Every Ag can dream of being Governor someday

Quoted in yesterday's Eagle

In the interview printed last week, Perry was asked about layoffs and buyouts of experienced faculty. He was quoted as saying, "We're laying off professors because there was a huge hiring increase that went on in the mid-2000s and these people are not even in the classrooms teaching our kids. I totally support that concept. Reductions in personnel that are nonessential at universities is good fiscal management."

The push to hire new faculty through the "Faculty Reinvestment Plan" was based on the flawed idea that A&M needed to reduce class size and increase our research prominence.

We could save a lot more and reduce the cost of college for students if we just got rid of the classrooms too. As the Governor's own career shows, all an Aggie needs can come from yell practice and Bonfire.

Blank SLATE

The guidelines for this year's Student-Led Awards for Teaching Excellence have just come out:

The guidelines for the system program called “TAMUS Teaching Excellence Awards” (a.k.a. SLATE) have been issued. The program has been changed from our pilot SLATE program run by the students last year. In particular, there will be no inquiry to departments concerning the rigor of any course or its grading with respect to expectations in the curricula, and no review and recommendation by a student committee this year. Although the students advocated for small courses (less than 15 students enrolled) and courses that grant less than three hours of credit, the System guidelines have stated clearly that those variations are not allowed in the program.

The departmental and student committee reviews were added in response to criticism that SLATE was an easily gamed popularity contest that made TAMU an international laughingstock.

Vision 1920 is glad to see that A&M is showing the strength to remove the concessions to the critics... even if they might be right.

Spring Excellence Awards

The winners of the second round of Chancellor Mike's Excellence Adventure were announced earlier this month

The Texas A&M University System awarded $507,000 to outstanding faculty throughout the system in the second presentation of the Teaching Excellence Awards, a voluntary, student-selected honors program launched last fall.

The 144 faculty winners will receive checks ranging from $2,500 to $10,000. Texas A&M University had the most recipients, with 54, followed by Texas A&M University-Commerce, 17; Prairie View A&M University, 15; Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, 13; West Texas A&M University, 12; Texas A&M International University, 10; Texas A&M University at Galveston, 7; Texas A&M University-Kingsville, 9; Tarleton State University, 4; Texas A&M University-Texarkana, 3.

Last time, 500 faculty participated in the pilot program, which involved three schools. 46 winners at A&M represented the top 18%, so the total in College Station was ~256 out of ~2800 faculty, or 9%. This time 56 faculty were in the top 20%, so the participation rose to about 10%.

The Chancellor has said

"Money is not an incentive for [faculty]," he said. "They show up every day and do the best they can. They can't logically do better than their best. I call it a reward."

Vision 1920 agrees. No Aggie instructor would respond to an award that's about 20-25% of some of the winners' budgeted salaries by trying to game the system.

Excellence in Teaching

Vision 1920 has been focusing too much on research lately. We must remember that the primary mission of the university is teaching. Some of the faculty whiners argue that the time they spend mentoring the students working in their labs should count as teaching, but we all know that's just an excuse to get out of real teaching... the kind where the instructor has to stand in front of a classroom. Like in High School.

To improve the real teaching, our Chancellor last year created an innovative new program called the Teaching Excellence Award. This innovation drew attention to A&M from all over the world! Here's some of what people said:

Inside Higher Education

Ashley strongly disputed the idea -- widely held by researchers -- that student evaluations are not reliable and encourage grade inflation. He characterized the debate as unsettled. "You'll find studies that say it's true and studies that say it's not true," he said. Asked for a study that shows that student evaluations are reliable and don't encourage grade inflation, he said that the article he used in working on the policy was "Student Rating Myths vs. Research Facts," and was published in 1999 in the Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education.

The author, Lawrence M. Aleamoni, is now retired as a professor of education at the University of Arizona. Reached Monday, he said that he did in fact show in his article that some student evaluations can be reliable. But he said that several parts of the Texas A&M policy run counter to his findings and recommendations.

For example, Aleamoni said that the only times he has found student evaluations to be reliable is when they are nationally devised and normed, and not when they are "home grown," as A&M's questionnaire is. Further, Aleamoni said that his research found that students may answer very specific questions about their professors reliably. But broad questions -- such as "Does this professor deserve a teaching award?" -- are the sort that students tend to answer based on student grades.

The Times(UK) Education supplement points to the fact that these kinds of programs have been tried elsewhere

A few of these programmes have got the same sour reception as the bonuses paid to executives of corporations, including failed banks.

News that academics at the University of Florida College of Medicine received $7.6 million in bonuses last year has caused uproar on campus, where budget cuts portend layoffs and slashed academic programmes.

Readers at the Chronicle of Higher Education commented

What a profoundly troubling idea.

and

What a disgusting (though sadly predictable) degradation of educational relationships.

and

Having spent well over thirty years as a member of the professoriate, ten of those as an administrator (department chair, associate dean), I thought I had taken the measure of how low the corporate/customer-service model could go: apparently not.

The program proved to be so popular that 300/2000 faculty signed up for it... Some might worry that this program might not be sustainable at a time when A&M is looking at budget cuts. Fear not:

The chancellor said he is committed to the initiative. The initial funding came from existing sources, but he has put in a legislative appropriations request for $12 million to continue funding the program.

"If I had to prioritize my entire budget, this would be first," he said. "If I have to take money out of administration, that's what I'll do."

Vision 1920 is confident that he wasn't talking about System administration. Let's not go too far.