Posted on 12/26/2003 7:05:38 AM PST by tom paine 2
Edited on 12/26/2003 7:32:01 AM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The Illinois Board of Higher Education has launched a controversial examination of faculty productivity, a move that has riled professors at public universities throughout the state.
Having challenged university administrators to pare costs and increase their own productivity, board Chairman James Kaplan wants to take the same look at college faculty.
However, once you grant tenure, there is ZERO leverage you have over a tenured faculty member, unless they are totally incompetent. Pay raises are so minor as to fail to affect teacher productivity; and if you "punish" poor teachers by giving them MORE classes, you are actually punishing the students.
The problem arises because after 6+ years you get to know people and hate to "fire" them, so you (not me, but most) look for "reasons" to justify keeping them on. It's all very humane for the instructor, and deadly for the students.
There is a third factor that plays into the evals, and that is "service," which is to say "networking" on faculty committees that, IMHO, accomplishes nothing. I know, many of my colleagues would disagree, and have solid arguments. I serve on as few committees as possible; publish more than the rest of the department put together in some years; and always have teaching evals well above the std. deviation. I argue that I CAN do these things BECAUSE I don't serve on these stupid, time-sucking committees.
Anyway, bottom line: it's nearly impossible for the state government in any way to fix a "productivity" measure for faculty, esp. once they are already tenured.
When I had enough of not eating, I completely re-tooled myself, got a Ph.D. (after having terrible grades as an undergrad) and got jobs teaching when everyone said there were no jobs. As a white male writing on American history, I nevertheless managed to get not one, but two job offers. It is possible, which is what I tell grad students who are serious about "making it" in the profession.
It's a little different at the University of Chicago, where you have Nobel Prize winners teaching the undergraduates. State bureaucracy is inherently corrupt, I fear.
Once tenured, a bad prof is effectively impossible to remove, so focus on the untenured profs.
I went to college in Illinois. I deliberately avoided the U of I, because it had a reputation for letting grad-students teach the undergrads. Full professors were too busy with their research and grad-classes to spend much time with the undergrads. I hope that's not the kind of "productivity" they're looking for.
The college I chose was considered a teaching, rather than research, university, so professors who liked to teach handled the majority of the undergrad load.
Unfortunately, I have heard that changed a bit, and only a few of the excellent tenured faculty who taught me still remain.
Not true where states and universities have enacted "post-tenure review;" such as the University of South Carolina.
It effectively abolishes tenure; a failed periodic review, leads to "rehabilitation" or revocation of tenure and dismisal.
While it is true that there are cases of egregious abuse of tenure, its abolishment leads to a "piece-work" mentality. And, what they want when they say "productivity" is grants (government welfare) not necessarily scholarship or excellence in teaching.
Every level of administration "skims" from extramural grants, so in an era of declining state funding, that, literally, is the "bottom line."
I would agree and go one step farther.
bottom line: it's impossible for ANY government in any way to fix a "productivity" measure for ANYTHING.
Have to agree. This is especially true at the federal government level. There have been various half-hearted efforts to implement evaluation systems (e.g., merit pay) that supposedly rate productivity by comparing levels of achievement vs. specific objectives. However, the systems are easily gamed, and largely defeated by, wily bureaucrats.
Probably true, but are you tenured? Don't new profs have to do some amount of service to have a well-rounded portolio for tenure review?
I'm a doctoral student serving a 2nd year on a major committee in my school. It hasn't been bad, but last year I was on 2 big committees and it almost killed me because there was so much work to do outside of the committee before we even had the meetings. It was hard to keep up w/my classwork.
Measured, of course, by how many of their students become top-notch professionals.
I suspect that one might say that "research" would suffer but I would say so what. Are we talking about education or research. I resent that the parents are carrying the burden of research through the vehicle of tuition, and I further resent that the taxpayers are continally subjected to the guilt transference of supporting the schools because it is "for the children." Most of the research is nonsense anyway and doesn't have an economic valuable result and if it does it should find its own sugardaddy and leave the students and taxpayers alone.
If I were king I would make the profs. stand or fall on their own merit and productivity. In other words tough S**T.
Hey, I'm NO FAN of student evals---it's like letting the inmates run the asylum---but I do think that if ALL YOUR CLASSES say on evaluations that a) they "didn't learn much" and that they "wouldn't recommend the class to someone else" or that you are, in their view, a "poor professor," then something is up. And studies have shown there is no correlation between high student evals and easy grading. Tough graders routinely get good evals if they are good teachers.
In the perfect world, a combination of ADMINISTRATOR review (not "peers") and student evals would be optimal. I have proposed a system at our school where anyone with 2/3 of their student evals more than 1 standard deviation below the department average should not be given tenure. This assumes that everyone will have a bad class now and then. However, I also open the door to "peer review," but it must contain very specific comments, and comments like "students sleeping" or "not engaged" should be warning flags.
The other benefit of tenure, though, is that research, by its nature, takes a great deal of time and you don't always show results right away. A more rapid "productivity review" I think would punish people doing brilliant and sophisticated (but time-consuming) work.
This, for example, is the debate between disciplines when, say, economists look at historians' work. It takes very little for an economist to formulate a hypothesis, get some grad students to accumultate the data, and run it through computers. They can get a brief article out in no time. But try, for example, studying antebellum bank records in the South, like I did, where I had to read documents that were in poor condition and written in a nearly foreign hand . . in EVERY SINGLE SOUTHERN STATE, all for a period of about 30 years. Well, that takes a little bit of time. So tenure has its uses.
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