Why Quantify Faculty Performance

Abstract

efforts of talented administrators and professors of education and sociology? Third, why do faculty and ad ministration members rely on them anyway? The initial answer to the first question is that members must be ranked for a number of pressing, practical reasons. Salary, retention, promotion, and tenure decisions must be made. Ranking for these pur poses requires "objective" standards, if only because the courts demand them. Objectivity implies, for most of us, quantification according to a method which has been accepted by the members of the relevant "scientific community." The premises on which this method is based may be questionable, perhaps even ludicrous, but once they have been accepted by convention, no member of the relevant community has the right to quarrel with the results they generate. We note that "the