I once got in fairly serious trouble in a discussion along similar lines suggesting that evidence implied the university would make a lot more money as a combination fine dining restaurant/lounge and a high end bawdy house.  That was intended in part as a joke, but it seems we are getting very close to that reasoning in real life.

(opinions as usual mine alone, and not that of my part time employers)
----- Original Message -----
From: Richard Cox <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wed, 27 Oct 2010 02:59:49 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: Re: Putting a Price on Professors



We recognize that we live in an era of accountability, facing continued assessment. It is important that we are responsible for our actions and evaluate ourselves regularly. We need to learn how to use annual reviews and teaching evaluations to set personal objectives and to do it in a way that is transparent to both students ad colleagues. 


(edited)
What we see going on in Texas, assessing the financial worth or impact of faculty, however, is another example of the worse excesses of the notion of the corporate university, where students are just customers and the driving force in everything is the financial bottom-line or the marketplace. It is why the list of books and articles about the corporate university grows daily, recently reflected in the set of articles about this academic model in the October 17 th issue of The Chronicle Review . 

(edited0


In an article about what is happening in Texas, Bill Peacock, vice president at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the group that developed the notion of the productivity spreadsheet, is described as acknowledging that “this approach could mean a radical reshaping of academia, with far more emphasis on filling students with practical information and less on intellectual pursuits, especially in the liberal arts.” At first glance this could be seen to affirm that the corporate model might be friendly to professional schools such as ours. But Peacock is also reported as being unconcerned about this: "Taxpayers of the state of Texas" should decide whether "they should be spending two years paying the salary of an English professor so he can write a book of poetry simply to add to the prestige of the university or the body of literature out there." 
-- 
James H. Sweetland                               414-229-4707
Professor Emeritus                               [log in to unmask]
School of Information Studies                                       
University of Wisconsin--Milwaukee