Klinefelter: By the Numbers

Overcome University Tenure's Limitations

Tomorrow's farm operators require more sophisticated business instruction than what many public institutions are providing. (Photo by John Morgan, CC BY 2.0)

University tenure systems are designed to protect tenured professors from political whims and ideological pressures from administrators, politicians, bureaucrats, and powerful alumni with personal agendas. There are pros and cons on both sides of the arguments whether academic tenure is a good or bad thing. My point here isn't to argue either; but, simply to take it as a given and suggest a supplement.

The issue is that somehow universities need to find ways to remain more responsive and flexible, to remain on the leading edge of research, and to expose their students to the best and brightest minds. Too many land-grant universities lack the expertise to prepare tomorrow's commercial farm operators for the complexities of running high-risk, high-dollar operations. As I argued in my December 2014 column, "Key Courses Colleges Forget," many public universities fail to offer adequate training on negotiation, risk reduction, managerial accounting, geopolitics, entrepreneurship or employee management. The skills needed to lead a $10 million and up operation are more akin to an MBA than the old farm operations course work.

One obvious limitation is the funding to go out and hire new PhD talent. Another is that some of the emerging areas involve topics and tools current faculty don't have an interest or expertise in. The "best" in any field are also limited by definition, and some universities wouldn't be appealing to them because of location, reputation or culture, even if the money were available.

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An alternative I have advocated are mini-mesters courses taught by outside faculty. Mini-mesters intensive two-week courses offered between regular semesters.

The top faculty in colleges of agriculture at the major land grant institutions often make $150,000 to $180,000 per year and typically have appointment splits of 60% research and 40% teaching at larger research institutions. In many of these universities, 40% teaching represents two graduate courses per year or four sections of two undergraduate courses. Thus, they are earning $30,000 per graduate course.

I believe many of these top faculty would be willing to go to another university between semesters to teach their course over a two-week period for $30,000 plus expenses, travel and lodging.

The benefit to the host university and its students are that the cost would be much less than hiring a full-time faculty member and these courses and faculty could be changed as new areas developed and as new academic stars arose; many who could not be attracted to a full-time position. There would also be a benefit to host university's faculty, in that they could audit the courses and build their own capacity through continuing education in new topics without uprooting their families or incurring the expenses associated with a sabbatical.

If universities could raise money for $1 million endowments for each course they wanted to offer in this manner, they could fully fund the positions without taking away from their existing operating budgets.

The earnings generated would typically be slightly more than needed to fund the position and would be reinvested to build the corpus of the endowment to cover future inflation. I would encourage those who now or in the future want to support their university, to consider this as an option.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Danny Klinefelter is a finance professor and extension economist with Texas AgriLIFE Extension and Texas A&M University where he teaches a beginning farmer program. He also is the founder of the mid-career Texas A&M management course for executive farmers called TEPAP.

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