A tie vote among Metropolitan State College of Denver’s faculty on pay-for-performance means that the school’s president has a lot of work to do in building trust among professors that the plan — to be considered by the Board of Trustees this week — is good for them.
An early count of ballots showed the faculty is evenly split, 105-105, on getting paid based on performance. But professors narrowly rejected, 102-98, Metro president Steve Jordan’s actual plan.
“I’m going to do a lot of deep thinking about it,” Jordan said. “People didn’t necessarily reject pay for performance. The concern continues to be that we don’t have all the criteria in place yet.”
The vote is still in question, however, because late Friday, Hal Nees, president of the faculty senate and a plan supporter, found 24 unopened ballots on his desk. Metro State officials said they’ll investigate on Monday how late the votes came in — they were due no later than noon.
The four-year, 22,000-student school’s pay-for-performance plan has been called unique by national experts because of its combination of a base-building salary increase and one-time bonuses for meeting certain goals in teaching, advising and professional development.
If the pay plan is approved by the Board of Trustees, evaluations of professors would begin Jan. 1. The one-time bonuses and raises wouldn’t kick in until 2009.
Jordan told faculty members in November that $2 million he will set aside for the plan would probably not go to salaries if faculty didn’t approve it.
Universal criteria
Professors across campus, even those who disagreed with the plan, say they voted for it because they wanted money to go to salaries instead of other campus needs.
Renee Ruderman, an English professor, is against the idea because she says it would lead to infighting among her colleagues.
“Those of us in higher education are not necessarily only motivated by money,” she said.
“This whole idea of a bonus system or another layer of paperwork to submit and prove ourselves is very annoying.”
What makes Metro unique is that criteria across all departments — from chemistry to music to art — would be the same.
A committee working for the past 18 months to craft those guidelines is not finished with its work. Evaluations will likely look at student engagement, how well students are doing in the major and materials used in the class.
Administrators will also survey students about professors, said Linda Curran, vice president for academic affairs.
Across the country, professors at research universities are often given merit pay based on the number of scholarly articles they produce and the amount of research dollars raised.
Those criteria are easier to measure than teaching quality, said Robert Tout koushian, a professor of economics and education at Indiana University.
Toutkoushian, who has studied merit pay in higher education across the country, said plans like Metro’s are becoming more common, but they are difficult to implement.
“We can count research dollars,” he said. “But in teaching, ideally you’d like to know how much better off the student is after the class. We don’t have a great measure of that.”
Similar but smaller program
Mesa State College in Grand Junction is in its second year of a similar plan that is smaller in scale.
Professors there can receive between $500 and $3,000 for highly proficient or exemplary work in teaching, creative activities and service. Last year, the school spent $228,500 on the plan and 197 of 207 full-time professors got some bonus, said Dana Nunn, Mesa State spokeswoman.
Professors rewarded in the Metro State program could receive bonuses of between $2,000 and $10,000. Full professors currently earn salaries ranging from $47,000 to $100,000.
The school’s Board of Trustees will take up the issue Wednesday.
Board president Adele Phelan said the split vote gives them an opportunity to make a decision based on what’s good for the institution for the long term.
“There certainly is an indication of board interest,” Phelan said. “It’s a wonderful opportunity for us to exercise the kind of responsibility that is entrusted to us.”
Allison Sherry: 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com
