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Texas A&M University System is discussing setting a new accountability measure to evaluate professors and compare what they are costing the university versus how much revenue they are bringing in.
According to James Hallmark, the provost and vice president for academic affairs at WTAMU, they started discussing more accountability measures for college professors across Texas about five years ago. Since then, many colleges have devised numerous ways to measure accountability. In fact, WT already has a few measures in place.
One such measure is the student evaluations that students fill out regarding their professor at the end of each semester. These evaluations offer insight for department heads about how well a professor is meeting his or her students’ needs. Hallmark noted that this survey is not all inclusive when it comes to measuring the work professors do.
“The faculty member isn’t just teaching,” Hallmark said. “The faculty member is doing research, advising, service, serving on committees, serving as a department head, directing a thesis. They’re doing a lot of things that aren’t reflected in that formula.”
This new measure being discussed by TAMU is only in the elementary stages of planning and will not be applied for a while, if at all.
“The reason that this is even out in the public is because a state legislature was given [a copy of the proposed measure] so that she could look at it and kind of give them some feedback and at that point, word began to get out,” Hallmark said. “And so instead of requiring entities like [the Prairie] to file Freedom of Information Act stuff in order to get it, the system just said here it is. I guess if we had something to hide, we would have done that, but we don’t.”
The new accountability measure, in theory, will work from an equation with numbers taken from class size and number of hours the professor will be teaching. Additionally, classes will be “weighted” by the state. Essentially that weighting is assigned based on how much it costs to teach that class. For example, a chemistry class would have a higher weight than an English class because of the supplies generating money is doing a whole lot of other things that are very, very valuable to the university.”
Dr. Hallmark, however, has stated that he has no opinions of the measure because he does not see it being applied in the near future. Also, there is no intention or way to rate a professor as “good” or “bad” based on the amount of money they are generating. This is just one way to collect data out of the many ways that the TAMU system uses.
“My concern is that some individuals are putting more stock into this than there really is,” Hallmark said. “The most important thing is that this is just a draft and it is not a decision making paradigm, just something they’re playing around with.”
The leaking of this information has caused uproar among the TAMU system’s professors. Some believe that this measure is currently in place and will be affecting their positions. However, this is not the case.
Professor’s jobs will not be cut or added based on the information that would be received from this accountability measure.
“They’re not looking for if an individual faculty member is doing well or if an individual faculty member is not doing well,” Hallmark said. “They’re looking for patterns. For example, if we looked at our overall structure and said this department is costing us 10 times more than what another department is costing us and yet, they have a very similar number of faculty and expenses. So why is this one costing us so much more? Maybe we need to be looking at that and figuring out how we can have more efficiency.”
In truth, this information will not be closely affecting the educational faction of the TAMU system. All of the numbers and statistics taken will be going through the business departments to the Board of Regents.
Additionally, professors should remember that this will not be the only accountability measure taken into consideration during a professional review. University officials are keenly aware of how much teaching is done outside the actual classroom with students consulting professors during office hours or through email.
This new measure, although it has not been implemented, is just one of many that the Board of Regents for TAMU is considering.
