There’s been a lot of discussion, a lot of faculty time and some attention in the press for MSCD’s proposed “pay- for-performance” plan. Contrary to newspaper headlines, MSCD already has a merit pay system. Indeed, any annual raise we receive is supposed to be for merit only—thus our annual dossiers. Pay-for-performance should be seen as merely another type of merit pay, albeit one that is not widely used in academia, possessing a number of distinct disadvantages, and, to date, containing a number of peculiarities unique to the plan proposed for implementation here, particularly the notion that any “pay for performance” received by a faculty member in any given year would not be added to that faculty person’s base pay. This plan proposes a bonus for performance.
The real problem with our present merit pay system is that it is remarkably under-funded and, hence, in its present state exists without real incentive for faculty. It has been suggested elsewhere that unless a merit raise is at least 6% of base pay, it will simply lack the necessary motivating force to make faculty work harder than they already are. Indeed, the faculty at MSCD already work hard and "produce," but given the merit raises we have received that are far less than a truly motivating 6% of base, faculty members here must be driven not by monetary incentives but by their sense of responsibility to students and their intrinsic desire for personal satisfaction and the recognition of their peers, here and elsewhere in academe.
Pay-for-performance is usually discussed in the context of secondary education -- not higher education-- where the performance referred to is student performance on standardized tests or other quantitative measures, rather than the faculty member’s own performance in areas like scholarship and community service. So, whose performance will matter here? We don’t really know, so we can’t know if performance criteria will serve our sense of responsibilities to our students and to our academic fields.
