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Ed. This story is important for two reasons.
First, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, is also a former President of Texas A&M and rumored to be a candidate for the job of UW President.
Second, in my experience, salaries at universities are low if we compare them with comparable salaries for people trained to the same level in the private sector. In my own field, Pathology, private sector pathologist earn up to a million dollars a year .. far more than the most prestigious UW pathology prof. People accept the difference because they value tenure and the freedom to study and teach.
I find it odd that we are told that the Emmerts and Mandenhalls, University Presidents who portray themselves as CEOs, justify their salaries because of the comparative market for CEOs. The same thing is true for college football coaches.
condensed from an excellent post by Amanda Fairbanks at Huffington Post
A newspaper in College Station Texas, filed an open records request that spells out dangers facing even the most prestigious faculty. They requested and obtained a preliminary copy of a spreadsheet prepared by Frank Ashley, vice chancellor of academic affairs for Texas A&M . Ashley’s spreadsheet listed faculty members according to how much money they made or lost for the university. The analysis was strictly based in cash flow .. tuition, grant income, gifts vs. salary and other costs.
Of the 50 highest compensated faculty members, only five appeared to be in the black and earning their keep. The rest were crimson.
Texas Governor Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an Austin-based conservative think tank, came out in favor of Ashley’s metric. The data revealed, for example, that while one faculty member at Texas A&M earned more than $500,000 each year, the average counterpart at Texas’ College Station campus made around $120,000.
(Click here to download the spreadsheet, provided courtesy of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.)
Ashley’s spreadsheet was not meant for release. However, Ashley has now assembled a second appraisal of professor productivity, using data from the current academic year. It’s a move he predicts other schools, particularly in Texas, are likely to follow.
“With the economy where it is right now, everyone wants to make sure they’re getting the most out of what they’re paying for. There’s this widespread belief that the professorate is a nice job,” he says. “We want to make sure that we’re being transparent and good stewards of the money that taxpayers provide for us.””
The new spreadsheet has not yet been released to the public.
TEXAS vs TEXAS A&M POLITICS
University of Texas President William Powers Jr. — A&M’s arch rival — is opposed to the use of such bean counting at his Austin campus.
“Yes, we are cutting budgets and resources are scarce. And yes, we need to be productive and efficient in all that we do and we are in favor of doing things in more cost-effective ways. But we need to do it in a way that recognizes how research is done.”
ARE METRICS GOOD OR EVEN POSSIBLE?
As an example of how hard it can be to quantify the value of research, Powers cites University of Texas Professor John B. Goodenough’s discovery of the materials that make lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, which hinged on the decade-long, dedicated scholarship of his colleagues — work that appeared profitless for a very long time.
Ed. Assessing academic research in any “objective” sense is likely impossible. Stanley Cohen, a scientist at Vanderbilt, won the Nobel Prize after thirty years of work that went largely unnoticed until we began to see it as central to tumor biology. Cohen’s work, now the foundation for Vanderbilot’s growth as a research center, could not have been valuated most of that time and would never have been done in an induststrial setting.
Before anyone gets too excited about any such metrics, I suggest looking at one simple fact. American universities rank far above those of the rest of the world. Within the USA, top ranked Universities are central not only the “tech” economy but to law and management jobs that populate Goldman Sachs, Time, Inc, or the large Insurance Companies.
Assessing teaching itself is complicated because of the diversity of options in college. Scott E. Carrell, an economist at the University of California, Davis, used data from the US Airforce Academy to avert this problem. Students at the Air Force Academy follow a prescribed curriculum.
Carnell’s study found that neither final test scores nor student-authored class critiques are very good predictors of a professor’s effectiveness.
All of which leads to an interesting question: If a faculty member’s effectiveness can’t be measured at most schools, do we subject what we can calculate — say, a professor’s compensation — to greater scrutiny? Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, an outspoken critic of Ashley. describes the spreadsheet as absurd and even dangerous:
“People love concreteness and it’s a very attractive thing, but this measurement is such a narrow aspect of what we do that it misses the overwhelming majority of everything else.”
On the other side, Andrew Hacker, who’s taught political science at Queens College for more than 40 years, wonders what a professor at Yale University, who makes $817 an hour and gets every third year off, does to earn such a high salary. One Hacker describe how they calculated such a high hourly rate.
“Yes, I know they’re going to talk about grading papers and committee assignments, but I’ve seen enough of the top professors to know they never change their lectures, their graduate students do all their grading, and the committee stuff is a waste of time, anyway,”
Ed. Again the comparison with non academic jobs matters. Often the Yale professor is talking about her life’s work. Whehn Sarah Palin get $50,000 for an hout talk, how much is that an hour?
Hacker isn’t alone. “We see an enormous variation in what people do and what they get paid to do it,” says Richard Vedder, who directs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington, D.C. and is a professor of economics at Ohio University.
“Money gets dropped out of airplanes over our campuses, alumni are nostalgic about their alma maters, legislators want to provide economic access — and there’s no accountability.” Texas A&M is”a pioneer, whose attempt is not only a noble effort, but one that I predict will spread.”
Michael Hout, who teaches sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, applauded the A&M study, saying that “public universities get the desired results but function as ‘trust me’ systems that exist behind closed doors, where the public can’t see what’s going on. This is an attempt to change that.”
While Hout sees the Texas A&M model as fundamentally flawed, given its reliance on one number attributed to each academic, he also criticizes the University of California system, where assessment is based on a portfolio review and remains entirely hidden from the public. “The future has got to include something in between, and right now the academic community and other stakeholders are trying to figure out where that middle ground is,” said Hout. “If we’re lucky, we’ll
THE RED BRIGADE AT A&M
Dudley L. Poston, a tenured professor of sociology at A&M, makes $302,545.
“I quickly discovered that I’m teaching more than most faculty, that I have more students than most faculty and that I’m publishing more than most faculty.But when it co mes to financial accounting, I’m in the red.”
The spreadsheet said he cost more than he brought in but failed to lnclude a $450,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, an omission Poston believes would have landed him squarely in the black.
After the data was publicly released, Poston said it was not uncommon for fellow faculty members in the red to acknowledge and congratulate each other, as if being granted admittance into a secret society. Some have since informally assembled into what they term a “red brigade.”