by Jon Lackman | 28 October 2010 | Uncategorized
The Chronicle of Higher Education and The Wall Street Journal have lately been discussing some unusual proposals emanating from Texas A&M University. According to the WSJ:
A 265-page spreadsheet, released last month by the chancellor of the Texas A&M University system, amounted to a profit-and-loss statement for each faculty member, weighing annual salary against students taught, tuition generated, and research grants obtained … The balance sheet sparked an immediate uproar from faculty, who called it misleading, simplistic and crass—not to mention, riddled with errors … States spend about 11% of their general-fund budgets subsidizing higher education … Just over half of all freshmen entering four-year public colleges will earn a degree from that institution within six years … And among those with diplomas, just 31% could pass the most recent national prose literacy test, given in 2003 … The National Governors Association … just formed a commission focused on improving productivity in higher education … Some professors express deep concern that the focus on serving student “customers” and delivering value to taxpayers will turn public colleges into factories.
Journalist Naomi Schaefer Riley wrote:
[T]axpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent … [But] measuring incoming research dollars as part of determining a faculty member’s worth assumes that we want to encourage all faculty members to do research … [N]ow we get into territory where both the university system and its critics get it wrong … No doubt there is useful research coming out of the university system. But plenty could be omitted without a great deal of detriment to students’ education … Proponents of [a new Texas A&M teacher] evaluation system claim that they are pushing for more focus on teaching by measuring how many students the faculty members at Texas A&M instruct, and at what level. Professors receive more credit for teaching higher-level students. But again, that is backward. The idea should be to give senior faculty members more credit for teaching introductory classes … Moreover, the metric entirely ignores teaching quality … Someone—a grown-up, preferably—needs to get into the classroom and watch what is being done there … Assistant deans, deans, provosts, even presidents may not want the task, but they are the ones in the best position both to understand the material being taught and to gauge whether a student sitting in the back row is grasping it.
Meanwhile, Robert Watson, an English professor and (former?) vice-provost at UCLA, argues that “humanities really do make money”:
[At UCLA, the humanities] generate over $59 million in student fees, while spending only $53.5 million (unlike the physical sciences, which came up several million dollars short in that category) … The widely respected Delaware Study of Instructional Costs and Productivity shows the same pattern … We produce a profit despite the irreducibly labor-intensive aspects of much work in the humanities … Class size therefore cannot swell in many of our departments without destroying our essential pedagogical function … Yet because the discretionary budget in humanities goes almost entirely for teaching staff, across-the-board cuts hit our instruction especially hard … The assumption that the humanities are a vestigial parasite within an otherwise self-sufficient institutional body is dangerously wrong.
UCLA president Mark G. Yudof replied: “[Humanities] departments must depend on two funding streams—taxpayer dollars and student fees. And for 20 years now, the State of California has been an unreliable partner, reducing in real dollars its support for each full-time-equivalent student by half. This is the problem.”
If you find all this too depressing to contemplate, allow me to recommend “So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities,” a video, this Simpsons episode, all of PhD Comics, and this Doonesbury strip.
A small correction to an interesting post: Mark Yudof is President of the University of California system, not the UCLA campus.