Officials of the Texas A&M University system have proposed a new method for ensuring accountability on its 11 campuses. Faculty members across the country, needless to say, are up in arms. But are they reacting for the right reasons? The simple truth is that administrators got one thing right—but two crucial issues wrong. Before we just storm the gates, perhaps we should sort those issues out.
Consider the proposal. Each member of the faculty will be evaluated according to three criteria: salary, dollars brought in through research, and money generated through teaching. Peter Hugill, a professor of geography at Texas A&M, called the measures "silly" on the Huffington Post. Adam J. Myers III, of the university's Mays Business School, suggested to the local news media that the raw numbers were an "insufficient" basis on which to evaluate professors.
Professors far and wide are still angry about last January's announcement that the system plans to award faculty members up to $10,000 in bonuses on the basis of student evaluations. The professor-turned-New York Times-opinionator Stanley Fish weighed in on that plan in his column, suggesting that the state is "currently in a contest with Arizona and South Carolina for the title 'most retrograde.'" He concluded: "If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it."
Michelle Moosally, an associate professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, got to the heart of academic sentiment when she told the Houston Chronicle: "Academia is highly specialized. We don't mean to be exclusive. We are a public-serving group of people. But at the same time, that public isn't well-enough aware of what we do and who we are to evaluate us."
The fact that the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation has laid the groundwork for these proposals has not helped their popularity among academics. But the think tank is correct that taxpayers deserve to know how their money is being spent. Public-university operating costs in Texas have gone up more than 60 percent in the last two decades, even after adjusting for inflation, and professors are among the state's highest-paid public employees. The state needs accountability measures, and they must be enforced by a party other than the faculty, who, it could easily be charged, have a conflict of interest. That's what Texas A&M got right.
But Hugill is right, too. These accountability requirements are silly. First, 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. In fact, if the State of Texas wanted to get its money worth out of its public-education system, voters should demand that professors return to the classroom. Asking how much money professors bring in through research is like opening up a fruit stand and asking how much money employees bring in through the sale of cellphones. Cellphone sales aren't the business. They aren't the mission. And they're distracting employees from selling fruit.
But now we get into territory where both the university system and its critics get it wrong.
According to a recent report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, students at West Texas A&M University can graduate without taking a single course in literature, a foreign language, economics, or mathematics. Students on the Kingsville campus can go without composition, literature, economics, and math. And at Texas A&M International University, they get through with no foreign language (how international!), no literature, and no economics. Are those colleges producing the kind of educated citizenry the state wants? The answer is no, and the proposed accountability measures don't even begin to address the question. What's more, none of those campuses is graduating even 40 percent of their students.
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. For instance, Hugill's most recent contributions have included a chapter on "Transitions in Hegemony: A Theory Based on State Type and Technology" and the article "German Great-Power Relations in the Pages of Simplicissimus, 1896-1914." Moosally's master's thesis was titled "Resumptive Pronouns in Modern Standard Arabic: A Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Account," and her current research interests include "interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest [and] cross-linguistic patterns of agreement."
Moosally is right about one thing: The public isn't well aware of what she and many of her colleagues do. But they should be. That is not to say that the public will be able to understand what goes on in all of the chemistry laboratories in Texas. But Moosally teaches English at a college that is not exactly tasked with performing cutting-edge research. Houston-Downtown's mission is to provide "educational opportunities and access to students from a variety of backgrounds including many first-generation college students."
According to a 2004 survey by The Chronicle, 71 percent of Americans thought it was very important for colleges to prepare undergraduates for careers, while only 56 percent thought it was very important for colleges to "discover more about the world through research." The survey doesn't specify what kind of research, though most people outside the ivory tower might assume that the question meant hard scientific research, not humanities or social-science research. One indication of the worth people place on social-science research is apparent from the survey's findings: Only 35 percent of respondents felt it was very important for colleges to "provide useful information to the public on issues affecting their daily lives." (Imagine what they might think about research on information that wasn't useful.)
It's not just that higher education should be held accountable. Nor is it just that too many faculty members don't even want to hear that 'A' word. What Texas A&M officials have also missed is that faculty members must be held accountable for what they teach.
So on to the teaching proposal. Proponents of the new 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. Freshmen and sophomores are in most need of engaging, experienced faculty members who will help them understand and perhaps even become excited about a particular subject. Instead senior faculty members are being rewarded for gravitating toward small, upper-class and graduate-level seminars, where most of them prefer to be anyway.
Moreover, the metric entirely ignores teaching quality. Who cares how many "student hours" professors put in if they are not particularly good teachers anyway? Faculty members object to student evaluations, though most department chairs and administrators I've spoken with suggest that such assessments are a good gauge at both the top and the bottom of the profession. Students know a really bad professor, and they know a really good one. But they're not particularly helpful at evaluating all those in the middle. It is likely that students hold grudges against tough professors and reward the easy or predictable ones, as Fish has suggested. Perhaps evaluations by recent alumni would be a way of getting around this problem. Imagine receiving a questionnaire five years out of college asking: "Which courses do you think have had the greatest impact on your intellectual and career development?"
Ultimately there needs to be a systemic solution to the problem of teacher quality. Someone—a grown-up, preferably—needs to get into the classroom and watch what is being done there. And senior faculty members should not be exempt from regular classroom visits. 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. Real accountability takes time. There is no easy formula for getting around that.
Comments
1. richpa - September 08, 2010 at 07:57 am
Making fun of research based on article titles? There's thoughtful evaluation for you.
2. english_ivy - September 08, 2010 at 09:34 am
So excuse me, but somehow an English classroom and a non-research intensive school has nothing complex going on? While a chemestry lab might be too complex for people to understand?
Hmm... nice bias.
The simple answer is to return to the days of yore when most profs were tenured, when work loads were down, when scholars were free, and encouraged, to be less realistic and more idealistic.
The University system worked great for decades (except that women and non-whites couldn't get in). That problem relatively speaking solved we seem to be going about trying to destroy what was, otherwise, a great system.
Chasing after ideological ghosts.
Tenured professors, eggheads, liberal intelligentsia, academics, are not inherently lazy, dishonest, or uncaring about their society or their students.
The blanket assumption that that is the case, based upon a the occasional bad apple is like painting all of Islam with the bush of terrorists, or all Southern Christians with the brush of one wacko burning Korans.
Professors, in fact, in general anyone who teachers at a college or university, is very likely a wildly qualified, competent, committed, person engaged in a career that is their life's work. A career that next to their family is the only thing in their life that really matters.
This suggestion that folks with PhDs, folks who have spent 10 years as students before taking their tenured place at the head of the class are somehow unruly, education hooligans is based upon the anecdotal and hair brained response by admin folk.
The hair brained-ness is far more about the effort of occasionally much less qualified, educated, and committed people to "govern" professors.
In short, what is going on is the classic, the overcompensating syndrome of the insecure manager.
Also, admins are trying to make up reasons that they need to exist.
Professors research and teach. They may not always do either very well, but they will generally do both earnestly.
This is all complicated by the blood suckers trying to squeeze financial blood from the university stone.
Sooner or later the universities will crumble.
Yes, they are somewhat inefficient.
But it is only recently that "efficiency" has become such an important value--and the university tradition is very very old.
Is inefficiency so bad?
Loving your kids might be inefficient, but it is not bad.
Not everything must be entirely rational, entirely instrumental, sometimes things just need to be a little messy.
That is ok.
Messiness is always there really anyway, we just decide which messes we want to see.
3. scottrj - September 08, 2010 at 09:41 am
I agree with richpa, those seem like cheap shots on Moosally especially. As a linguist, the titles of her work make perfect sense and sound quite interesting. In fact, "interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest" sounds like it aligns very well with the mission of Houston-Downtown, because that sounds like work trying to bridge the discipline of formal linguistics (which is admittedly often esoteric) and the practical educational issues of whether grammatical instruction interacts with students' interest and ability in writing. I'm part of a social science research institute tasked with tackling immediate, critical, real-world problems across the US government, and I get the chance to see every day that social science and humanities research is NOT just ivory tower frivolity, though I would agree that that's certainly the dominant popular perception. I'm just disturbed to see this opinion expressed here.
I agree with some of the general ideas in the rest of the article, including the need for careful approaches to teaching evaluation instead of counter-productive knee-jerk policies, and many colleges could benefit from a re-alignment of priorities and reward systems for faculty to encourage good teaching. But the comments attacking research seem completely out of place, especially the implication that the quality/value of research should be judged by whether the titles of papers are immediately transparent to someone that knows nothing about the field being addressed by the paper.
4. faculty21 - September 08, 2010 at 10:13 am
This article makes the same mistake that has driven this initiative. The writer suggests that "In fact, if the State of Texas wanted to get its money worth out of its public-education system, voters should demand that professors return to the classroom. " Actually, research overhead drives about 50% of A&M's budget. If you think about this in purely economic terms (which I think is a poor model, but let's follow that train of thought), then we want fewer teaching hours for faculty and more research to generate income. Students pay 3% of university costs and the state pays 24%. Yes, teaching is a crucial part of what faculty do. But unless the state or students want to contribute 50% of the budget, then research must occur.
I agree with the previous comments regarding the anti-intellectual tone of this article. The attack on humanities research that you suggest in your article seems fairly juvenile.
5. morrisville - September 08, 2010 at 11:51 am
When you hire Ph.D.s as educators, you shouldn't be surprised that they want to do research. Besides their teaching, the profession's rewards all push in that direction. Research brings prestige to the campus, is relatively easy for administrators to measure (albeit in a flawed way), and is valued by our peers. Obscure research is largely incomprehensible to non-specialists and easy to mock, but this is what many faculty like to do.
For all the talk about rewarding good teaching, I've yet to see it effectively done by administration or society at large. Teaching awards are sparse and may be awarded for popularity. I agree that if a school's mission is teaching, that's what faculty should devote their efforts to. Now, show me how college faculty get rewarded for it?
--RAD
6. thomasreaganmitchell - September 08, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Inaccuracies: Texas A&M International University (TAMIU)does indeed have a foreign language requirement for all students to be fully admitted to the university: 1 year of college level foreign language (through course work or proficiency exam credits) or the high school equivalent (3 years in the same language). Most B.A. degrees require an additional year of foreign language study. TAMIU also requires a literature course as part of its core curriculum. However, It does not, as the article notes, require an economics course in all degrees.
7. davi2665 - September 08, 2010 at 02:01 pm
Faculty 21- I do not buy your contention that research overhead drives about 50% of the Texas A&M budget. That is not permissible by the laws which govern overhead on federal grants. Overhead is for shared costs (pooled costs) in RESEARCH, for specifically negotiated items carefully scrutinized and itemized, as you may recall from the Stanford woes (Dr. Kennedy) several years ago of misusing overhead. Overhead cannot be used as a slush fund, as a fund to hire new non-research faculty not directly involved in the specifically funded research, as a source of building new programs, new buildings, or hiring new administrators. To do so would be fraudulent. Overhead use is very carefully evaluated, and can ONLY be used for its intended and contractual purpose. Even those institutions that pretend to "return overhead" to investigators or departments cannot really do so. They must spend the actual overhead for the negotiated shared research costs. What they CAN do is to identify an amount of money equivalent to the overhead sum (derived from philanthropy, tuition, clinical revenue in a medical center, or any other non-NIH source) and give that to the individual laboratory or department, pretending to have "returned" the overhead.
The research direct costs pay for faculty research salaries, technician salaries, postdoc and predoc salaries, of personnel actually working on the specific aims of the awarded projects (and not for any other purpose) and the actual approved costs (by NIH counsels which approve the funding of research awards)of doing the research. That can amount to a sizable portion of the total medical school/university budget. Many research intensive departments have 10x the number of faculty needed to handle the teaching and administrative roles of that department, and basically function as a division of NIH research on a medical school or university campus, which drives the total budget. These funds, however, and the accompanying overhead, are NOT usable for instruction, undergraduate or graduate student (medical student) course work, or program expansion. Faculty need to get a realistic idea of how research funding and overhead actually come about and how they are used, rather than making assertions that are not even remotely correct.
8. 11159995 - September 08, 2010 at 02:22 pm
There is a lot wrong with the blunt quantitative measures that Texas A&M is trying to implement, and several are pointed out in this article. The metric of research money will inevitably skew evaluations in favor of the sciences against the humanities and the nonquantitative social sciences (which do not benefit from NSF grants) like most of political theory. But I do agree that there is an overemphasis on research relative to teaching, and as one who worked for over forty years in university press publishing and evaluated thousands of proposals and manuscripts, I can attest that there is too much mediocre research being funded that the world does not need (as the acceptance rate of 10% for top presses and journals suggests). Research is very important as an adjunct to teaching, however, and professors should be encouraged to keep up with the latest and best research in their fields even if they are not actively pursuing research themselves. They cannot excel in teaching otherwise. As for evaluating teachers, I like the idea of surveying recent graduates who have enough relevant knowledge but also more distance and less vested interest in evaluating teachers. But how about also tapping into what will be an increasingly large and sophisticated population of retired people, who might enjoy spending some time in a classroom evaluating teachers for modest compensation to supplement their retirement income? Many of them would also have expertise in subject areas enabling them to produce more informed evaluations than current undergraduates or even recent graduates. They could submit their resumes and be selected as evaluators for specific courses accordingly. --- Sandy Thatcher
9. glord - September 08, 2010 at 02:34 pm
Interestingly the author uses social science research to make his argument that no one cares about social science research
10. mozman - September 08, 2010 at 02:41 pm
I can certainly believe that research overhead accounts for 50% of the University budget. I'm not in Texas, but half of the operating budget at my institution comes from overhead also - our negotiated overhead rate is over 60%.
This article fails in that the author assumes that the driving mission of Universities is teaching. This is true at SLACs and teaching institutions, but at a research-intensive place like A&M, the primary mission of the University is the generation of new knowledge - i.e. research. To think otherwise is to make the place a glorified community college.
11. jffoster - September 08, 2010 at 04:50 pm
Interesting that the author Naomi S Riley singles out the Master's Thesis of Michele Moosally for ridicule and as an example of reasearch "that could be omitted". Does Author Riley know what resumptive pronouns are? Does she know what phrase structure grammar is? Does she know what the term 'head' in "Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar" refers to? One suspects not. And what, Author Riley, would you have had her do her MA thesis on?
As to Moosolly's current research interests, ""interactions between grammar knowledge and writing abilities/interest [and] cross-linguistic patterns of agreement."", I wonder why it didn't occur to Riley that, as Commentor (3) Scottrij pointed out, this could have a good deal of bearing on the teaching of writing.
I wonder also why Author Riley didn't single out a physicist working on "String" Theory. After all, I'll bet she couldn't even get "35 percent of respondents" to say they thought it was important for professors to play with string. Shouldn't they just teach classes and leave playing with string to the cat?
12. rrowlett - September 08, 2010 at 05:59 pm
Here we go again in a portion of the commentary with the false dichotomy of choosing between teaching and research. Do we still have problems recognizing that (1) it's hard to profess anything if you don't know anything in your scholarly field (or at least anything current), and (2) teaching and research are synergistic for both faculty and students.
Indeed undergraduate research is not only good for scholarship, it is also a high-impact educational practice as well. Measuring faculty worth by the number of students served in the classroom will only drive caustic competition among faculty to build teaching loads out of the largest, easiest-to-teach classes, at the expense of high-impact engagement in faculty-student collaborative research.
13. lopedevega - September 09, 2010 at 09:29 am
A glaring error of fact, delivered in a censorious and sarcastic tone, always calls into question a writer's every observation. Naomi Schafer Riley most assuredly did not look very far or think at all when she slammed Texas A&M International University, allegedly because we do not require a foreign langugage, literature, or economics. TAMIU is located in Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border. 85% of the people in our county report that Spanish is the language of preference at home. The region is bilingual, binational, bicultural. Hence the "international" in our name. Should a student enter TAMIU with fewer that 3 years of foreign language study in high school, we require one year of study at the University. Our CORE requirements include two courses in English composition, followed by an additional course in literature required and one more possible as an elective. It is true that, depending upon one's chosen field, a student may elect not to take a course in economics.
It is to be hoped that the publisher of the promised book on tenure will employ a rigorous fact-checker. Miss Riley badly needs this support. Most disturbing: Does "The Chronicle" check facts before publishing an article?
Ray M. Keck III, President. Texas A&M International University
14. lmcmillen - September 09, 2010 at 01:13 pm
The report on Texas A&M International University's core curriculum, which Riley cites in her article, can be viewed here: http://www.whatwilltheylearn.com/schools/3370
The university's description of its core requirements is here: http://www.tamiu.edu/catalog/current/acadreg-und.shtml
According to the university's 2010-11 catalog, the humanities requirement can be fulfilled with a course in film history.
Liz McMillen
Editor
The Chronicle Review
15. ugahistory - September 10, 2010 at 08:37 pm
"[I]f the State of Texas wanted to get its money worth out of its public-education system, voters should demand that professors return to the classroom." Now that's an enlightened statement, coming from a publication aimed at academics. Did Fox News just buy the Chronicle?
The research mission of universities and the research responsiblities of faculty at research institutions isn't a function of personal preference, indulgence or straightforward economics. It's basic to what universities are for, and essential to their educational mission.
Research publication is a marketplace of ideas, like any other marketplace. Stupid or pointless work either never gets sold (published) in the first place, or disappears quickly. The fact that an occasional pet rock shows up on the shelves needn't alarm Ms. Riley to the degree that it apparently does.
More importantly, where do Ms. Riley and the myriad others who echo and re-echo this tired old "get them professors teaching and not researching" saw suppose that the material to be taught in classrooms comes from? Pushing faculty at research institutions away from publication only means less "consumer" choice in this marketplace, turning the "manufacturing" end of things over to an even smaller number of producers. That's not a recipe for quality. And in the current fiscal climate, when mid-career moves are all but impossible, it would mean that the future state-of-the field in most subjects would be determined by the handful of scholars in each field who had the right timing and the right aura of future promise coming out of graduate school to secure jobs at Harvard and Yale.
That's not a recipe for excellence in the pursuit of knowledge, just one for further gutting the once-premier American university system.
16. fcpiii - September 15, 2010 at 05:23 pm
jjfoster might want to check Dr Moosally's references before mounting a vigorous defense of the improtance of her research. According to Google Scholar her last "publication" (a conferance procedings only) was over 10 years ago; no references that I can see of peer reviewed journal articles, and less than 30 citations since 1997.
Taxpayers (especially in Texas) can be notoriously short sighted in understanding the importance of basic research, but aren't they justified in questioning the support of research that has minimal impact?
Dr Moosally appears to have many other accomplishments if Google can be believed.. President of the Faculty Senate, good teacher ratings on Ratemyprofessor.com ( she apparently teacher at least three courses) and runs the collegebowl team.
There is a role for all of this in an effective University, but faculty need to be aware that taxpayers(and parents at private universities)will demand that their money is being well spent... The public is certainly able to recognize hard work and accomplishments , even if we cannot quickly recognize the issues involved in specialized research.
Unfortunatly, University of Houston- Downtown does not require CV's to be posted online, apparently, making it very difficult to identify other accomplishments.
17. alexmcintosh44 - September 18, 2010 at 08:05 am
My teaching makes extensive use of the research and others like me perform. If my position was re-defined as teaching only, I would continue to rely on the research of others. Suppose, however, all universities revert to a teaching-only institutions. What would we then teach? The research that was done before the 'great' transition. What would that make those still teaching? History professors.
18. universityprof - September 20, 2010 at 09:25 pm
No one has ever suggested doing away with research. Research is and always will be part of the work of an academic. Research, teaching, and service are all important. The problem today is that research is the cart pulling the horse. Teaching is the primary mission of a university; teaching should have the highest value. Currently teaching and service are almost irrelevant in the reward structure. People are complaining about the A&M Chancellor; people should be complaining about the long line of administrators who led us into our current mess, one in which many of my collegues view undergraduate students as irritating pests who get in the way of their all important research. On the other hand, who can blame the profs, they are simply profit-seeking self-interested parts of the academic market system, at least if you think the state-run educational system is a free market. Cynics might say that self-interested administrators look for any rationale possible to pay a few teachers increasingly higher salaries to justify increasing the pay of administrators themselves. Administrators do seem to do at least as well as "top" researchers.
19. dr_mcmom - September 23, 2010 at 06:35 pm
Universityprof. I'm saddened to read your view of research faculty as "profit-seeking self-interested." Wow.
Consider these: 1) Research is a critical mission at a research university - otherwise, it wouldn't be a ...RESEARCH university. 2) From your comments, it seems you view teaching to occur in classrooms. Teaching AND learning DOES happen in the context of research. Indeed, the major benefit of undergraduate education at a research university is the unparalleled opportunity to climb Bloom's Taxonomy and USE what was learned in the classroom. From what the undergrads in my lab tell me, it results in an experience that makes salient ALL the abstract things they "learned" in the classroom.
Now, that said - I'd be ticked off if I were at a teaching institution and learned about a bias toward research productivity. THAT is counter to the mission and would need to be corrected. But I find it difficult to understand your position - it's like going to Disneyland and complaining that there are too many rides instead of exhibits. Ya want exhibits, go to a museum!
If I come across as flippant or disrespectful, that is not my intention and I apologize in advance (do let me know). I'm trying to understand you . . . but I don't quite get it.
Peace!