If cash-strapped universities want an easy way to save money, Lawrence B. Martin, a professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, has an idea.
By tallying faculty output in areas such as publication rates in scientific journals, Mr. Martin has concluded that there could be as much as $1-billion to $2-billion in extra salaries sloshing around U.S. higher education, needlessly lavished by institutions on faculty whose low teaching loads aren’t justified by their research output.
“If the least scholarly and productive 20 percent of faculty, who are effectively producing little or no scholarship, are receiving reduced teaching loads,” said Mr. Martin, who runs a side business supplying major research institutions with data about their faculty’s productivity, “then the cost of that is staggering.”
Assaults on the teaching productivity of faculty are a longstanding feature of academe. But with universities facing prolonged budget pressures, while armed with new tools to quantify output, the demands are likely to grow.
The current governors of Texas and Florida, for example, have pushed their universities in recent years to improve their measurements of faculty workloads, convinced that stricter expectations for time spent teaching will help balance education budgets.
And California, which is bracing for the possibility that its public universities will soon need to start turning away tens of thousands of qualified students, is being pressed to consider similar steps. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni, in a report this summer, offered California universities a series of suggestions for coping with tighter budgets, including tracking “the number of courses taught and student credit-hours generated by each tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track professor.”
But in terms of using modern computational rigor to carry out such ideas, and then demonstrate real savings, it’s still early days. Many universities have begun collecting better data on faculty performance. Mr. Martin’s company, Academic Analytics, now claims as clients a majority of the membership of the Association of American Universities. So far, however, universities appear to only be starting to figure out how to make extensive use of the new information.
And the initial signs suggest that, while there may be many benefits to universities of better understanding the work being done by faculty members, large-scale cost savings are not likely to be one of them.
Not Big Savings
One of the most well-developed work-load-accountability programs is at Iowa State University, where the traditional system of posttenure review has been bolstered with broad new definitions of what makes a successful faculty member, as well as with positive and negative repercussions for those who perform well above or below expectations. The measures can include teaching and participation in extension or outreach programs, and the rewards can come in the form of salary bonuses. Repercussions can include loss of pay or firing.
The program was driven by Elizabeth Hoffman, a professor of economics who recently retired as provost. The new system, Ms. Hoffman said, is based on a fundamental understanding that every faculty researcher wants to be productive, and on a recognition that traditional definitions emphasizing journal publications don’t necessarily capture all the skills that universities should encourage and value.
Faculty at many universities often feel abandoned by their institutions when their research fails to meet standard measures of scholarly value, said Ms. Hoffman, a former president of the University of Colorado system. And such faculty don’t necessarily feel they’ll be rewarded if they respond by shifting gears to put an emphasis on teaching, she said. “I think we’ve been able to change that at Iowa State,” Ms. Hoffman said.
In its first set of 81 posttenure reviews, 16 faculty members were rated “superior” and only four were rated as performing “below expectations.”
The system’s embrace of measures beyond research can encourage professors to take on more courses, and the prospect of low ratings can lead some faculty to leave, Ms. Hoffman said. But over all, she said, such performance incentives are not something universities should regard as generators of budget savings on the scales suggested by Mr. Martin.
The figures $1-billion to $2-billion figure are “awfully large” numbers, she said.
‘Everyone Has Merit’
Mr. Martin, a former dean of the graduate school at Stony Brook, based his estimate on the assumption that the lowest performing 20 percent of faculty, in terms of research and teaching, represent about 35,000 professors nationwide, at an annual cost of salary and benefits of about $150,000 to $200,000 apiece. But Ms. Hoffman said she believed the lowest-performing faculty are already paid relatively low salaries, and unlikely to get raises.
And the poor economy is further reducing the likelihood of major financial gains from such a system, said Cary Nelson, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and past president of the American Association of University Professors.
A strategy to pressure faculty to teach more courses might have had noticeable budgetary effects back in 1970, Mr. Nelson said, recalling the year he arrived at Urbana-Champaign. At that time, he said, his department had 99 faculty members, and perhaps 30 percent of them “didn’t belong there and weren’t doing productive research,” he said.
Now, however, success rates on research grant applications are low, and the job market is tough, Mr. Nelson said. The English department at Illinois, now down to 60 members, has a system of merit raises tied to research-publication performance, but the tougher competitive environment means it is virtually impossible to single out anyone as exceptionally good, he said. “The problem is that we’ve done good enough hiring that everyone has merit” based on his or her publication rates, Mr. Nelson said. “There’s no one who doesn’t have publication merit in my department.”
Some are not persuaded. Mark S. Schneider, who led the Education Department’s data-collection systems as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that faculty who teach only a couple courses per semester while doing little or no research are essentially stealing from taxpayers and students.
Mr. Schneider, who became vice president of the American Institutes for Research after leaving NCES, said he sees a form of conspiracy among faculty—even the many who work long hours—to avoid pointing out their low-performing colleagues, out of an overriding interest in maintaining friendships and professional alliances.
“Most people would just accept that,” he said, “and not poke a stick at that practice.”
Mr. Martin is sympathetic to that point of view, though he also acknowledges the need for better facts. Part of the problem is that nobody, not even the federal government, has good nationwide data on such basic indicators as how many courses faculty teach per semester. The National Center for Education Statistics used to compile some faculty-workload information, but it stopped about a decade ago because of budget constraints, said Mr. Schneider, who also serves as a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI is a politically conservative think tank that hosted a 2009 conference where Mr. Martin first offered his estimate of $1-billion to $2-billion in cost savings.
Academic Analytics is trying to fill the data void left by NCES, Mr. Martin said. And in the process, he said, it is learning how little universities really know about their own faculty productivity, and how sensitive that information can be. The company used to share its data publicly but stopped several years ago after finding it might have encouraged universities to spend more time touting their relative rankings than quietly considering their problems and their options for improvement.
Most universities have a clear vision for what they’d like their faculty to do, Mr. Martin said, but are handicapped by failing to have an accurate understanding of what their faculty are already doing. “And if you don’t know where you’re starting from,” he said, “the chances of ending up where you want to go are very limited.”
