Higher Education Reform Meets Professor X

The controversy over reform in Texas higher education has confused the public. Which side is right?

Watching a charge from one side, then a counter-charge from the other side loses the reader in the weeds of detail. The charge and counter-charge often do not meet head-on but speak past one another, leaving the reader with what seem to be apples/oranges comparisons.

I propose a different way to approach the controversy. Having been a college or university professor for 27 years, an editor of an academic journal for many years, a college vice president, and director of the Fulbright Program for the U.S. government, I know how universities operate. Hard experience has taught me that fundamental reform in higher education is a must.

Consider the following prototype of Professor X.

He got a Ph.D. at age 29, then worked through the ranks for seven years to be given tenure at age 36. Tenure guarantees lifetime job security, so Professor X no longer needs to publish anything ever again. Even though former Harvard president Derek Bok reports that “fewer than half of all professors publish as much as one article per year,” Professor X still wants to publish that one article per year.

An academic journal publishes his article, but it is so esoteric that only very few scholars read it or cite it. The article has no value to students or to classroom pedagogy.

Professor X teaches two classes per semester – each class with an average of 16 students, translating to 32 per semester and 64 for the entire year. He has taught these two classes several times over the years, so he needs little preparation for each lecture – just some brief reviewing of old notes.

He posts three office-hours per week to meet with students. He needs to grade papers, but with only 32 students for the semester, such grading is not heavy lifting. He also serves on a few committees, but elects not to do much for them.

Professor X pulls down a six-figure salary, plus 25 percent in fringe benefits. He teaches two 15-week courses per semester – for a total of 30 weeks per year – and has 22 weeks off.

He says he “works 60 hours a week.” Maybe so, but many of these hours are extraneous to his teaching and focus on outside matters that he wishes to pursue.

With tenure, he has no accountability to students, administrators, or the public. He can confess, with impunity, that his teaching is beyond reproach.

With tenure, he cannot be forced into retirement at any age, but even in retirement, his benefits will be bountiful.

Is there any wonder why college teaching is one of the most coveted positions in the world?

Now here is the sad part: the above prototype is real. There are countless professors like Professor X. I have discovered a great many of them in my five decades of working in higher education.

To be sure, there are thousands of excellent, conscientious, hard-working professors out there, but the educational system enables indolence and abuse, with impunity.

Now here is the key question: How many professors at our colleges and universities are like Professor X?

I don’t know.

But I can also tell you that regents, chancellors, presidents, faculty, students, parents, and the public don’t know either – at least not yet. Awareness is limited to the respective trenches of compartmentalized universities. The history faculty knows who the slackers are in the history department, but not in the physics department. Nor do regents or presidents know who the slackers are because there is no overall accountability.

And naturally, the status quo defenders want to keep it that way.

As I mentioned at the outset, there are charges and countercharges, both sides seeming to be right at the time to the confused public. There is only one way to resolve this conflict: regents must require thorough examination of compartmental trenches in the university and report the results to the subsidizing students and taxpayers. That is beginning to happen in Texas, with predictable howls of indignation from university faculty, administrators, and the alumni elites.

We must have this accountability is because college has become staggeringly expensive – and will continue more so until fundamental reform is constructively implemented.

Ronald L. Trowbridge, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a non-profit, free-market research institute based in Austin. Trowbridge formerly served as vice president of Hillsdale College in Michigan.