At the Acton School of Business here, faculty pay is largely based on student evaluations, students are treated as customers, and the faculty’s job is to teach, not to conduct research. If the private M.B.A. school’s co-founder, Jeff Sandefer, has his way, the state’s premier universities will take a page from his lesson plan and adopt similar strategies that he has been pushing behind the scenes with the enthusiastic support of Gov. Rick Perry.
Mr. Sandefer, a third-generation Texas oilman and major campaign contributor to Mr. Perry, has aggressively promoted what he calls the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” for making higher education more cost-effective.
In 2008, Mr. Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, co-sponsored a higher-education forum to advance those ideas.
Among the more controversial proposals are splitting university budgets into separate amounts for research and teaching, awarding faculty bonuses based entirely on student evaluations, and supporting the creation of a new accreditation system that would assess how well institutions deliver on their promises to students.
Since then, Texas A&M University’s regents have taken those suggestions to heart, creating a new faculty-bonus system based solely on student feedback, and giving professors a red or black numerical rating based on what they cost and bring in to the university.
The system’s chancellor, Michael D. McKinney, has served as the governor’s chief of staff and shares his former boss’s enthusiasm for Mr. Sandefer’s ideas.
The proposed changes haven’t made as much headway at the University of Texas, but the recent hiring by that system’s regents of a “special adviser” with ties to Mr. Sandefer and the think tank whose board he sits on has some faculty members and alumni crying foul.
The adviser, Rick O’Donnell, was hired to a new, $200,000 position in February, just weeks after he and Mr. Sandefer invited regents from the University of Texas and Texas A&M to a private lunch to hear from two online-education experts.
The lunch coincided with the annual meeting of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Mr. O’Donnell has written policy papers for the think tank questioning the value of much of the research being conducted in universities.
He was later reassigned to a position that ends in August after questions were raised about his hiring.
During an interview over coffee this week, Mr. O’Donnell insisted that he isn’t the enemy of research that some people believe him to be, based on a few papers he wrote years ago.
Mr. O’Donnell, who worked for Mr. Sandefer for three years and is former secretary of the Colorado Department of Higher Education, does think, however, that universities should do a better job measuring the costs and benefits of the research they sponsor.
“If it’s funded by the university, shouldn’t there be some mechanism for evaluating what it’s producing and whether it should continue to be funded?” he asks.
Debate Over the ‘7 Solutions’
Along with the questions Mr. O’Donnell’s hiring raised in higher-education circles here, Mr. Sandefer’s involvement in promoting his agenda has been the topic of heated discussion ever since news organizations, including The Chronicle, obtained e-mail exchanges between Mr. Sandefer, his father, J.D. (Jakie) Sandefer III, and officials with the Texas A&M system regarding its efforts to put ideas from the Seven Breakthrough Solutions into effect.
In an e-mail dated August 25, the elder Mr. Sandefer, a retired oilman, complained to Jim Schwertner, an A&M regent, about what his son perceived as the board’s sluggish response in implementing the changes, which the chancellor, Mr. McKinney, supports.
“Jeff cannot figure out why A&M has not gone ahead and completed Reform #1, which is of course what we thought Mike was putting together,” he wrote, referring to the proposal to provide a tool for regents to measure faculty teaching performance. He said his son was losing interest because of the board’s lack of action.
“Just tell Jeff to get ready to saddle up,” Mr. Schwertner wrote back. “We are doing a lot more than staff knows about.”
Mr. Schwertner declined to comment on the e-mail exchange when contacted this week
Meanwhile, the chairs of higher-education committees in both the Texas House of Representatives and Senate have expressed concern about the damage the controversy over the governor’s agenda could have on the reputations of the state’s universities.
“Administrators and chancellors and regents should be running institutions,” Dan Branch, a Republican representative from Dallas, said Wednesday. “Think tanks ought to be able to weigh in in the public arena, but they shouldn’t be calling the shots behind the scenes.” After meeting with officials from both Texas A&M and the University of Texas to convey his concerns, he says he received assurances that that was not the case.
Judith Zaffirini, chair of the Senate Higher Education Committee, said regents statewide are being pressured to adopt an untested and questionable platform supported by the governor and Mr. Sandefer.
“One of the frightening aspects of this is the undue influence that Jeff Sandefer has on higher education,” the Laredo Democrat said in an interview late Wednesday. “This isn’t just an A&M or a UT problem—it’s a statewide problem.”
Mr. Sandefer declined to comment, but, in a written statement, cited his experience teaching at the University of Texas and founding both the Acton M.B.A. program, with its customer-driven focus and the Acton Academy, an elementary school in Austin.
“As a teacher and the co-founder of two schools, I have been deeply interested in educational innovation for the last 20 years,” he wrote. “I have had hundreds of conversations, with students, parents, university presidents, and people of all walks of life, about how to improve the quality of teaching and lower the cost of a college degree.”
Richard A. Box, chairman of Texas A&M’s Board of Regents, released a statement this week defending the system’s commitment to teaching, research, and service as it works to carry out the governor’s agenda. Over the past five years, research expenditures have increased 33.7 percent to a record $772-million, Mr. Box said. “This commitment extends to expanded academic programs, faculty hires, and research facilities,” he said.
The Association of American Universities, a group of elite research universities, raised doubts about that commitment in a letter criticizing Texas A&M for its cost/benefit listings of individual professors, as well as the teaching awards based entirely on student evaluations.
The chancellor was undaunted. When asked by a local reporter how he responded to the letter by the association’s president, Robert M. Berdahl, he said he threw the letter away.
