When you take The Man’s money . . . .

. . . you dance to The Man’s tune.  That’s the grim lesson public universities are now learning, as state legislatures facing serious budget issues are trying to figure out exactly what taxpayers are getting for the money they spend on higher education.  The Wall Street Journal has a major story on the issue, excerpted over at TaxProf.  Some of the looming changes:

[P]erhaps the most far-reaching initiative is the cost-benefit balance sheet at Texas A&M, the oldest public university in the state. Each faculty member is assessed on criteria including the number of classes that they teach, the tuition that they bring in and research grants that they generate.

One metric divides their salary by the number of students that they teach. The range is striking. Some nontenured lecturers earn less than $100 for each student they instruct. Other professors are teaching such small classes that their compensation works out to more than $10,000—in a few cases, more than $20,000—per student.

Law professors are likely to do better than most on this metric, given the average size of law school classes.  But there’s likely to be pressure on those highly paid scholars who teach relatively few students in arcane seminars.

The money quote is from a highly regarded history professor who has written a study of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov.  “If you want me to explain why a grocery clerk in Texas should pay taxes for me to write those books,” he says, “I can’t give you an answer.”

I suspect the trend will not stop at public universities.  Next up, of course, will be private universities that get public money, which is pretty much all of us.

FGS