Business Course for Professors

When he took office last spring, California State University Chancellor Charles B. Reed began trying to base more of professors’ pay on performance. Faculty members protested, even mounting a 1960s-style march in Sacramento two weeks ago in which they donned academic robes, belted out union songs and called for Reed’s ouster.

That all changed with Reed’s announcement Monday that the California Faculty Assn., representing Cal State professors, had agreed to a merit pay compromise brokered over the weekend. Now the faculty members who had been calling for the chancellor’s removal are praising his compromise, which gives faculty committees the final say in most merit pay decisions. Presidents of the individual CSU campuses still have a key role in establishing merit pay, which will involve nearly 40% of overall raises, but Reed declined to give them the last word.

By compromising now, Reed has prompted the Cal State faculty to work with his administration. Only 7,542 of Cal State’s 20,000 professors and instructors are members of the California Faculty Assn., and a whopping 15% of those joined in the last few months out of concern about Reed’s proposed reforms. Had Reed continued to take a hard line, he would have inflamed the faculty he needs to manage.

If the settlement is approved, as expected, by the faculty union and the board of trustees, the chancellor will be free to move forward with other essential reforms, such as improving the colleges’ ability to train teachers. The 22-campus system educates the majority of the state’s public school teachers. Reed also has an economically sensible plan to accommodate the expected “tidal wave” of new students, children of the baby boomers, by using existing campuses year-round.

Shortly after taking office last year, Reed called Cal State “one of the most important economic engines for preparing California’s work force.” Many Cal State faculty members have scoffed at his notion that universities should work closely with business and abide by its key principles, like basing pay on performance. They are scoffing no more.

The most significant accomplishment of the merit pay settlement is that it creates a partnership between faculty and administrators to put those business principles into practice.