Over at BurkaBlog they’re talking about Rick O’Donnell, who the UT Regents have hired as a ‘special adviser’. Rick comes to us from the for profit Acton B school, but what’s fascinating are some of his ideas on higher education…
Texas should consider separating teaching and research budgets. Right now we pay a faculty member their salary, benefits, and office space, and they do a little teaching and they do a little research, and its unclear whether they’re any good at it. What do we get for that money? What Texas could do is say, ‘Look we’ll split how you get paid 50 percent for teaching and 50 percent for research, and at the end of the year we’re going to ask a simple question: How many students did you teach and did they rate you highly or not, and how much research did you produce.’ And was it good research? And then we can say, hey, did we get our money’s worth?
Gee. Let me think. Someone who talks in vague, abstract ways about evaluating the work product of academics isn’t someone who should be in a position to, you know, evaluate academics. As for students rating professors, seriously, if you don’t see the flaw there you’re on the wrong blog.