Is Every Professor Really Doing Research? : Productivity reform by Sacramento fiat, no . . .but

“Save water, shower with a friend.” Thus read a bumper sticker popular in Berkeley during one of our earlier California droughts. If everyone showered with a friend, we could undoubtedly save some water. There would, however, be certain other complications.

Legislative Analyst Elizabeth G. Hill, in her analysis of Gov. Pete Wilson’s 1992-93 budget last week, suggested that if the 5,600 regular faculty members of the University of California taught an average of six courses per year, instead of the current five, the state would eventually save $47 million per year.

Simple arithmetic to analyst Hill, but simple-minded arithmetic to UC President David P. Gardner, who lashed out at the proposal as “fundamentally the most destructive recommendation that has been made” during his nine years as UC President.

Later, Gardner conceded that in this year of protracted budget crisis, everyone’s nerves are frayed. In fairness, however, an at-a-stroke, one-course, across-the-board increase in the UC faculty teaching load strikes us as a recipe for chaos.

Suppose you are a professor of Sanskrit, one of the three great classical languages of the world (with Mandarin and Greek). A great university can no more dispense with Sanskrit for economy reasons than an unabridged dictionary can leave out one letter of the alphabet to cut printing costs. But as things stand, you rarely teach to five full classrooms in the course of a year. How does the university gain by requiring you to teach to a sixth? The problem grows from there, so one could perhaps excuse Gardner for an uncharacteristically heated--and haughty--comment on Hill’s proposal.

On the other hand, the addition of a sixth course to a UC professor’s annual schedule is surely not in every case fundamentally destructive. If it were, how could distinguished UCLA historian Robert Dallek have volunteered to add a sixth course to his own schedule for just the reasons that Hill proposed?

The schedule that UC faculty maintain is understood to include at all times--that is, even short of sabbaticals and the like--enough time for serious research. But years after tenure, it may be sadly evident to an honest dean that a given member of the faculty is in fact doing no research whatsoever. At the dean’s discretion, surely, and not by Sacramento ukase, a reassignment of such a professor’s time to teaching in the form of a sixth assigned course would scarcely hurt those faculty who are in fact doing the research they were hired to do.

California State University faculty regularly teach nine courses per year. CSU is understood to be a “teaching university”; the state does not buy research time for its faculty. And yet, against the higher odds, CSU manages a surprising amount of first-rate research.

If, as President Gardner claims would be necessary, UC admitted 15,000 to 20,000 new students just to fill the classes opened up by a one-sixth increase in faculty teaching load, then doubtless the 17.6-to-1 UC teacher-student ratio would go up. Low ratios and high quality do tend to go together, however: Stanford’s, for example, is only 10 to 1.

So, we agree: Hill’s proposal has all the rigor of a bumper sticker, and UC was right to reject it. But the time has come for a hard look by the university itself at the cost of research time for faculty who are doing no research.

Shower briskly, lest you be required to shower in tandem.