The main effect, though, was to cause university administrators to reconceive of students as customers to be satisfied, rather than charges to be educated, and to inject a potentially irrelevant measure into faculty evaluations. I leave you to do the Google search with keywords student evaluations criticism to find the literature showing that the physical attractiveness of the professor and ease of grading bias student evaluations of instruction, and that the correlation between them and actual educational outcomes is in the range of .4 to .5 (meaning that whatever student evaluations measures only predicts between 16% and 25% of the variance in actual learning) -- correlations with expected grade are of about the same magnitude.
The university does not fit comfortably into the categories of commerce because students, parents, and eventual employers all share aspects of "customer-ness", while students are also "raw materials". Perry's plan is exactly wrong because it is not conservative. A conservative reform of universities would look to the model of the university as it grew organically from the middle ages onward, not to commerce as a model. Remaking everything in the image as commerce (sadly an enthusiasm on the American right) is as baleful as the left's enthusiasm for remaking everything as a social program.
Measuring research "productivity" in terms of grant-funding would ensure that Texas universities will only have plodding scientists who follow the herd and do what everyone else does: all the physicists will be string theorists, all the climatologists will believe in anthropogenic global warming, only mathematics that fits comfortably into one of the boxes created by the NSF's subdisciplinary categories will get done,. . . No paradigm shifts in any discipline will come out of Texas under Perry's reforms. Real, groundbreaking science will be exiled in favor of grantsmanship.
The other "reforms", besides 1), 3) and 7), seem fine to me, provided 1) is gutted in favor of objective measures of instructional prowess and peer evaluation of instruction. On 7) the devil is in the details, and I suspect "measurable student progress" will be measured in terms of retention, leading actually to a decrease in education. Why? Because accreditation gets left to folks from colleges of education who have been dumbing down American education for decades and think (along with university administrators who see students as customers) that student retention is an untrammeled good. Actually, we could do with more incentive for faculty to fail students. Grading on an old-fashioned curve -- mean at mid-C, grade-ranges for B's, C's and D's one standard-deviation wide -- should be encouraged, not effectively banned because it by construction fails 6.7% of students, harming the ever-important retention, and only gives A's to 6.7% of students, depressing student evaluations of instruction.
Thank you for your comments.
One thing Perry does well is start the conversation and move the ball down the road.
I’m glad you saw some merit in his plan (though you have reservations).
I imagine you would come to the table to discuss changes.
With regard to the retention issue, when I first read your comment I thought you meant by retention, students' ability to master and remember the course material, which would of course be good and is already addressed by the GRE. Then I saw you meant the inverse of the student resignation rate and were talking about something else entirely, which is a collegiate equivalent of the endless chewing and mooing over high-school dropout rates that is the fascination of Texas school administrators. I agree with you, that retaining students should not be a university concern except where hardship threatens the continued studies of viable students.
With regard to grading, though, I've never thought curves were honest grading tools, but only social tools. Personally I don't think the curve has a defensible academic purpose. It caters to the leadership obsession of privilege academies -- only. As an evaluation tool, grading on a curve is slippery and unhelpful.