This seems like a very bad idea to me. "Performance"
as a professor defined as papers published, patents,
or administrative duties avoids the issue of what I
believe "should" be the primary focus of a
"professor": TEACHING!! Of course that would be
another can of worms, because how would performance as
a teacher be measured?
Looks like Germany is trying to solve the brain drain
problem too superficially.
Edryce
--- Charles Wankel <
wankelc@optonline.net> wrote:
> Germany Set to Link Professors' Pay to Performance
> By VIVIEN MARX
> Chronicle of Higher Education, Thursday, November
> 15, 2001
>
> Germany is about to pass legislation that would link
> pay to performance
> for all 30,000 of the nation's professors.
>
> "This is the most sweeping reform of the university
> system since the
> '60s," said Edelgard Bulmahn, the German minister of
> education and
> science.
>
> After being passed by the Bundestag, the lower house
> of the German
> parliament, last Friday, the law is headed in the
> next few weeks for the
> second house of parliament, the Bundesrat, where
> observers say approval
> is practically certain.
>
> The new law will establish what for Germany will be
> a novel payment plan
> in which a quarter to a third of professors' pay
> will be based on their
> performance. The reform will also establish new
> positions, junior
> professors, aimed at recruiting younger researchers
> to faculty posts.
> The government plans to support 3,000 junior
> professorships over the
> next five years.
>
> "We can no longer afford to lose our brightest
> minds," Ms. Bulmahn said
> in a speech to legislators. "In the '90s, 15 percent
> of all Ph.D.'s went
> to the United States to seek employment."
>
> Currently, faculty members earn pay raises based
> only on seniority. The
> new plan establishes two grades of base pay, with
> the final pay linked
> to performance criteria -- the number of published
> papers or patents for
> a researcher, for example, or the degree of
> administrative
> responsibilities a professor takes on, such as
> department chairmanships.
> While salaries cannot go below the base pay, they
> are no longer capped
> at an upper limit. According to Ms. Bulmahn, this
> measure would make
> German universities more competitive with
> institutions outside Germany.
>
> Debate has raged for months on the new payment
> rules. Earlier this year,
> 3,759 faculty members from across the country signed
> a letter of protest
> that ran as a four-page advertisement in the
> Frankfurter Allgemeine
> Zeitung, a respected daily newspaper. The
> faculty-and-staff association
> of the Universities of Applied Sciences went even
> further. In a mock
> obituary in Die Zeit
http://www.zeit.de/ , a
> national weekly, the
> association claimed that its institutions had
> "passed away," with
> "funeral proceedings to be held by the members of
> the German parliament
> by the end of 2001."
>
> According to G???nter Siegel, president of that
> association as well as
> president of the University of Applied Science, in
> Berlin, the new law
> means lower pay for the average professor, thus
> decreasing the
> possibility of attracting faculty members.
>
> According to the Association of German Universities,
> professorships in
> general will be "weakened." When comparing
> philosophers and computer
> scientists, the association argues, it is not
> performance but market
> value that will be used as the decisive criterion
> for payment. That, in
> turn, will lead to a demise in the humanities, the
> association says.
>
> While many faculty associations and the university
> rectors' conference
> generally support reforms, they worry that no extra
> money is going to be
> given to universities for professors' pay. "The
> basic math of that is
> that if we decide to pay some professors more, the
> money will have to
> come from another professor's salary," explains Mr.
> Siegel.
__________________________________________________
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