Rate Three Professors

Professor A (Literature) gets $0.00 plus an essay on expository language by Alexander Hamilton about the Federal Reserve Bank.

Professor C (Art) gets a sculpture, of a pyramid with an eye atop it, as on the reverse of a dollar bill.

Professor B (Science) gets $1,500.00 plus a new Etheric Vibration Detector for her Subfield Research Laboratory.

$500 each. They are each making standard contributions to their field.

Now, if A were publishing a translation of a previously lost work of Olde English, or B were publishing a paper on a previously-thought-impossible technique in their field, or C had inspired a new art movement, then they might get a bigger bonus.

But these sound like the kinds of things we're expecting our faculty to do, anyway.

K

I think they all get $500 based on what you have written. For example, was Prof B finally submitting the experiments done as a postdoc, but since then has shown little progress?

Is Professor C a MacArthur Fellow?

Is Professor A actually making money for the university on his books? Or, are his/her courses always totally full? Same number of students is a sham, since EVERYONE in science has to take some physics, but who is taking 19th-century American literature?

Actually, if they can get that many people to take THAT course, and give him good reviews, they deserves the entire $1500

There's one option you don't have available and it's the one I want. $750 to B and C; their work is completed. A has a contract but no actual product.

I wouldn't award any of them a bonus. In my view, a bonus is a reward for exceptional work. I'm already paying each of them a fine salary to do research and publish their results, and none of these achievements sound exceptional to me.

I give them nothing, each and severally. The $1500 is mine as administrator as earned performance bonus. If not, I might go elsewhere. They aren't going anywhere.

It seems to me that the comments appearing above avoid one of the central difficulties in the question: How do you decide which fields are more valuable to your fictional to your college community? Right now, Science frequently gets more money than Literature or Art, presumable because there's more value there (where I have no idea what "value" really ought to mean).

Think of it this way, what if I'm Congresswoman X and I have funds that I can give either to the NSF or the "National Art Foundation". How do I distribute?

Or maybe this is not what Chad meant.

In any case, I'm amusing myself with restating the question rather than answering it.

Honestly, I'd say that the literature prof has the most impressive achievement. Very few books are getting published these days. It's much easier to get a journal article published.

I'd like to give professor A $1000 and the others $250 each, but since that's not an option, I'd probably give it all to A.

I would say Professor A gets jack since he has a contract and hasn't produced anything. I would say Professors B and C have both showered the university with modest amounts of glory, and so I'd give Professor B $1000 and Professor C $500, if only because science is more expensive a pursuit than art. Unless Professor B is a theoretician, in which case I'd do the opposite and give Professor C the $1000.

Unless I spent the money myself on booze and gambling. And the rest I'd just waste.

I'm feeling cynical this morning: Uncle Al nailed it.

$500 to B and $1000 to C since A is already getting paid for his work, and since artists tend to get much smaller grants than scientists.

None-- Pocket the cash.
And you thought administration was stupid...

I'm going to buck the trend here, and say that the English prof gets 1000 because that is the result of several years of work. The Scientist's work was probably all done during that year, and so may get the same thing again next year... I'd probably split the 500 between B and C (I know it's cheating)

The arguments about how expensive science is are irrelevant because this is not research funds, this is pure salary, and English professors don't eat less expensive food than scientists...

One gets $1,000 (the big bonus), one gets $500, and other gets the shaft. Let Jimmy James pick who gets which.

I'd rate the contributions: A< B < C, because A has a contract, but hasn't finished anything, B has finished something medium sized, and C has finished something major and done a show (although I guess it depends on what sort of sculpture we are talking about).

As far as $$ goes, it's a choice between (500,500,500) or (0, 500, 1000), and I'd probalby choose the former, because the differences in output aren't great enough to justify the latter.

bugginess: that first sentence was A less than B less than C.

I just read a nice little article about Einstein's feet yesterday (Cabinet Magazine, issue 23). Apparently, he lamented the fact that he wasn't a cobbler...as it would have afforded him the opportunity to produce meaningful work, as opposed to endlessly cranking out worthless shit as a professor, just so he could keep up with the numbers game.

Your post suggests that's all it is - numbers. Perhaps you are right, but is this really the game we should be playing? A thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters can write a thousand papers, but that doesn't make them GOOD papers.

So why not ask "Which professor has mentored students...and how well?" "Which professor makes working in the university better (or worse)?" "Which professor presented at a conference, and did they make the University look stupid when they did?" "Which professor presented at the local high school and got a bunch of youngsters interested in their discipline?" "Which professor actually contributed to the committees they served on (as opposed to merely taking up space)?" "How well received have each of the professor's works been?"

For everyone suggesting that A hasn't produced anything yet: in the humanities, it's almost (though not 100%) impossible to get a contract based on "no work yet." You submit a book-length manuscript, the results of work you've already completed. The press (and its anonymous readers) might tell you to revise lots of things, but the bulk of the work for that project is finished, usually.

Good exercise in how one assesses achievement across fields. I'd give each of the three $500, since (by my limited awareness) they're all basically okay, neither exceptional nor laggardly.

greythistle: For everyone suggesting that A hasn't produced anything yet: in the humanities, it's almost (though not 100%) impossible to get a contract based on "no work yet." You submit a book-length manuscript, the results of work you've already completed. The press (and its anonymous readers) might tell you to revise lots of things, but the bulk of the work for that project is finished, usually.

This was how I understood the process, and what I had in mind when I wrote the post. I probably should've said "published a book," to avoid confusion, but the results have been interesting anyway.

ANT: Your post suggests that's all it is - numbers. Perhaps you are right, but is this really the game we should be playing?

Well, that's the real question, now, isn't it?
The thing is, this is the game we're playing at many colleges and universities, when it comes to trying to rate faculty performance on a yearly basis.

Give each 200 bucks and keep the rest for "administrative processing."

"Same number of students is a sham, since EVERYONE in science has to take some physics, but who is taking 19th-century American literature?"

My 19th century American lit. class had more people in it than my intro to physics. Yes, most scientists have to take physics, but at many schools (Chad's being one of them) almost everybody has to take literature as part of gen. ed. Further, everyone has to take "precept," which, at least when I was there, was/is taught mostly by humanities faculty.

My inclincation is to split the money evenly. But there is another consideration. My understanding is that humanities faculty generally receive less (in some cases far less) in salary than those in the sciences or engineering. Part of the reasons is that those in the sciences and engineering are expected to bring in at least part of (and in some cases most of) their salaries in the form of grants etc. Should salary be a factor in determining a bonus? And if so, how?

I guess that bigger universities can have different schools and departments, of reasonable size, where the regular judgements about who's doing well can at least be made between people in broadly similar areas. Bit tricky if you have a 'Physics Department' of two people.

Chad,
Yes, I know it's the game we're playing in academia. And your post, at least to me, speaks volumes. But when I look at the responses, which answer your question only at its face value, they speak even greater volumes - because not a single one actually called into question the nature of the game, or your methods of assessment, instead choosing to quibble over the details of "A, B, or C?" Answer #7 got close, but even that didn't get all the way there.

In other words, perhaps the problem is less with the game and more with the fact that we allow it to go on by playing it ourselves. The problem is us.

I don't know what bothers you about it. It's real life for most people. If an employer has some cash knocking around to use to reward employees, hell yes they have to make a judgement as to who deserves it. In a more fluid employment market they'd perhaps think about who they least wanted to lose (but if they're all tenured, they are unlikely to be going anywhere).