Guest Blog: Problems with Recently Suggested Higher Education “Reforms” at Texas A&M

Problems with Recently Suggested Higher Education “Reforms” at Texas A&M
By John Edens, Ph.D.

Regarding the “7 Solutions” for higher education reform proposed by Jeff Sandefer through the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), there are two main issues of concern in terms of their effect on TAMU. The first issue is the process by which TPPF has tried to implement these poorly thought out "solutions" at our university. The impression a lot of faculty have is that a regressive ideological organization has been trying to take control of the direction of higher education in Texas, particularly at TAMU and UT-Austin, and force their particular political agenda on the students, faculty and administration. As has been documented in various emails that have been released to the public by the news media, some of the people involved in these discussions have remarkable disdain for the professors who work in higher education and they also seem to have had enormous involvement in important decisions (e.g., faculty reward programs, the chancellor's "retirement")—despite holding no elected offices and not apparently having any particular expertise in how one should run a major Tier One research university.

Among those who do have experience with higher education, one of the major TPPF players, Rick O'Donnell, has been widely discredited by the San Antonio Express News for producing one of their reports lambasting the importance of most research and scholarship that goes on in universities. Apparently so full of errors, TPPF pulled it off of their website. Although these people claim they are interested in "transparency" in higher education, there is very little that has gone on in recent months that appears to be transparent to those of us down here in the trenches. Hopefully the new state legislative oversight committee chaired by Representative Branch and Senator Zaffirini will shed further light on exactly how much undue influence these people have been having, or at least have been attempting to have, at Texas A&M and elsewhere.

The second issue of concern is the content of the supposed "solutions" themselves. First, they're almost completely untested and have been essentially rejected by other systems, such as the University of Houston, which hired an outside agency that found the solutions to be seriously lacking. Although on their face these solutions might seem quite reasonable, close inspection reveals a lot of problems. First, several of them are solutions to problems that don't actually exist, at least not here at TAMU and I gather at a lot of other schools. For example, they argue that teaching should be evaluated before anyone is granted tenure. Having been through the tenure process myself and having served on the tenure committee in my department here, I can assure people that we definitely place a lot of weight on the quality of a faculty member's teaching accomplishments when judging whether to recommend them for tenure.

Another one of their suggestions is that we should reward great teaching. We already do. Faculty raises are impacted by the quality of our teaching, among other things. Also, our Association of Former Students gives out rigorously vetted teaching awards each year, using a very thorough evaluation system. TPPF and the Sandefers apparently want to simply give bonuses to people who get high marks on simplistic student evaluation forms, which can easily be manipulated, placing more emphasis on being popular rather than being a good educator. Even the student organization involved in the oversight of these awards is rebelling at this point, refusing to use the term "teaching excellence" in the title.

Other recommendations of the TPPF and the Sandefers border on the bizarre, such as pursuing alternative university accreditation systems, denying any state tax dollars from being spent on academic research, and putting universities under sunset review by the state legislature. Thankfully, these ideas seem to have found little traction among the state legislature, as best I can determine.

But I think the most misguided suggestion by the TPPF is the idea that budgets for "teaching" and "research" should be separated. Although they argue for this in the name of "transparency," if you read their literature it seems to me to simply be a means of trying to kill scholarship--particularly in the humanities and social sciences--that lies at the heart of what major universities should be pursuing. This was the main thrust of the O’Donnell piece for TPPF that they had to pull off-line due to all the inaccuracies. By creating this false dichotomy between teaching and research, TPPF has made it clear that they would like to see "unfunded research" discontinued in universities because they argue that most of it has no value (and note that they are the arbiters of what has value and what doesn't—not the people who actually work in those fields).

To me this mentality is incredibly short-sighted, because it assumes that an immediate dollar value can be applied to knowledge generation, as well as assumes that knowledge is stagnant and simply needs to be "delivered" to students as "consumers." If people don't think academic scholarship is important, they should pick up an introductory textbook in any discipline from the 1950s or 1960s and compare it to a current edition. Almost none of those advances would have occurred without research and scholarship that goes on at major universities, much of it very basic (i.e., having no immediate practical or commercial use) and much of it not externally funded. There are lots of projects that university researchers conduct that would not be “profitable” to private companies. For example, research on improving how our criminal justice system works has huge benefits for our society, yet it’s unlikely one could find external support for such initiatives in the private sector.

Private sector funding for research also raises the specter of conflicts of interest, such as when big pharmaceutical companies pay for experimental drug trials. Do we really expect those results to be completely objective and independent? Having academic researchers who aren’t beholden to special interests (and who are protected from retribution by being tenured) is one of our best defenses against biased results and corporate greed.

A second very important point, argued more eloquently than I could by the presidents of TAMU and UT-Austin, is that research and teaching in these universities go hand-in-hand. Doing good research in a lab or in the field teaches students numerous important skills that they'll never pick up in some on-line class or in a room full of 300 other students. That’s why the faculty teaching seats/salary analyses such as the recent report by Richard Vedder for TPPF are so misguided. It implies that a faculty member’s value can be boiled down to the number of “seats in a classroom” they cover any given semester. Aside from the obvious fact that different types of classes require vastly different amounts of time and effort to teach (a fact not addressed in Vedder's analyses), a lot of the education that a student receives at TAMU goes on outside the classroom. And according to the National Science Foundation, researchers in academia already work about 50 hour weeks, and put in more time than researchers in other settings. Some of the statements made by Vedder about faculty just needing to "work harder" are just patently offensive and ignorant and suggest a real lack of understanding of what occurs at a major Tier One research university such as A&M (and UT).

The impact of all of this in my mind is that in the long-term these "solutions," particularly those designed to kill unfunded academic research, will discourage the best and the brightest from wanting to come to A&M—both students and educators. Faculty want to come here not only to pass on existing knowledge but also because they want to involve students in the advancement of knowledge as well. That’s what a major research university should be doing and, if it isn’t, you’ll eventually see its reputation bottom-out and its best faculty head elsewhere. At a time when our state government has clearly said that we need more (not fewer) Tier 1 research universities in Texas to remain competitive with other states that have many more than us, the ideas of TPPF are taking us in the wrong direction. We shouldn't let them try to turn Texas A&M University into the Wal-Mart of higher education.

Biographical Data:
John Edens, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and professor in the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University. He teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in Forensic Psychology. His primary areas of research interest are (a) the interface between the mental health and legal systems and (b) psychopathic personality disorder (psychopathy). Prior to coming to A&M, he held faculty positions at Southern Methodist University and Sam Houston State University. He received his Ph.D. from Texas A&M in 1996. The opinions expressed in this statement are solely those of Dr. Edens and do not reflect any official positions of Texas A&M in general or the Department of Psychology in particular.