U of Texas: Things to Come at UC?

Faculty and administrators at public universities in Texas said Monday they don’t want to shrink from efforts to make public higher education more accountable — they just don’t want to do it this way.

In this case, “this way” refers to efforts by the University of Texas System Board of Regents to measure the productivity of faculty members in strictly numerical terms. The efforts are reflected in 821 pages of raw data that have been collected by the UT system. The data have not been vetted. Each page contains the disclaimer that the information is “incomplete and has not yet been fully verified or cross referenced [and] [i]n its present raw form … cannot yield accurate analysis, interpretations or conclusions.” Originally planned for release after more thorough review later this year, the data reached the public last week through open records requests filed by several Texas newspapers. The information lists the salary, teaching load and number of students of each faculty member, as well as his or her external research funding…

But on Monday, the resistance to the productivity measures took a more public turn. In a speech, William Powers Jr., the president of UT-Austin, critiqued some of the assumptions underlying the analysis — though he never cited it or the regents directly. And, strikingly, he based his critique on the grounds that the analysis failed to adequately capture the output, productivity and relevance of research (typically, teaching is the aspect of a professor’s job that is thought to be the more difficult to accurately measure). Powers’s comments Monday were his first since last week’s release of the faculty productivity data at UT, and professors at Austin hailed their president’s words…