. Research has also gone beyond a hands-on focus (e.g., mattress testing) to a more scholarly approach using socialscience survey methodologW and statistical testing.
Toward Discipline The changes in the credentials required for employment in hospitality education--and, indeed, the changes in hospitality programs themselves--were highlighted in the early 1980s in a series of articles appearing in academic journals, including this one? The authors of these articles took note that hospitality education seemed to be on its way to becoming either a subdivision of business education or a full-fledged academic discipline in its own right. At issue was the appropriate balance between scholarly accomplishment and industry experience for newly hired faculty members. The last of the Cornell Quarterly's series of articles in this vein appeared in 1986, when E.C. Nebel III,Thomas Calnan, and Harsha Chacko, t See, for example: Denney G. Rutherford, "An Analysis of Career Determinants and Publishing Patterns among the Hospitality Professoriate," The Jol~rnal of Hospitality Educatiot~,Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter 1983), p. 10; Jeffrey M. Wachtel and DavidV. Pavesic,"The Doctorate Dilemma," Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administratio~ Q~artedy, Vol. 24, No. 2 (August 1983), pp. 35-37; Thomas Powers and Carl 1<.iegel,"R. (for IKesearch) and D (for Doctorate): An Affirmative Definition of Hospitality Education," Cornell Hotel and Restam'ant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 2 (August 1984), pp. 43-48; and E.C. Nebel Ill,Thomas W. Calnan, and Harsha Chacko, "Desperately Seeking Doctorates: The Hospitality-Educator Shortfall," Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 2 (August 1986), pp. 36-38.
reporting on a 1985 survey, warned that expansion of hospitality education and a focus on the doctoral degree for hiring professors might cause a shortage in faculty members with appropriate credentials. 2 One of the early salvos in the discussion came in 1983 from Jeffrey Wachtel and David Pavesic. They were concerned that the doctorate was overbalancing industry experience as a credential for hiring hospitality professors. They wrote: "It is the opinion of the authors that hospitality educators with industry experience are better teachers than educators without industry experience.''3 And they added their view that hospitalityeducation programs should have hiring requirements different from those of other departments. One year later Thomas Powers and Carl Riegel suggested that industry experience remained a highly desirable credential for hospitality faculty members, and they proposed that the Ph.D. may not be absolutely necessary. However, they asserted that a knowledge of how to conduct research and teach at the college level is essential for anyone on a hospitality faculty. They scoffed at the common view that theory is somehow useless to hospitality educators: "Theory is absolutely essential to teaching and research," they wrote, "because it determines which questions we want to ask.TM Therefore, they suggested that an advanced business or other technical degree combined with a knowledge of research methodology (and industry experience) would constitute excellent credentials for a would-be faculty member. In their study of hospitalityprogram directors, Nebel, Calnan, 2 Nebel, Calnan, and Chacko, p. 37. 3 Wachtel and Pavesic, p. 35. 4 Powers and Riegel, p. 45.
and Chacko reported that 40 percent of full-time faculty members held a doctorate as of the fall of 1985. 5 More to the point, 70 percent of the 82 program directors surveyed said that they were either "very likely" or "somewhat likely" to hire people holding doctorates when openings occurred in their faculty.
Ten Years After: Still a Balance? A decade has passed since the Nebel study. Both the hospitality industry and hospitality education have experienced considerable changes in that time, not the least of which was an industry shakeout and a reconsideration or restructuring of many academic programs. 6 We wanted to find out what effect, if any, that turbulence might have had on hospitality programs by getting a sense of how many faculty members had been hired in the past three years and determining what credentials were held by those newly hired professors. To that end, we sent a brief survey to the directors of 202 fouryear hospitality-education programs in the United States and Europe that are members of CHRIE. Names and addresses were obtained from the C H R I E list. We received 78 completed questionnaires (a 39-percent response). O f those 78 respondents, 30 indicated that they had not hired a new faculty mem-
5 That finding was at variance with a 1982 study of l i R A faculty that found 52 percent holding the doctorate. See: Denney G. R u t h e r ford, " W h o Teaches Hospitality Education?,"
Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vnl. 23, No. 2 (August 1982), pp. 38-41. ¢' For example, see: R o b e r t Ford et al., "A Customer-Based Approach to Hospitality Education," and Carl A. Reigel, " W h e n the Budget Ax Falls: A Tale of Survival" in this issue of ComelI Quartedy; and Cathy A. Enz, Leo M. Renaghan, and A. Neal Geller, "Graduate-Level Education: A Survey of Stakeholders," Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4 (August 1993), pp. 90-95.
ber in the past three years. Consequently, the following survey results are based on the responses of the directors of 48 hospitality programs, or 24 percent of the original sample. As Chris Paxson notes elsewhere in this issue of the Cornell Quarterly (pp. 66-73), such a relatively smallpercentage response is typical in hospitality-related surveys. The reader is left to determine the extent to which these results can be generalized to the academy as a whole. At minimum, the results give an indication that hospitalityprogram administrators still look for at least some balance between academic accomplishment and industry experience in hiring new faculty members. The doctorate degree is important--almost essential in most areas--but at least some amount of hospitality experience is also valued. The responses represent 97 faculty members hired between 1992 and 1994 by 48 program administrators in four-year institutions in the United States and Europe. O f the 97 new hires, 49 held a doctoral degree (Ph.D., 35; Ed.D., 9; "ABD," 5). Three others held a juris doctor degree. Thirty-nine held a master's degree, and the remaining six were hired with a bachelor's degree. C u r r i c u l u m vitae. At the time of their appointment, the newly hired faculty members had a mean of 3.4 years of teaching experience and had already published two or three papers in refereed journals. The mean length of hospitality experience for the new hires was 3.8 years, the median was two years and the mode was one year of experience. Consequently, a graph showing length of hospitality experience among the new hires would be heavily skewed. If the x-axis is length of service and the y-axis is number of individuals, the curve
August 1995 •
Exhibit I
Research or teaching area
Restaurant or foodservice management Human-resources management Tourism Hotel operations Accounting and finance Marketing Recreation Service management Foods and nutrition Computers Strategic planning Beverage management Psychology or consumer behavior Culinary arts Convention management Gaming Law
Number hired
Percentage
13
16%
10 8 7 7 7 4 4 3 3 3 3
12% 10% 9% 9% 9% 5% 5% 3% 3% 3% 3%
3 2
3% 2%
2 1 1
2% 1% 1%
Total responses = 81
would peak near the origin and show a long "tail" along the x-axis. F o o d service. We asked the program directors to list the research or teaching areas of their newly hired faculty. Although not all directors did so, this open-ended question drew a total of 81 responses, some of which we were able to group. Even without grouping, however, positions in food-service management constituted the largest number of new hires (see Exhibit 1).When "culinary arts" and "foods and nutrition" were added to "restaurant and food-service management," foodrelated hiring accounted for 18 out of the 81 positions about which we had information (22 percent). That result is intriguing because our casual observation suggested that some hotel-administration programs might be following the industry's lead in focusing more on rooms management and general business and less on food production and food service. Based on the results of
96
this small sample, it appears that hospitality educators maintain a fairly strong c o m m m i t m e n t to teaching food preparation and service as a core topic. An alternative explanation is that our small sample may have been biased toward programs that still have a large food-service component. The growing importance of human resources to the industry is also reflected in hospitality-education programs' hiring. H u m a n resources management was the number-two hiring area. The long list of other specialties demonstrates the diverse nature of hospitality education and is a reflection of the complexity of the hospitality industry.
No Shortage The fact that nearly 100 new faculty members were hired by just 48 programs in the past three years testifies to the vitality of the hospitality academy. The relatively low means for teaching and industry experience indicate to us that the retirement-related turnover in the hospitality academy predicted by Nebel, Calnan, and Chacko is occurring. While some of the hiring may involve relatively experienced professors moving from one program to another, most of the new hires appear to be in the early stages of their teaching career. There is little indication, however, of the shortage of doctorates that concerned Nebel et al. in 1986. Moreover, in keeping with the position articulated by Powers and Riegel and Wachtel and Pavesic, the combination of a master's degree and industry experience remains an acceptable credential for employment as a hospitality professor.
HOTELAND RESTAURANTADMINISTRATIONQUARTERLY
Because we sought to keep our questionnaire simple, we did not provide a means to cross-tabulate teaching area with degree level. Consequently we cannot report or speculate on whether the master's degree is more c o m m o n in one teaching area or another.We also cannot indicate whether the six new teachers holding only bachelor's degrees offset that absence of academic scholarship by offering considerable industry experience, although that is our expectation. We would encourage further research that employs more intricate statistical methods on the issues we raise here. In closing, we note the mean dollar amount of funded research reported for the 97 newly hired faculty members--S9,400. This figure indicates to us a fairly strong emphasis on research among these new hires. T h e credential p r o b l e m . The lesson in the material we present here is not in the numbers so much as in the principles underlying the figures.We applaud the apparent emphasis on research, because it is a key to the future of hospitality education.What is missing in our survey--and hard to assess--is the connection between credentials, research, and actual excellence in the classroom. An advanced degree does not ensure teaching quality, although a strong research record undoubtedly goes far in that direction. Creating and transmitting information is not about credentials, whether academic or practice-based. The goal of hospitality educators must be to develop and present the materials students need to be effective participants in the hospitality industry. Regardless of the credentials, hospitalityprogram deans and directors must seek out the instructors who can accomplish that job.