MISUSED MERITOCRACY

During the interview process at leading university, the interviewers told me the administration used a merit approach for deciding advancements and salaries for professors. At the time, I had over twenty years of experience teaching and knew past students rated me high as a teacher. One thing I had found out early in my career that one of the things a person learns is if teaching is where his or her talents are. If the students don’t like you, they have multiple ways of telling you. Conversely, a teacher knows if the students are learning or not and knows what they are learning.

Teaching ability is not the kind of thing that educational administrators from outside the classroom can easily score; it is more the kind of thing both students and teachers sense and feel. In addition, a teacher also knows if the students like them or not, which many feel go hand in hand with teaching ability. At the lower levels of education, the students believed this is invariably true but at the college level, a parent or outside observer but especially the students realizes a divergence is often true; the best teachers or professors are not popular. Unfortunately, the opposite is often true; the most popular teacher’s class is the one where the students learn the least. 

Therefore, as awkward as it sounds, meritocracy has merit. I was thrilled with that aspect of my new job. The first couple of years went by remarkably well, but then we had a change of the College Dean, and what at the time appeared to me to be a sudden and remarkable change of direction. To be fair, it was not just the new Dean; it was by a directive from the University administration. The department chairperson, my immediate supervisor, was a researcher and not a teacher. He had been telling me, warning me, that students highly rated me as a teacher, but I did not have research grants. With the new Dean, meritocracy changed meaning; the administration based merit on research awards, papers published, and the size of research grants. My salary stagnated in spite of student evaluations were the best in the college and in spite of the fact that I had more student contact time than any other professor in the college. I was feeling put upon but for others it was worse. In one department, the administration fired one of the most outstanding teachers for not doing research. He moved to another institution where that administration rewarded him repeatedly as the outstanding teacher year after year.

I could not imagine a university administration would hire a professor for research ability and discourage teaching. I could not believe the Department Chair at a major university, what I believed was a teaching institution, demanding I let the technician teach what I had been teaching and devote my time to doing research. That same chair withdrew support money for an outstanding teaching assistant; thus, forcing me to fire that person, because he was teaching and not doing research. Eventually, I put myself out of misery by retiring early; in other words; the administration won. Still, I watch in misery as our universities change from teaching institution to taxpayer supported, industrial funded research institution. There is some evidence recovery on the way because a small group of professors is demanding they teach students and students are demanding professors teach them. In spite of that spark of hope, the evidence shows that industries have created a university-industrial complex just as they created the military-industrial complex. Did you know that at the University of Minnesota, tenure is tied entrepreneurial propensities but the administration does not mention teaching ability?  

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