Some professors who have taken a closer look at the vast file of data on faculty productivity released last week by the University of Texas system have found inaccuracies and discrepancies that they say further underscores why the information, which the system readily acknowledged was in draft form, shouldn’t have been released.
The salary information for individual faculty members that was included in the 821-page spreadsheet the system made public seems to be attracting the most attention from critics, who have called it flat-out erroneous in some instances. And at a time when the salaries of all public employees are in lawmakers’ cross hairs, professors are bracing themselves for the fallout that is likely to stem from some numbers that seem inflated.
“My salary on the spreadsheet is $30,000 higher than my annual contract salary,” a lecturer in the University of Texas system wrote in an e-mail message. He did not want to be named because of his status as a non-tenure-track employee. “Other details are correct, but the number 99 percent of people will want to see is not. The spreadsheet says that it’s me, but it is not me.”
The lecturer said his complaints about the data are ironic because he and most of his colleagues “are generally supportive” of greater openness when it comes to the state’s public institutions. Indeed, other faculty members have said the release of the data itself is not the issue, but rather its raw and unanalyzed state that leaves too much open to interpretation.
Inadequacies Cited
System officials said the decision to release the data even though it was in draft form and included many gaps resulted from receiving multiple requests for it from news-media outlets under the state’s open-records laws. After noting the data’s shortcomings, in a disclaimer cautioning that the information was “incomplete and has not been fully verified or cross-referenced,” the system released it “in the spirit of openness and transparency” because much of the data was already public anyway, said Anthony P. de Bruyn, director of public affairs.
In addition to salary information, the system released data on course-enrollment numbers, course loads, how much grant money individual faculty members won in 2009-10, the average grade awarded by professors, the share of time faculty members spent on research and teaching, and their average student-evaluation score.
Thomas Kelley, a spokesman for the Texas attorney general’s office, said in an e-mail that the state’s Public Information Act “applies to records available on the date of request,” even if the university system thought the records being requested were incomplete. Mr. Kelley said system officials had two options: release the data available at the time or request a ruling from the attorney general’s office about whether the incomplete data must be released.
Mr. de Bruyn said the data, which spans the system’s nine academic campuses, was collected mostly at the institutional level. Yet professors have noticed some mistakes in the data that seem to point to a more-distant process.
For instance, Renee Rubin, an associate professor in the department of language, literacy, and intercultural studies at the University of Texas at Brownsville, said she and her department chair were listed in the wrong department. “So then you begin to wonder what else is wrong,” Ms. Rubin says.
Apples and Oranges
And although her salary was accurate, she said, the data doesn’t explain a key point: Faculty are on nine-month contracts. Some salaries are reported that way, professors said. But Ms. Rubin’s salary, as listed, might seem inflated by about $10,000, because the salary information includes what she was paid for teaching during the summer.
“People would look at that and think I make $69,000 or so for nine months and that’s not accurate,” said Ms. Rubin, who will be retiring at the end of May.
Such incomplete data have also triggered dissension in individual departments. A professor who posted a comment in response to a Chronicle story about the data’s release wrote that if the salary numbers are “in any way accurate, the data also reveals that the administration has been lying to us every time we ask for a raise. Several of my colleagues and I are furious, and I sure wouldn’t want to be the dean or the chair right now.”
One Chronicle commenter pointed out that some faculty members named in the spreadsheet are not who they seem—and that appears to be reflected in their pay. Nathan Crandell, a technical writer in Georgia, said he looked through the data and randomly picked out two professors whose salaries intrigued him. One of them, G.D. Saxon, was listed as a tenured associate professor in the history department at the University of Texas at Arlington and the spreadsheet said he earned $142,100 in 2009-10. “You always hear that history professors are underpaid so I wondered why in the world this one was making so much money,” said Mr. Crandell, who said he had compared Mr. Saxon’s pay to other associate professors in his department who made substantially less. “I wondered how long had he been teaching, where did he go to school, does he publish every year?”
Mr. Crandell said some “quick Internet research” revealed that Mr. Saxon is also the dean of libraries at the Arlington campus. “That explains a little bit more about his salary,” Mr. Crandell said. “But I had to go find that. Not all the information is there, and I just think it’s very dangerous to release the data too quickly.”
