Earlier this week the faculty at the University of Maryland at College Park voted down a proposal that would have reduced salaries for professors that had received three consecutive years of negative post-tenure reviews. Hat tip.

The students generally supported this proposal, but it was faculty opposition that killed it. I would have sided with the students in this instance. I agree with President Obama that a teacher's salary should be based on their performance.

Some of you might object to this form of post-tenure review, since it seems like it would involve a lot of extra work. Actually, the people-hours required to process these review could be significantly reduced with the use of technology. I am think of a computer program that, with a little bit of help, could automatically do things like analyzing a professor's student evaluations, tracking the progress of their students beyond the professor's class, measuring their innovations in teaching, recording their usage of new technologies, counting visitors to their blogs, tallying their hours of service on committees, recording their hours spent in community outreach and service, tracing discussions of the professor or their work on the Internet, obtaining figures for their book sales, determining stats for online access of their publications, counting their publications and citations to their publications that appear in research databases, calculating research funds they acquired and used, and evaluating their research progress. For portions of the review that required qualitative responses, individuals involved could fill out brief surveys on a secure web site. With this and other information, the software could then determine whether a professor was meeting or exceeding performance goals and deserves an annual pay raise.