Stanley N. Katz: How to Justify Our Paychecks
"Faculty productivity" is hot. In part, that's due to what I think of as "the Texas wars." First came the skirmish at Texas Tech University in 2008, when faculty objected to a report commissioned by the chancellor on whether tuition was rising because faculty weren't in the classroom enough. Next was a controversial report last year on the Texas A&M system, comparing faculty salaries with the amount of money generated through teaching. Now the Regents' Task Force on University Excellence and Productivity has created its own metric, published recently online as an 821-page spreadsheet for the University of Texas system.
But the issue isn't limited to Texas. During the A&M uproar, a spokesman for the American Association of University Professors was quoted as saying that tough times are leading a number of states to look at faculty productivity. And it is important to remember that the topic is part of a larger public concern with accountability in higher education. This month the Miller Center of Public Affairs, at the University of Virginia, released a report calling on colleges "to focus on productivity." Echoing the message of the Obama administration, it noted that "at a time of budgetary stresses, colleges must be rewarded by both state and federal governments for producing more graduates." It isn't clear, however, how such productivity is to be measured. By the annual number of degrees awarded? Within how many years after matriculation?
The same kind of confusion is at the root of debates on faculty productivity.
Concern for faculty productivity actually goes back further than the recent focus on academic accountability. In the past, the questions were usually whether professors were overpaid, since they spend so few hours in face-to-face teaching. The comparison was to schoolteachers, who spend most of each day in the classroom. Of course, the faculty response has always been that this seemingly simple metric misses much of the real work of professors: out-of-class student contact, class preparation, research, and administrative duties....