It is much better to have a crude, imperfect measure that we know than the pretense that we have a perfect measure. We weren t planning to pass out any kind of measure at all. We asked the deans to work with the department heads and to come back to us at the faculty search hearings with their own assurance that their faculty were fully engaged. People came back with very different ways of accounting for their department s time. We do plan to do another workload study off of Snyder and Isis to see whether the reports we get from departments look the same or different than this other data.
Most institutions change most productively through generational change.
While I agree that we should make a good faith effort to increase the productivity of the existing faculty, the existing faculty has certain qualities that you can t change. I think that the people who are productive will continue to be productive, but the people who aren t very productive may be forced to go through the motions, so that you will have the perverse effect of some people who teach three and three and aren t that engaged in teaching will now teach poorly four and four and students will further say that we have a faculty that sucks the excitement out of course work. Unless we revitalize the faculty and have a real commitment to get the best scholars and teachers through early hiring, you are going to have mass exiting. I was in charge of workloads for three consecutive years in CAS, and we did some tightening up, but there wasn t much more tightening that could be done based on the criteria that you have laid out here. While one can always take the worst case and find someone who is doing virtually nothing except teach two courses, there are precious few, and this is not going to make a serious financial impact on the University.