WASHINGTON, March 11 (UPI) -- Tenured college professors might be bad teachers and even worse scholars, but their institutions and peers have little ability to influence their conduct, according to a recent study by The Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
To improve the quality of their teaching, professors need incentives, something radically nonexistent in the individualistic culture of the North American university, writes Rodney Clifton and Hymie Rubenstein in "Collegial Models for Enhancing the Performance of University Professors."
Often when professors receive tenure they neglect their students and focus on research or outside assignments like consulting businesses, Clifton and Rubenstein write. The sheer number of extraneous commitments may cause professors to view students as nuisances rather than the paying consumers they really are, according to the authors.
"At many institutions, professors often teach out of necessity, not because they love teaching or because they are inspiring teachers, sometimes taking delight in repeating the tired aphorism 'this would be a great job if it weren't for the students,'" Clifton and Rubenstein write.
Professorial nonchalance has led to graduate students conducting a significant amount of university teaching, and is one of the reasons behind declining academic standards, the authors claim.
"Undergraduate students are often short-changed by poor teaching, huge classes, poorly designed examinations, grade inflation, ideological indoctrination, political correctness, and 'Mickey-mouse' courses," Clifton and Rubenstein say.
To change the prevailing culture of neglect, the authors argue that professors should be evaluated and rewarded for the collective achievement of all the professors within their academic departments. If professors are judged on a departmental basis, they will be more inclined to be involved in and aware of the activities of their peers, they say.
One incentive the authors suggest is withholding financial and staffing resources from departments that receive, on average, poor reviews from student evaluations. Departments that receive the highest ratings from students would obtain increased money and staff. Departments that have neither superior nor dismal ratings would retain their resources.
Group evaluation, with some variations, also would apply to scholarship. Rather than increasing performance, a group rewards system would only exacerbate the current situation, says David Salisbury, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
"Teaching and scholarly activity is an individual activity and achievements are made as individuals, not as groups," Salisbury says. "It would make people who are not real productive and effective look better than they really are and it would make people who are extremely productive and effective look worse than they really are."
Despite flaws in the current university evaluation system, viable alternatives to the current system of peer review simply don't exist, according to Herbert London, president of the Indianapolis-based Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank.
"While I think there are abuses and I'm very much concerned about those abuses, and I would like to see the university system sanitized to some degree so that ideology plays less of a role in these matters, by and large I think peer review is the most effective way of evaluating one's colleagues," London says.
Peer review occurs when a university committee judges the merit of a professor's work and research. It is often a prerequisite for achieving tenure.
Although student evaluations are an important indicator of performance, London cautions against inflating their significance.
"Students are more inclined to support professors they regard as popular or entertaining, not necessarily those who exhibit the greatest scholarship," London says. "So to rely on students to make judgments of this kind is sometimes, I think, a very problematic matter."
London does not think, however, that student evaluations are worthless. For example, many university pay increases are directly tied to such reports.
The Fraser Institute report is an example of a growing movement in North America to use performance-based standards when assessing professors, according to Robert Benjamin, president of the RAND Council for Aid to Education. Benjamin agrees with Fraser's contention that it is often difficult to assess how well a professor is doing at his job because the business of education is essentially an ongoing process and is completed a little at a time rather than all at once.
Quality standards are an example of the introduction of market-centered initiatives within universities, Benjamin says.
Reassessing tenure is an important step introducing the same incentives that work in other parts of the marketplace, says Salisbury.
"Tenure protects the less productive," he says. "There is not a job in any other sector that I know of where you're guaranteed a job for the rest of your life no matter what you do, unless you do something extremely unethical or illegal. Why should we have such a system in education?"
Short-term contracts that can be extended are viable alternative to tenure cited by the authors of the Fraser report. The reasoning is that professors would be held to and therefore act in accordance with higher standards, because their jobs could otherwise be in jeopardy.
Benjamin, however, does not advocate abolishing tenure and does not believe the system will be dismantled anytime soon.
"I think you do need a critical mass of full-time faculty to develop curriculum and to attend the running of a college or university," he says. "You just can't do it only on a part-time basis."
