During their Nov. 13 session at UT-El Paso, the UT System’s Board of Regents unanimously passed an initiative to honor the University’s foremost teachers and thinkers with monetary prizes. But this latest noble attempt to recognize those who make the University spark is feeble at best.
Beginning the fiscal year of 2009, a select amount of tenured teachers will win awards of $30,000 each; the remaining funds will be split into dividends of $15,000 and given to part-time and adjunct faculty. The system is allotting $1 million per year for the next five years to the University to finance teaching awards. A parallel award program that will also receive $5 million over five years is intended to reward faculty members who commercialize their laboratory discoveries or support technology transfer. In total, the board expects to recognize 30 faculty members per year. Always on the cutting edge of largesse, the University system claims that these awards are the highest offered at any university in the country.
They’re also the most foolish. UT has 2,500 faculty; surely more than 30 of them are excellent teachers deserving of generous bonuses. Awarding a disproportionate number of faculty — 1.2 percent, to be exact — with excessive amounts of money is not only overindulgent, but lazy. If the board really wanted to put its money toward supporting excellence in teaching, as Vice Chairman James Huffines stated as its goal during Thursday’s meeting, a more meaningful and motivating solution would be to award 500 faculty with $2,000 each, or 1,000 with $1,000 each, or simply to elevate teacher salaries across the board.
And so the meeting in El Paso was business as usual for the regents: throwing some money at its servants to prove its piety, but missing the mark and ultimately serving very few.
— Leah Finnegan for the editorial board
