Texas A&M professors, students express concerns about reforms

Professors and students at Texas A&M University are worried that reforms being pushed by Gov. Rick Perry and regents will seriously damage the school’s national reputation, hurt faculty morale and lower teaching standards.

“Many professors see this university as about to take a big step back and are reviewing their options,” said Vickie Buenger, a clinical associate professor of management at the Mays Business School. “Alumni who are now middle-aged and in positions of power think they received an adequate education. They don’t realize that the A&M of 20 years ago would not be nationally competitive at preparing students for the 21st century.”

One star faculty member who had planned to stay at A&M recently relocated to Australia in part because of concerns about what the reforms would mean for the progress of the university, Buenger said.

Buenger, 50, said that when she graduated from A&M, it was the kind of place people made jokes about, with good reason.

“It was a definite second choice for most people,” she said.

But that has changed. Now the school has a national reputation in many fields as a major research university, with internationally known faculty. But changes being implemented by regents could quickly push it back to a mediocre level, Buenger said.

Many of the seven breakthrough reforms crafted by Perry associate Jeff Sandefer, co-founder of the private Acton MBA program in Austin, advocate for a ‘students-as-customers’ model of high education, placing a greater emphasis on faculty teaching rather than research. (Sandefer, A&M Regent Phil Adams and University of Texas System Regent Brenda Pejovich are all board members of conservative think tank Texas Public Policy Foundation.)

One early reform resulted in the creation of a spreadsheet that lists the total employment cost for every A&M faculty member, along with how much revenue the teacher brought in, according to number of students taught and research grants. Those who earned the university a profit were designated as “in the black,” and those who operated at a loss, listed in as “in the red.” A&M officials said the version of spreadsheet made public on its website last fall was incomplete, and took it down pending further review and revision of the document.

Buenger said that while she appreciates the regents looking at creative solutions to improve education, universities aren’t businesses.

“Even if they were, it would not be a good idea for a business to do a cost/benefit analysis of every employee. There are many jobs that do not correlate with creating revenue,” she said.

Buenger said that “the military wouldn’t judge soldiers by counting how many people each individual had killed. Where would that leave those who had important jobs like radio communicators? Another analogy would be to try to compare the worth, and money spent on, a fighter pilot and an infantryman.”

It is particularly difficult to judge faculty outside of the sciences by these formulas, because research in other fields usually isn’t driven by large grants. “If a scientist isn’t getting an NSF grant, that may be cause for concern. But for a 19th Century British literature scholar not to get a grant is pretty normal,” she said.

Many professors in the business school teach overload one semester so that they can take time to do other sorts of projects the following semester, Buenger said. Their “worth” depends on which semester is examined. Judging professors by how many students they teach doesn’t work at Mays for another reason. Students pay differential tuition, which means they pay more money in order to have smaller classes with more individual attention from professors.

Not all business professors agree with Buenger. Accounting professor L. Murphy Smith wrote a letter to Rick O’Donnell, former special advisor to University of Texas System regents, saying, “I can say after 30 years of as a university faculty member, most academic research is highly irrelevant to practitioners and of little value to society at large. Most of my colleagues acknowledge this privately. To do so publicly would jeopardize their careers. ” (Read the letter via the Texas Tribune.)

He said it is natural that professors would oppose curtailing research.

“If professors have spent years, even decades, in building research skills to publish articles in little-read, low-relevance but so-called high-quality academic journals, then you can’t expect this professor to gladly change his or her lifestyle by aiming research at highly-read, widely distributed, professional practitioner journals. …Further, you can’t expect this professor to happily agree to switch from teaching two or three courses per year ( a typical teaching load for endowed chair positions) to teaching four, five, six or more courses per year,” Murphy said.

Outside of the business school, liberal arts faculty expressed concerns about the reforms. Associate professor Armando Alonzo teaches large classes in Texas history, so he benefited from the performance metrics used in the A&M spreadsheet. Still, he thinks it is bad way to judge teachers.

“I literally have hundreds of students a year, but at a research-level university, there are other components professors are judged on, like research and service,” he said.

Associate professor Jonathan Coopersmith, who teaches the history of technology, said that he is concerned with the lack of emphasis put on research in the new rubric. The experiences that he has had while on a recent Fulbright research grant have informed his teaching, he said, and he doesn‘t teach the same things he did a few years ago.

“The whole idea was philosophically and intellectually wrongly conceived, and in practice it was executed in a very amateurish way,” Coopersmith said of the spreadsheet.

Another early reform implemented by A&M regents is allowing faculty with high student evaluations to apply for large cash bonuses. A concern is that this will encourage professors to lower standards in order to win popularity with students, and will discourage them from sharing successful teaching strategies with other faculty.

“I’ve never applied for it, and I wouldn’t apply for it,” Alonzo said. “It is making students into consumers, rather than treating them as students.”

A&M students aren’t as thrilled at the idea of having such power over professors as one might suppose.

“I think giving students hard, thought-provoking work would be minimized because professors are more worried about maintaining their job and having a good reputation rather than nourishing the students’ minds,” said A&M student Jacquelyn Smyth. “Professors are here to open minds, make you think outside your realm and push your limits. It’s pretty simple, I would say, because if we start lowering expectations (which in classes we already have) it’s only harming students in the long run.”

A&M student Maury Jackson agreed. “Students want good grades, easy A’s, and friendly professors who don’t give much homework and will be lenient when they make mistakes, “Jackson said. “What students need is professors who will give them the grade they earned and tell them to try harder next time.

“Which professor will get better evaluations?” Jackson asked. “The one who gave all A’s and took assignments for full credit three days after the due date? Or the professor who failed half of the class because the students didn’t try hard enough and did not live up to the expectations of what the class encompassed? I’m fairly confident in my prediction of who the evaluation victor would be. So one of the professors ‘deserves’ money and the other does not? Evaluations and their corresponding prizes must praise and reward professors that do their jobs well and force students to learn as opposed to rewarding the well-liked professors who ram students through the system with easy grades, regardless of information retention.”