Volume 68, No. 3
WWW.PANAMERICANONLINE.COM
ACanHEAVY PROPOSAL we ask the professors to do more?
By Karen Antonacci The Pan American
After a $4 billion cut to higher education in Texas last year, including extensive impact on the University through cuts, layoffs, and early retirements, the future may well hold more painful shrinkage for higher education and UTPA. When the next budget decisions are made in coming years, UTPA may have to make some tricky moves in doing its part to account for some percentage of an expected repeat of the state budget shortfall. The question is, how much can be trimmed before the high-dollar items start feeling the crunch? The majority of expenditures at the average university goes to paying personnel, outside of intermittent and expensive building projects. Faculty salaries in particular have become an issue of great tension. No one seems to have the appetite to raise tuition or fees, and the University may be running out of areas to tweak and save. In the spring, controversy swirled around the “Seven Breakthrough Solutions” for higher education, a Rick Perry-backed business efficiency model that pitted regents and their educators against those who argued that the standards used to judge productivity must be adjusted to fit the unique business of an university. Academics were quick to point out that the business model doesn’t fit with college teaching, and faculty should have input about how their performance will ultimately be judged. Some supporters of enforcing stricter productivity guidelines for faculty, like the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation, questioned whether faculty are pulling their weight, and if not, whether to raise their workload. Some critics of faculty say that they spend too much time on research, or teaching smaller classes instead of taking on more classes with more students, which would pull in additional money and possibly lower the cost of public education. Gene Powell, chairman of the UT Board of Regents, hired adviser Rick O’Donnell last year to examine efficiency in the system. O’Donnell requested extensive data on salary and number of students taught by faculty in the System, among other things.
The resulting data has been criticized for its metrics and comes with a disclaimer that states it is raw data and should not be used for analysis. Yet the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a Washington D.C. think-tank, used the data to draw the conclusion that a fifth of UT system faculty taught the majority of the classes. O’Donnell was relieved of his post after a successful protest by state faculty. Dora Saavedra, an associate professor who is chair for the UTPA Faculty Senate, is also skeptical of the data and said it does not give an accurate representation of the amount of work that professors do. “I thought the metrics were oversimplified,” she said. “For example, this semester I’m teaching two graduate courses. Each graduate course is 16 students… and I also teach another class that has 41 students. So depending on how you report those numbers, it looks like I have very few students, yet what I have on the workload was a semester that I had several undergraduate classes that were 45 or more students. So that semester I had close to 100 students and I was working just as hard if not harder.” The data also do not take into account classroom availability, or how often a course must be offered. Core classes must be offered regularly and sometimes they are equipment-heavy, meaning that the number of slots for students is equal to the number of, say, computers. “Departments have to teach certain courses every single semester and you have to cover those,” Saavedra said. “In (some cases) there are certain courses that we teach every other year.” Also ignored in the 821-page report that caused a firestorm is mention of writing-intensive courses that may be impossible to expand. Richard Vedder, director of the center that did the study based off of the data, has publicly stated that while smaller class sizes are preferable, it may “be a luxury we can’t afford.” UTPA created a task force in October to examine faculty workload after having addressed the issue two years ago with dialogue. The current situation is that faculty tenured prior to 2005 teach four classes a semester, lecture-based faculty may teach as many as five classes a semester and faculty hired or tenured on or after 2005 teaching at least three. These different categories of faculty load also have different levels of responsibility in
September 15, 2011
the fields of research or creative projects and service. Research or creative projects include publishing books or scholarly articles, doing scientific research or a number of other things. The service component can be to a professional organization, or serving on department, college or university-wide committees. Lecturers, usually master’s degree holders, have little to no research requirement, and limited service requirements while others are required to produce scholarly work and serve on committees related to the University and that professor’s college. Generally, the lecturer’s job is to teach, and to teach often. According to the UTPA provost, Havidan Rodriguez, the October task force consulted with the Faculty Senate and other stakeholders, ultimately deciding to keep a baseline of three classes per semester as the workload. Saavedra maintains that while it may not always look like it, these combined responsibilities illustrate that faculty are more than pulling their weight. “The public is worried that people are not putting in their forty hours, or defrauding the state by taking a check they haven’t earned,” she said. “But I’d say that 98 percent of faculty are working in the range of 60 hours a week. We are stretched to the limit.” As to whether further budget cuts will force faculty to take on more students and classes, Saavedra said she doesn’t think it’s likely, and the provost agreed. “One of the recommendations (from the taskforce) was that we maintain the 3/3 teaching load we have for faculty, and that’s not going to change,” he said. “The president [Robert Nelsen] has indicated that unless departments make other types of decisions, the president nor the provost…we’re not going to request that the faculty workload change.”
The King is here! Artifacts from the upcoming King Tut exhibit arrived Wednesday, Sept. 14 || Read the complete article in next week’s issue. Erick Gonzalez / THE PAN AMERICAN