Photo: Eric James SarmientoThe Texas A&M University system has embarked on a new accountability program. For every department – indeed, for every professor – revenue generated and?cost incurred are calculated; and?profit – the difference – is reported. Each professor is presumably supposed to have a?marginal revenue product above his/her compensation.
Cost (at least the professor’s pay) is easy to calculate.?? Unfortunately, the calculation of revenue includes only outside grants received and tuition revenue.? Any unfunded research, no matter where published, is assumed to have zero value, as is any service. Were this to spread throughout Texas (as I sadly expect it will), any publication – even in the most visible scholarly outlet, even if it affects how the average person thinks about the world – would be valued at zero; so too would an appearance in a nationally visible media outlet.
University administrators facing these incentives would have every reason to construct a faculty of grant-hustlers and low-paid teachers (subject, one might perhaps vainly hope, to some minimum teaching quality).? Despite the traditional UT-A&M rivalry, I hate to see a great institution do this damage to itself.? Worse still, this kind of mindless accounting, if it spreads, would increase still further the widening gulf between the quality of the nation’s best private universities and its top public universities.? Very depressing – especially to someone who has spent 38 years teaching at public universities.
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Letting college professors operate with a taste of real world
commercialism may be an idea whose time has come, although I would suggest doing it a bit differently for economics professors.
It is interesting that some tenured economics professors at major universities, earning maybe $125,000 yearly with full benefits, who can’t be fired and replaced with a lower-paid teachers, are teaching their students the benefits of outsourcing and free trade.
And outsourcing and free trade have caused millions of American workers to lose their jobs. Thanks to free trade, our “industrial heartland” has become the “rust belt.”
But tenured economics professors still preach how great outsourcing and free trade are for the American economy.
But, what if American colleges did away with tenure, and every year they brought in 10,000 English-speaking economics professors from India or elsewhere who were willing to work for maybe as low as $20,000 per year.
Would economics professors then understand the real meaning of outsourcing a little better if their salaries plummeted, or they lost their jobs.
Maybe the unemployed economics professors could retrain and become nurses or get jobs at Walmart.
http://jobsback.com
How can you calculate a professors profit? How are they dividing between professors the grants and tuitions being paid to the college as a whole? From what is written in the article i would have to say that to calculate the revenue is impossible. And maybe its not, but for us to understand how this happens we need some more information. And then after we have the knowledge of how a professors profit is calculated and depending on this, how much they get paid. Then we will be able to see clearly how this will affect us.
We have a similar policy for being granted tenure at SD universities. X publications + Y research dollars + Z students advised = value. If value > min they can receive tenure. This seems to work fairly effectively.
However, as faculty members progress in their careers, their focus shifts away from grants and publications towards mentoring junior faculty and running various parts of their professional societies. These functions are nearly impossible to quantify, but are crucial for the success and ongoing development of departments. If evaluated strictly from revenue most senior faculty would be the first to go.
This is a bit puzzling. Since the university certainly has a revenue stream and expenses and some other cash sloshing around, how is it that the individual faculty has any interest in doing the actual accounting work?
If they want YOUR numbers…LIE like a sinner. If they object, tell them to do it themselves. This bad idea will go away eventually.
My guess is that the “Upper Management” is clueless as usual. Buy them all a copy of Robert Townsend’s “Up the Organization”.
Further hollowing-out of the middle class. Fear not, man of the university, you too will be calculated in terms of the pennies you are worth.
Of course, for the CEO, for the Politician, there is no such calculation made.
Ah, equality, where have you gone?
Seems to me a great mistake is trying to be made. Not all of our endeavors need to be cost justified. Soon we’ll have people trying to charge students more if they earn an “A” in a class because they obviously received a greater educational product than someone who received a lesser grade!
-phil
I believe this system must be modified somehow to account for unfunded research and publications, because these two things definitely add value to the professor’s teaching at the university and need to be rewarded somehow. Rewarding only monetary gains will, like the post says, only incentivize “grant-hustlers and low-paid teachers”, and in the long run probably weaken the institution rather than strengthen it.
“University administrators facing these incentives would have every reason to construct a faculty of grant-hustlers and low-paid teachers.”
What alternative incentive system would you suggest? Neither grant-hustling nor low pay are necessarily predictors of poor teaching or research, are they? How should a university evaluate professors? Publication rate? Graduation rate? Grant income? Some nebulous, peer-determined “quality” factor? I don’t think there’s an easy answer.