An article on the Austin American-Statesman discusses a proposal to change post-tenure review in the UNiversity of Texas system. Texas has had post-tenure review for a long time.
The details don’t interest me so much as some of the rationale for post-tenure review (my emphasis):
“It increases the accountability universities have to demonstrate to taxpayers that their money's being spent productively,” said Thomas Lindsay, director of the {Texas Public Policy Foundation}’s Center for Higher Education. “I think it's pretty unobjectionable... unless we believe faculty are alone among human beings in requiring no incentives to do their job.”
I have incentives to do my job.
Incentives like pride.
Curiosity. Desire to help students. I have plenty of incentives to do my job. It’s just that a lot of them are internal. They matter to me, not just because of the dollar value. If I was only interested in external incentives (i.e., money), I would have pursued a different career.
I don’t buy Lindsay’s implication that the only reason anyone does anything, ever, is because there is some external carrot or stick.
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