Proposal #68
Proposal Title: Positive selection among faculty
Anticipated Savings/Revenue: not known
Units affected: all
Impacted Degrees/Courses: all
Brief Description of Proposal:
The objective and goals of a university are reflected in how the university treats the faculty with respect to those goals. My personal view of a professor as a career position is one of research and teaching. How does San Francisco State University treat faculty with respect to these two categories? From the long view that I have (30 yrs at SF State), the university's position is that there is an expectation and otherwise we can ignore anything to do with it. Until quite recently, maybe the last 3 years, there was no celebration of either research or good teaching on campus. Now there is a single 'self-nomination' award in each category. That isn't worth much is it? That tells me the university is self-absorbed on other topics. It's bad enough being part of a unionized faculty, with a race to the bottom a built-in aspect of union faculty.
My recommendation to the restructuring committee is that, no matter how you restructure the system, no matter how many departments or colleges you eliminate, you will not accomplish anything (except for easing the budget) unless you additionally focus on the remaining faculty. Not only do you need to add faculty to those remaining departments, but you need to celebrate research and teaching. One award a year? Given the culture on this campus, that means it will HAVE to rotate among colleges and no department will receive two until other departments have a 'chance'. In other words, these are meaningless awards. They are weakly based on merit, but that's it. Instead, if you want to celebrate research, there should be a large number of awards each year, not ranked, but to reward those folks who go out of their way, because on this campus, people have to go out of their way to produce good research, especially consistently. Not only that, but there should be financial awards for that productivity. We live in a national culture that claims merit rises to the top, we are professionals in which publishing is a competitive, merit-based activity, and yet, we're a unionized faculty in which the least productive is rewarded as much as the most productive. In my experience, a faculty member who feels they deserve a merit raise has to, instead of talking with their chair and dean, apply for jobs at other institutions and then negotiate later with their dean. Is that a pathetic process? What does that say about the worth of faculty on this campus? It says to me that the institution lacks consideration for their faculty, that it lacks the will or judgment, or lacks the courage to review its own faculty and make a decision about who is performing. While it may not be possible to raise salaries because of the union contract, it certainly is possible to provide one-time bonuses. Those could easily happen. They should be substantial, on the order of $10,000 each, and should be distributed among 10-12! people
for research performance, and some large number for teaching performance. They should be 'repeatable', they should not be tied to some 'proportionality' among colleges or departments. There is considerable merit across the campus. This would act as a positive selective forces to create the type of faculty reflective of a higher class of academic institutions, faculty who would be in better spirits, and faculty who would create an institution that would not only be of higher academic performance, but who would attract higher quality faculty to join it through time. Right now, everything is negative based, do this or else. But where's the carrot? Where's the campus process that would improve attitude?
Note: Proposals are posted as submitted, without
editing other than to remove the submitter's contact information.
