From Bill Mohler

in reply to Carol Pilbeam

8/25/09 2:18 PM

I suppose my meaning on insitution vs faculty might be better stated this way:

The status and salary of an individual faculty member can be either a positive asset to the institution (productive faculty: publishing, getting grant support, administrating, and/or educating) or a negative asset (not productive enough a combination in these realms). Collectively, there is a net asset level for the full faculty of the institution. It is best for the institution to maximize the positive asset level for the full faculty. This is best done when the status and salary of the individual faculty can be adjusted (through promotion, termination, salary adjustment) according to the individual faculty's productivity. A healthy and productive faculty is of course the heart of the institution, but even hearts require supplemental assistance and occasional replacement in times of severe disease. Fortunately a faculty is made up of modular components (professors), the they can be addressed individually. I believe that some faculty (Leo, perhaps) prefers that the health of the faculty be handled at the level of the individual, to ensure that the individual and the institution are encumbered by extreme measures to protect the collective faculty.
No faculty member, including me, is by default a positive asset to the institution (or even to the collective faculty).

On the question of metrics of faculty performance: I would contend that the recent high rating of our main Storrs campus might be better correlated with the extraordinary investment by the past governor and legislature than with any effects brought on by AAUP. Let's see how they rank nationally once the very Wall-Street-contaminated Connecticut state budget deficits of the coming years begin to limit the extraordinary growth they have experienced at Storrs. Our branch of UConn was already dealing with budget deficits long before the recession descended. It is not a surprise that the action on deficit reduction has hit our campus earlier than it will at Storrs.

Bill