Merit-Based Pay Cuts for Academics?

Ilya Somin:

George Mason economist Bryan Caplan has an interesting post advocating merit-based pay cuts for academics:

Many universities now have pay freezes or even nominal pay cuts. Under the circumstances, several professors have told me that there's little point in doing faculty evaluations. If there's zero - or negative - money for raises, why bother saying who's doing well and who's not?

It amazes me how much these remarks take for granted. Suppose a department is 5% over-budget. It may be obvious that it needs to cut total compensation by 5%, but it isn't obvious that any particular professor's salary needs to be cut by 5%. If raises can depend on performance, so can cuts! If a chairman normally gives a 0% raise to his worst performer, and a 5% raise to his best performer, why not respond to fiscal austerity by simply changing the range from -7.5% to -.2.5%?

I agree with Bryan's argument, though I suspect many of my fellow academics won't. One possible objection is that the criteria for evaluating "merit" in academia are too subjective. But academic departments already have merit criteria for making hiring and promotion decisions. If our criteria are good enough to decide whether or not someone deserves to be hired or offered lifelong employment, they should be good enough to make much less consequential judgments on whether a given scholar should get a 3% pay cut as opposed to 1%. A department that lacks good criteria for evaluating merit ought to get some pronto - whether it intends to base pay cuts on them or not.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at October 16, 2009 10:33 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas