Cal State Faculty Contract

Instead of a “Business Course for Professors” (editorial, May 12), may I suggest a journalism course for The Times, which has consistently misreported that the California State University has had no performance-based review until Chancellor Charles B. Reed came along. Not true.

At one recent point, I was chairing my department’s retention, tenure and promotion committee, on a team developing an accreditation report for a national review of my department, sitting on a university strategic planning group and being asked to sit on the new merit pay committee. The RTP process is very rigorous and does track performance past tenure, but it is tied to the tenure process that Reed wants to eliminate. The business practices he wants to instill are downsizing and outsourcing--fire tenured professors and hire part-time lecturers without health benefits or those nasty retirement benefits.

You want to see us as a bunch of ‘60s radicals. Please. At Cal Poly Pomona, where the Academic Senate voted no confidence in Reed, the largest colleges are business and engineering.

JERRY MITCHELL, Professor

Urban and Regional Planning

Cal Poly Pomona

*

Interesting that the disagreement is with who shall determine who is meritorious and not what deserves special merit. Currently professors have decided that the number of articles published and the number of committees served on shall be the bases of merit pay reward. Neither of which has anything to do with the quality of teaching. Of course, student evaluations are also involved, but they are merely a source for grade inflation (no one ever received high marks from students to whom they gave Ds and Fs, nor even Cs).

I have never seen merit pay awarded based on an appraisal of a professor’s lecture notes (time and effort involved) or tests (whether reflective of his thoughts or out of a published test manual). Nor is any merit related to the added number of hours spent in the office with the door open for student service.

Teaching proficiency is very difficult to assess and the current monetary merit system does little to reward that performance.

LOUIS J. KING

Professor, Behavioral Sciences

Cal Poly Pomona