By Audrey Williams June
from the Chronicle of Higher Education
How much professors in the University of Texas system earn and how many courses and students they teach were parts of a vast data file that system officials compiled at the request of a newly formed task force on productivity and excellence and released publicly on Thursday. Professors immediately voiced concerns that the information would be used to incorrectly gauge their efficiency on the job.However, system officials stressed that the data in the 821-page spreadsheet, which covers nine institutions, was in draft form and "is incomplete and has not yet been fully verified or cross referenced," according to a statement issued by Anthony P. de Bruyn, the system's director of public affairs. "In its present raw form, it cannot yield accurate analysis, interpretations, or conclusions."
SPREADSHEET: Download the U. of Texas system's faculty-productivity data
The university released the data in response to an open-records request from a local newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman. In addition to salary information, course-enrollment numbers, and course loads, the system released data on how much grant money individual faculty members won in 2009-10, the average grade awarded by professors, how much time faculty members spent on research and teaching, and their average student evaluation score. However, for many of the professors listed, not every data point was complete.
Full Article.
How is stuff like this still news? At least 10 years ago there was a website called "stonybrooksucks.com". It had a "ratemyprofessors" type component, a spreadsheet of salaries and random photographs of incompetance around the grounds.
ReplyDeleteState employees are state employees and their salary is public record. It's part of the gig. You don't get to keep it private just because you're an academic. If it's good enough for the janitors, it should be good enough for us. To think otherwise is elitist.
Almost-post-script: I looked it up. It's inactive, but it still exists.
www.stonybrooksucks.com
checkout the photos - some of them are hilarious
Even driunk I don't understn wjuy i took the Austin aperpo r a FIOa to get this data. big deal.
ReplyDeleteI'm with Beaker Ben on this. What's the point of wasting time to see how 'efficient' one is when the spreadsheet isn't even accurate? And do we need to be drunk to appreciate it? As one of those English proffies who is still grading essays at 1:45 a.m., I don't need a spreadsheet to tell me what I SHOULD be paid...
ReplyDeleteIt still takes a FOIA (or the state equivalent) to get this data in our state, but the university administration and the Faculty Assembly have agreed on a routine, and we have a spreadsheet with 5-year data, updated yearly, available, with password protection, to faculty via the university website. At various points, someone has either chosen to copy the data somewhere else on the web or done his/her own FOIA, and it has appeared on the web at large. As someone at the bottom of the pay scale, I find it more useful than disturbing (though, especially when the economy is up, I'd prefer that my students not know what I make, because I'm afraid they would lose whatever respect they have for me). Eval numbers are available to all (faculty and students) elsewhere on the university site, also password-protected. Course load could be compiled from information on the registration system, but that would be a lot of work, and administrative duties, etc. aren't always apparent.
ReplyDeleteI seem to remember getting an email sometime this year saying that a newspaper had FOIA'd *all* state employee salaries (not just university ones), and that the state would be complying. The bottom line is that state employees' salaries are public information, though one may have to jump through a hoop or two to get that information. I actually don't mind that (FOIA'ing emails, on the other hand, bothers me).
I'd love to know exactly how whoever is analyzing the data mentioned above is going to factor grades and eval numbers into his/her "productivity" measure. Do high grades equal high productivity or low? What about the correlation, or lack thereof, between grades and eval scores? And is anybody counting the number of graduates living, 10 years out, in their parents' basements, vans down by the river, and/or cardboard boxes under bridges? If so, do they have any idea how to account for the multiple factors that might contribute to such a situation?
Graduates? I thought those were adjuncts!
ReplyDelete@Ovreductd: well, adjuncts are by definition graduates, aren't they? The dropouts may be doing better financially, since they don't have the temptation of accepting adjunct work.
ReplyDelete