One of the funny things that has happened at research universities is the disciplines of study have evolved into a the departments that can get research money and the departments that can't no matter what they do. I'm not saying it is fair, but that is the way it is.
When you start talking about ranking (or firing) chairmen, one the metrics that needs to be looked at is how much money has their department raised and how that ranks against what is possible.
Let's go into the haves - Medicine, Business, Engineering, hard sciences - Chemistry, Physics.
Have-nots - History, Math, English, Foreign Languages.
There are some that I can't figure out like Law.
Need to do some work, so more later.
1 comment:
When I first came here, several administrator cycles ago, the "metric" they judged us by was credit hours. That made sense to me; after all, more credit hours = more money. Plus you are earning it not from pleasing some federal agency or shaking down the tobacco settlement research funds, but by meeting the demand of that forgotten man/woman: the student.
As a "service" department teaching large courses (we don't rely on TAs to teach our courses), History came out well but...
Then new administrators thought that was all wrong. We should be primarily judged (as departments) by number of majors. During my five years as undergraduate adviser the number of majors increased fifty percent (I'm not taking the credit, just stating a trend) but...
you guessed it: in the middle of that cycle, they came out with a new formula -- federal funding took primary place because SIU got overhead. Yes, that is one stream of revenue but how large is it compared to other streams? And is not money fungible?
Here is the crux of the matter: The individual faculty member becomes completely cynical about changing anything but the newspaper that carries his/her horoscope. Management is prone to fads, and in the private sector, they are tested by reality. Academic management is tested by....who knows?
I'd appreciate your thoughts on the matter, as a businessman. The incentive structure has to have some predictability (and make sense). One without the other is no good.
As for the law school, well....that's an offline in the gym conversation!
Jonathan Bean
Flummoxed Faculty Member Since 1995
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