[Editor's note: This story was updated at 12:35 p.m. Eastern time to reflect minor corrections to statements by Cepeda-Benito and Dunning.]

While the state grapples with ways to cut higher education funding in the face of a massive budget shortfall, professors are pushing back against an effort to quantify their professional value in terms of dollars and cents — a plan Texas A&M University System officials have tabled for now.

“It is an artificial way of analyzing what faculty do,” said Antonio Cepeda-Benito, the dean of faculties at A&M. “You cannot separate teaching, service and research from each other. They are all related. I don’t stop and think about how many hours I am teaching and how many I spend researching. I just do them both and know each activity will help the other.”

The A&M System chancellor issued a balance sheet earlier this year which weighted faculty based on the number of classes and students they teach, tuition costs and how many research grants they bring in. The “performance metrics” generally showed professors who were research-intensive and those who conducted smaller classes as in the red, while those who taught large class sizes as netting profit.

The tabulation, many found, was also rife with errors, including omitting professors and inflating salary reports. Additionally, basing value on class size was seen as unfair as faculty don’t decide how large their classes are, but are assigned to them by the department head.

The controversial measure, created by the 11-campus A&M System received overwhelming disapproval from professors and was quickly pulled from the university website. Subsequent notices went out to faculty from the university provost and president reiterating the data would not be used to evaluate professors or programs or be used against them in any way.

“The balance sheet missed the point,” said Cepeda-Benito, a psychology professor. “People want to come to A&M for the prestige of the institution. If you get rid of tenure-track, renowned faculty members because they are only teaching two courses per semester, you lose that.”

Jason Cook, chief communications officer for the A&M System, said a specific time table to produce the report again was not in sight. University officials are in the process of evaluating the feedback received from faculty and staff. He would not comment on the precipitating reasons why the document was complied.

The idea can be traced back to conservative think tank the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which set forth seven recommendations during a university conference in 2008 that stressed accountability from taxpayers, splitting research and teaching budgets and a customer-based approach to higher education. Gov. Rick Perry (who donated proceeds of his book “Fed Up!” to TPPF) helped coordinate the summit, which featured university regents (appointed by Perry) and TPPF representatives.

TPPF board members include Phil Adams, an A&M Regent, as well as Brenda Pejovich, a University of Texas Regent.

Although TPPF’s influence on A&M Regents seems obvious to some, the opacity of the process that resulted in the metrics irritates faculty, who feel like spectators rather than participants.

“Faculty are frustrated because they don’t have full awareness of the way things happen,”
Cepeda-Benito said. “There are so many layers in the decision-making process it’s hard to know what the motivations really are.”

Meanwhile, the state’s upcoming budget shortfall — estimated to be anywhere from $12 billion-$25 billion or more — is already forcing hard decisions to be made. Recently, major news outlets picked up on the buyouts of more than 100 A&M professors, first reported by the Bryan-College Station Eagle in mid-November. (Read the Independent’s report here.)

Internationally noted scholar and author Chester Dunning, a Russian history professor who could score low on the TPPF-inspired metrics, despite despite receiving numerous teaching awards, said the document is part of an effort to increase teaching loads and reduce research. The shift has created tension at the university and resistance by faculty.

“They are trying to do what they are ordered to do from above but also trying to evade a rebellion from below,” he said of the upper-administration. “They are pushing in one direction and we are pushing back.”

Dunning was featured prominently in a Wall Street Journal article on the topic in late October.

The model, argues Dunning, is driven by an anti-intellectual impulse as well as conservative ideology. A true understanding of what tier-one research universities are about is missing from TPPF’s guiding principles.

“There is an assault by so-called radical conservatives (radicals, actually) on higher education, people with an anti-elitist agenda who think there is something wrong with experts and people with degrees,” he said. “Some people don’t seem to understand that denouncing and dehumanizing research will not help our economy.”

Crudely breaking up the research and teaching budgets to examine profitability has instilled fear among the faculty, who feel that the research and discovery aspect of academia is being jeopardized.

“No one is saying we should not be accountable for what we do,” Cepeda-Benito said. “But we are wary that the mission of the university will change in a way that research will no longer be important and all we will care about will be teaching.”

The financial exercise reflects a nationwide trend to promote “productivity” in higher education, albeit an extreme version, said John Curtis, director of research and public policy for the American Association of University Professors. The metric is criticized as a misnomer, as it omits any substantial measure of actual learning or contribution inside or outside the university, such as participating in service, mentoring students and production of research.

“I haven’t seen any other examples as concrete and bottom-line oriented as Texas A&M,” said Curtis. “It is the most extreme example of literally reducing the higher education process to a cost-benefit analysis, where you are only looking at the things you can measure quantitatively.”

“It assumes that all disciplines function in the same way, all have equal access to the same resources, and classes are structured the same way,” he added. “And none of these things are true.”

The simplistic, consumer-based national trend underscores the fundamental misunderstanding by the public and by legislators of what the role of faculty is, said Curtis. The widely held perception fails to suggest that teachers are integrating the knowledge they obtain by research into the classroom. The misconception trickles down to policy where budget cuts aim for faculty first.

The AAUP are pushing back in the face of these reforms, encouraging faculty to organize and define their role and how they contribute to the university. Faculty have responded to pressure to increase transparency and accountability on their part at both A&M and UT, the two largest public universities in the state. The formation of task forces, created to explain what they do and what their impact on society is, has become paramount to faculty facing higher education reforms.

Texas A&M already produces detailed annual reports on faculty performance that incorporates factors such as salaries, credit hours taught, demographics and more.

According to the Fall 2010 “Who’s Teaching Whom?” report, professors (full, associate and assistant) taught 53.3 percent of all credit hours. Excluding required P.E. and professional classes, professors taught 70.2 percent of credit hours. (Visiting faculty, teaching assistants, lecturers and other individuals taught the remaining hours.)

Professors taught more than 80 percent of credit hours at the master’s level and 96 percent of credit hours at the Ph.D. level.

(Photo: Flickr Creative Commons/eschipul)