Professional Life Part 4

I'm going to continue with this series of things that have happened to me over my professional life as an economist at various universities in the US. I would be concerned about telling these things in a public space, but I know only 4 people read this blog anyway.

One of the more unpleasant duties I had to do when I was department chair of the Economics Department at the University of Oklahoma (OU) was to preside over annual faculty evaluations. To the faculty who were there when I arrived, this exercise was deadly serious. I could never really understand why. At other universities, annual evals might have had meaning since they could determine the size of a merit raise. However, OU was a poor state-school in a poor state and the faculty hadn't received merit raises in over a decade. It was strictly some form of Cost-of-Living increases and in most years nothing at all. Yet, these people would go crazy over them.

One thing that I did upon my arrival was to get rid of the rigged system that they had been using. Faculty were evaluated over the quality of their teaching, scholarship and service. By service they meant things like serving on committees or heading up new projects for the department or maybe reviewing research articles for a journal. To people not in Higher Ed, that one can be a bit odd. Anyway, they would rig the system so that everyone would get high scores. The system was set on a scale of 0.1 up to 5. If you had a 5 in a particular area that meant you were just the best and couldn't be touched and were fantastic. If you had a 4, you were excellent. If you had a 3, it meant you were doing fine. Nothing good and nothing bad. A 2 meant you needed to improve in some way and a 1 meant you were messing up big time.

Let me stop here to say that I thought, and still think, that giving out numbers was silly. What I wanted to do was write a narrative for each faculty member pointing out what they had gotten right and what they had gotten wrong and then add ways to improve. Them? They just wanted a number. And man, how the knives would come out if one person got a score that was even 0.1 lower than someone else. They would swear that you had just debased their entire career and called them worthless. I wanted to get rid of that by not using these numbers for exactly that reason. It would have meant a lot more work for me because I couldn't simply assign some number and move on. I'd have to actually know what each faculty member was doing in every aspect of the job but I felt that's what they were paying me to do. Yeah right.

What they were doing when I arrived was saying that if you weren't doing research or doing scholarship then that area would count little for you. Maybe as little as 5% of your score and if you were doing great at teaching, then they would let teaching count for as much as 70%. It was a nutty way of doing business and was so unfair. I came in and standardized the system. I said that if someone had tenure then the weights would be 40/40/20 for teaching, scholarship and service. I then said that if you were untenured (basically still probationary) that the weights would be 45/45/10. We didn't expect our junior colleagues to do as much in terms of service since they really needed to establish their chops regarding teaching and scholarship.

It was a bloodbath. The faculty thought the world was coming to an end as they all wouldn't have near 5 every year even though it never turned into a dime of higher salary. They wanted to see everyone else's scores (which I wouldn't do), they wanted to know the lowest, highest and mean scores. One faculty member went so far as to plot regressions to show where people were in comparison to him. He swore that he was being robbed of 0.25 points.

The madness never stopped over these things. One faculty member argued that we should not have any human input in faculty evaluations. There should just be a formula and then a person would put their materials in and a number would be spit out. When I asked about who would assign the weights that would be used in the formula, he responded that they would get together as a group. It was silly given that 1) they couldn't agree on anything and to think that they'd agree that this journal should count for X percent was foolish 2) there are over 700 journals in economics and they'd be sitting there for a year arguing over a weight for just one of them 3) what if a new person joined the faculty who hadn't been there when the weights were created initially? They'd have to do the whole thing over. He also argued that there should be no human judgement in the process. Since people doing the evaluating each year would change, then so could the scores. I said, "welcome to democracy". If you think that person Y is not fair, then don't vote them into a position to do the evaluating. Since I've left that nut house, I've heard that they are moving towards that model. Good grief.

Another thing that bothered me and still makes me mad was the reliance on student evaluations of teaching. There is a ton of research which has shown that faculty of color and women are dinged 10% before they even open their mouths. But student evals are a simple set of numbers and a lazy person can just say that you scored 1.1 points higher than me so you must be a better teacher. Nonsense. They don't seem to take into account that some classes are naturally less appealing to students than others. Elective courses are always going to score better than required courses. No one cared about any of that. I would go to each faculty members class to watch them teach. I'd try to go once a semester but at least once a year. They accused me of spying on them. It was just stupid, how in the world am I supposed to honestly write a tenure recommendation about someone and speak of their teaching if I've never seen it? In addition, I'm not about to trust my career to some 19-year-old who has never taught a class in their lives and trust them as an expert on my teaching effectiveness. This teaching eval thing is not unique to OU and most colleges and universities take the lazy way out. I want to see an entire teaching portfolio which is supported by peer evaluations of teaching which also has some accounting for the type of course. Let's not forget that the average response rate from students on these things is about 10% thus if you're teaching a small class and one student really hates you, you're a cooked goose. No one cared.

Got any comments about this post or this blog? Contact me at: garyhoover2012 [at] gmail.com