Wall Street Journal editorial, Grading the Ivory Towers: Texas A&M Shocks the Professoriate With Cost-Benefit Analysis:
There’s a memorable scene in the movie “Ghostbusters” when Dan Akroyd says in horror to Bill Murray after they lose their jobs at a university: “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”
The same can’t always be said of universities, where costs are rising faster even than health care. Now, a growing number of states are demanding that their taxpayer-funded universities show evidence of improvement in student performance. Perhaps the most aggressive school is Texas A&M, which is trying to measure professor productivity and performance. Given the reaction from some in the faculty lounges, you’d think Texas had banned football. …
Texas A&M is starting to ask such basic questions as: Is that psychology or engineering professor worth his $125,000 salary? The school is trying to answer this question by applying a cost-benefit analysis of how much each professor earns in salary per student taught. The school also uses such metrics of value added as research dollars brought in by a professor and student evaluations of how well a teacher performs in a classroom. For high-achieving professors, the new pay-for-performance standards offer bonuses of up to $10,000 a year.
The academic reaction to the plan has been furious. Nationally, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) calls the system of “balancing revenues and costs” both “simplistic and very dangerous.” Peter Hugill, a professor of geology and the head of the AAUP chapter at Texas A&M, has denounced the new analysis as “a weapon” to hang over the head of professors that is making “Texas a laughing stock.” The faculty is pressuring the university to lower the bonuses to $1,500 and spread the money to more teachers. …
No doubt the Texas A&M system is a work in progress and will be tweaked as it gains experience in evaluating its professors’ classroom performance and contributions to the university. … [W]e hope the school’s regents persist with this effort and that the reformers succeed in their efforts to spread pay-for-performance accountability to other public universities.
