I’m all for cutting college costs, scrutinizing where the money is going, trimming bloat, and making a dollar go further in higher ed. That means I also think that the job description of the professor needs some rethinking–with, for example, a re-valuing of teaching, and, in the humanities, a move away from ye olde unreadable monograph as the key to the tenure kingdom. It also means I favor real post-tenure review for the declining numbers who actually have tenure–the kind of post-tenure review that will actually register and respond to dead wood who don’t pull their weight. And, as those who read this blog regularly know, I’m in favor of moving away from tenure entirely, and into a fixed contract model that honors academic freedom while holding profs accountable and enabling institutions to recover some of the flexibility they urgently need if they are to navigate the era of economic scarcity that higher ed, with its bursting bubble, is entering. I’d also like to see things like expensive sports subsidies disappear–and I say that as someone who was herself a scholarship athlete once upon a time. First things first and all that.

When I mention professors in the same breath as I mention reform, I often incur the anxious wrath of academics who fear what the bean counters will do to them if they get any more traction than they already have. My response tends to be that we can’t do nothing in a crisis situation simply because we fear that the wrong people will step in and do the wrong things. I always say the solution is for those who really care about higher ed’s educational and scholarly missions to get involved in trying to resolve the issues that have arisen on their watch–not in a way that polarizes matters further (as, for example, faculty unions do) but in a way that really speaks to students, parents, and taxpayers. I say they need to do that before it gets done for them. That’s the only way to ensure that the right reforms get made–that the baby (liberal education) doesn’t get thrown out with the bureaucratic bathwater, or, alternatively, drowned in it.

Texas A&M is offering us an example of what such drowning looks like:

Frank Ashley felt the shifting winds several years ago: As state officials embarked on accountability measures for K-12 teachers, he said, he told his faculty colleagues that public sentiment would eventually demand such measures in higher education.

Now, Ashley, the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System, has been put in charge of creating such a measure that he says would help administrators and the public better understand who, from a financial standpoint, is pulling their weight.

A several-inches thick document in the possession of A&M System officials contains three key pieces of information for every single faculty member in the 11-university system: their salary, how much external research funding they received and how much money they generated from teaching.

The information will allow officials to add the funds generated by a faculty member for teaching and research and subtract that sum from the faculty member’s salary. When the document — essentially a profit-loss statement for faculty members — is complete, officials hope it will become an effective, lasting tool to help with informed decision-making.

“If you look at what people are saying out there — first of all, they want accountability,” Ashley said. “It’s something that we’re really not used to in higher education: For someone questioning whether we’re working hard, whether our students are learning. That accountability is going to be with us from now on.”

This looks to me like a rubric for proving that the arts and humanities are worthless, since those professors don’t tend to be bringing in funding from the NIH or major pharmaceutical companies. It creates an incentive to teach large, impersonal lecture courses rather than small, hands-on seminars. It also incentivizes doing nothing in the way of teaching outside the classroom–prep time, continuing education, one-on-one work with students, advising, independent studies, grading carefully, and more all appear to be missing from the assessment of faculty “worth.” Finally, it provides a means by which unwanted colleagues can be shown to be without value–if you want to drive an English professor out, assign them to teach small courses. And bingo! You can now show they they are not pulling their weight.

Bottom line, as expressed by Peter Hugill, an A&M geology professor and president of the local AAUP chapter: “As being partly paid by the public purse, I believe we owe the public some degree of accountability — I don’t have a problem with that at all. … What I have a problem with is silly measures.”

The proposed plan has yet to be presented to the regents. When it has, it will be opened for public comment.