Paying The Man To Serve

For the first time ever, the presidents of Iowa's three public universities will receive bonuses for achieving specific objectives. As the Des Moines Register notes, the practice is common at corporations and increasingly accepted at universities. However, it will bring both new possibilities, and new dilemmas. to the administration of Iowa's premier schools.

In a sense, it's not really that new. The football coaches at these schools already receive bonuses for meeting performance indicators. The difference is, measuring a football coach's performance is easy. They win games, they lose games, and the better coaches do more of the former than the latter.

For university presidents, on the other hand, it's a bit more opaque. How do you measure the performance of a university?

Is it measured by the quality of its research? Is it measured by the how well it teaches future leaders of the state, nation, or world? Is it some balance of the two? And how should these products of university life themselves be properly measured?

Answering these questions requires judgment and leadership, which is why the process used in establishing the metrics is good. Each president set his or her university's goals, and the Board of Regents approved. All these executives are intelligent, motivated people by virtue of the position they've already attained. They have led long enough to know their strengths, weaknesses, and leadership style, and their previous successes indicate skill in self-management, a process in which goal-setting factors heavily. Even more importantly, some of the proposed goals could actually be quite difficult to achieve.

At UNI, President Allen wants to cut classes, which could draw him into conflict with those who teach such classes.

At ISU, President Geoffroy wants departments to balance their budgets, which could require hard choices at the end of the year.

At Iowa, flood relief, though obvious, will not be easy.

One goal could prove very controversial. To borrow a terrible metaphor from national politics that is completely meaningless to anyone who hasn't spent time in the nation's capital, sexual assault policy is the "third rail" of university politics, and President Mason will be challenged to reform to a complicated, convoluted policy while showing the proper amount of empathy to current and future victims. A suggested change: tell the police.

That doesn't mean that the bonus scheme is flawless. Psychologists warn of "perverse incentives" from tying rewards to desired outcomes. President Geoffrory of ISU wants to increase student enrollment. This goal could be met quite easily by admitting students who are not qualified to study at Iowa State, which is not in the interest of the university or even the student wrongly admitted.

Nor are all proposed goals equally well-designed. President Allen of UNI wants to increase minority student enrollment by 1%. I assume he means increasing the percentage of students of color on campus, but this may be too simplisitic a measure of student body diversity. What about students of different religions or political persuasions? What about international students? What about students from other faraway places, like Massachusetts or Oregon? After 5 1/4 years in college, I have found diversity among students in some very unlikely places.

On the whole, paying university presidents based on performance goals seems like a reasonable, and timely, idea. Next year around this time, we'll probably be talking about how to make it better.