Though peanuts by Wall Street standards, Heather Ramsey’s bonus was an ivory-tower bonanza.
Ramsey was recently awarded $3,565, almost 7.5 percent of her annual salary, as a lecturer in mathematics at Texas A&M University. Eighty other faculty members got between $2,500 and $10,000 in the school’s first ever cash-incentive program.
The corporate world recently got a black eye because of bonuses, but in academe the idea of extra pay as a motivating tool is now high-concept — as a roller-coaster economy is prodding campuses out of their long slumber. The innovation comes at a moment when universities are in the cross-hairs of intersecting lines of criticism: Politicians and their trustees accuse them of ignoring the bottom line and students.
College campuses traditionally are heady places where even administrators could afford to be a bit detached from the workaday world. But rising tuition, falling endowments and strapped public coffers have forced students to shoulder a financial burden. And as families pay more, they notice whether their children have contact with professors, or are taught by graduate students and part-timers.
Those problems can’t be solved by fiat. Deans and college presidents have few sticks to use on tenured faculty reluctant to change their ways. So administrators are scrambling for carrots — which some think they’ve found in the business-world model of cash rewards for productivity and effectiveness. It marks a major change from the traditional model, where careers are built on publishing and prestige, and salaries are tied to how faculty perform not at the podium but out of the classroom.
“These bonuses really highlight a new priority on being teaching-orientated,” Ramsey said. At A&M, students manage the reward system. Course evaluations determine which faculty get bonuses and how much.
So far, the idea of cash incentives for professors doesn’t seem to have reached Chicago-area campuses — though the University of Illinois at Chicago does offer salary increases to faculty with a demonstrated commitment to teaching. But elsewhere, the bonus concept is contagious. Texas A&M based its reward program on one at the University of Oklahoma. The University of Akron has one, too. Deans elsewhere are watching these innovations, though how many schools have plans for bonus programs is unclear.
Kent State University shaped its faculty-bonus program to meet the prevailing political winds. Its president, Lester Lefton, thought it futile to ask the Ohio legislature to fund salary increases.
“The reality is a president of a public university is running a business enterprise,” Lefton said. “I have to run this in a business-like way.”
So he adopted the enterpriser’s assumption that the way to grow a business is to give employees who bring in new business a share of the profits. In this case, faculty members are Kent State’s sales reps.
Under its newly installed incentive program, faculty members who get research grants or bring in endowment money will be rewarded with a cut. (Some schools already give faculty a portion of earnings on the patents they’ve created.) All faculty will get bonuses if fewer students leave campus. Like other schools, Kent State loses students who transfer after freshman year. Lefton feels more would stay if they felt more welcome and hopes to enlist faculty in that effort.
“What faculty can do is spend more time with students,” Lefton said.
Every student Kent State loses costs the university $7,000, Lefton notes. So it makes good business sense to give the faculty bonuses totaling 40 percent of additional revenue when the retention rate goes up at least a half percent.
Lefton says that the beauty of Kent State’s program is that it is self-funding: Not one penny goes out until new revenue comes in.
“If the faculty blows the roof off this program, that would be a great thing,” Lefton said.
These innovations are not without their critics. Some worry about academic values being diluted. Other objections are more pragmatic. At Kent State, some note that not everyone teaches freshman courses, so why should all professors benefit when more students return?
At universities where bonuses are tied to student evaluations, some worry the incentive program could tempt professors to boost their ratings by easing up on grading or buying a round of beers at a campus bar.
Tatiana Erukhimova, who won $3,400 in Texas A&M’s program, agrees it could be problematic. “It is always questionable when you give awards based upon student evaluations,” said Erukhimova, a lecturer in physics. “But that is more so in the smaller, upper-level classes, where students and professors are friendly. I teach what they call the ‘weed-out’ classes — 100 students — where course evaluations aren’t going to be a popularity contest.”
Recognizing the potential pitfalls, the University of Oklahoma labels its bonus awards a “pilot program,” initially limiting it to the schools of business and engineering. Like Texas A&M, it makes cash awards based on student evaluations, noted Tom Landers, dean of engineering.
Oklahoma’s program, now in its fifth semester, gives out $2,500 and $5,000 awards to faculty who place in the top 20 percent. The university is studying whether the investment improves teaching.
“The results to this point are encouraging,” Landers said, employing the note of caution of an engineer evaluating an experiment still in progress.
The most daringly experimental of all these programs is at the Acton School of Business in Austin, Texas. Instructors get $5,000 in base pay plus additional money dependent upon their student evaluations.
Top-ranked faculty get $20,000, scarcely a living wage, but Acton insists instructors be part-timers. The school wants students to learn entrepreneurship by rubbing shoulders with practicing entrepreneurs — not from lectures by pure academics.
“We believe in the Socratic method,” said Georgia Thompsen, Acton’s executive director.
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rgrossman@tribune.com
An academic whodunit
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