The local university just announced a merit pay bonus incentive for faculty members, and the majority of the Music Department greeted the plan with great skepticism, not because they opposed recognition of superior accomplishment… but because the proposed structure was essentially flawed.  In fact, for many university departments, and for most schools, as well as many businesses and corporations, such “merit” awards will always be fatally flawed.

Why?  Because all too many organizations regard their employees and even their executives as homogenous and interchangeable parts, even when duties, skills, responsibilities, work hours, and achievements vary widely, and those variances are even greater in the academic community and yet paradoxically, in terms of administration and pay, they’re even less recognized than in the  corporate world.

Take a music department, for example, with instrumentalists, pianists, vocalists, composers, music educators, and musicologists.  How, with any sense of fairness, do you compare expertise across disciplines?  Or across time?  Is the female opera director who built a voice program from nothing over 15 years, who has sung on low-level national stages intermittently, who is a noted reviewer in a top journal in her field, and who serves as a national officer in a professional organization more to be rewarded than the renowned pianist who won several prestigious international competitions and performs nationally, but who limits his teaching to the bare minimum?  Or what about the woodwind player who was voted educator of the year for both the university and the state, who is known regionally but not nationally  as a devoted and excellent teacher? Or the percussionist who revitalized the percussion program and performs on the side with a group twice nominated for Grammies? Or the soprano who sings in an elite choral group also nominated for a Grammy?

Then add the fact that all of them are underpaid by any comparative standard with other universities [which also indicates just how hard music faculty jobs are to find and hold]…and with other departments, even though the music faculty work longer hours as well as evenings and weekends, and the fact that the annual “merit pay” award would be a one-time annual payment of $1,000-$2,000 to only one faculty member.  In essence, the administration is attempting to address systemic underpayment and continued inequalities with a very small band-aid, not that the administrators have much choice, given that the legislature won’t fund higher education adequately and tuition increases are limited.

In primary and secondary schools, merit pay has become a huge issue, along with evaluating teachers.  Everyone, even teachers, agrees on the fact that good teachers should be rewarded and bad ones removed.  But determining who is good or average, and who gets paid what is far, far, harder than it looks, which is why most teachers have historically opposed the concept of merit pay, because in all too many cases where it has been actually implemented it’s gone to administration or parent “favorites,” who are not always the best teachers.  A competent teacher in an upper-middle-class school where parents are involved and concerned should be able to boast of solid student achievement on tests, evaluations, etc.  A brilliant, dedicated, and effective teacher in some inner city schools may well be accomplishing miracles to keep or lift a bare majority of students to grade level, while a competent teacher may only have a few students on grade level.  Yet relying on student test scores would suggest that the first teacher of these three deserved “merit pay.”  And in “real life,” the complications are even greater.  How do you compare a special education teacher with standard classroom teachers, even in the same school, let alone across schools with different demographics?

In addition, when teachers feel overworked and underpaid, and many, but not all, are, offering merit pay tends to turn people into competing for the money — or rejecting the entire idea.  I’ve seen both happen, and neither outcome is good.   Yet the underlying principle of ratings and “merit pay” is that such comparisons are possible and valid.  So far, I’ve yet to see any such workable and valid plan… and neither have most teachers. And when merit pay is added in with all the other problems with the educational system that I’ve discussed in other posts, all merit pay usually does is make the situation worse.  It’s an overly simplistic solution to a complex series of problems that few really want to address.  But then, what else is new?

Last year, a voice professor listened, aghast, as a talented, but still far from top soprano vocal student announced she was going to forgo getting the more demanding Bachelor of Music degree and settle for a straight B.A., because she really didn’t need the extra work to get into the graduate school of music that was her choice. Needless to say, this spring the voice student received both her B.A. and an unequivocal rejection from graduate school. This particular scenario is becoming more and more common, according to the professor, who has been teaching at the collegiate level for over 30 years, is also a national officer of the National Opera Association, and, incidentally, is my wife.  She didn’t mean the rejection from graduate school, although that is also becoming more common in the field of music, particularly for women, because more women want graduate degrees and the competition is becoming more and more intense, but the growing tendency of students to make plans based on what they want, with no consideration of their abilities and no real understanding of the fields that they wish to enter.

In voice, for example, as my wife puts it, “good sopranos are a dime a dozen.”  For a soprano to get into a top-flight graduate school, she must not only have an outstanding voice, but excellent grades, performing experience, and a demonstrated work ethic.  On the other hand, the requirements for a bass, baritone, or tenor, while stiffer than they used to be, are not so demanding, for at least two reasons.  First, all operas and most musical theatre pieces have more male roles.  Second, not nearly so many men are interested in vocal performance, and many of those who do simply lack a work ethic.  So a hard-working male voice student with a decent voice and good grades may well have a better chance at both graduate school and a career than an outstanding soprano, because there are so many outstanding sopranos and fewer roles for them, not to mention the fact that there are also more tenured and tenure track university voice positions for tenors, basses, and baritones than for sopranos and mezzo-sopranos.

This tendency for young people to ignore reality is far from limited to the fields of performance. I’ve certainly seen it in the field of writing.  Every year I run across dozens of young would-be writers convinced that they’ll be published, if only they can get an “in” with an agent or an editor… or that, once they finish their epic, they’ll self-publish it as a e-book, and the world will reward them by purchasing tens or hundreds of thousands of copies. And I’ve read enough of what they’ve written to see why most of them can’t find an editor or agent.  But, I have to admit, occasionally, an author will make the big time through self-promotion and self-publishing –  and those authors were usually rejected by editors or publishers not because what such authors have written was poorly written, but because what they wrote was outside the boundaries of what “conventional” wisdom believed was popular. Such successes will happen… in perhaps in one in a thousand cases. I can name several cases where it has…at most a handful over thirty years.

I’m not knocking either ambition or dreams, but I am knocking the misleading idea that students can do anything they want, if they only work hard enough.  As I’ve said before, there’s a huge difference between “be all you can be” and “you can do anything you want.”  We all have both talents and skills… and limitations.  And willing yourself to be successful in areas where those skills don’t exist or are modest at best is usually an exercise in futility.

You can’t simply “will” something to happen because you want it badly enough.  Wanting it badly enough is merely desire.  Beyond desire, to reach a goal requires talent and polished skill in the field, knowledge of the field, and a willingness to work one’s way up through long and grinding work. A noted chef declared a few weeks ago that almost none of the young people seeking to become chefs in his restaurants ever wanted to start at the bottom.

If you don’t have the basic tools and mental or physical abilities required in the field, all the work in the world won’t help.  If you have the talent, but not the work ethic, you won’t make it, either.  And even if you have all of that, sometimes you might not, either, not because you aren’t capable, but because there are only so many openings at the top of any field… and sometimes it just takes luck and timing to go from being near the top to the very top.

In the field of classical music, for the past decade, professional performers and experienced music professors have been telling students just these points – and yet, very few of them, or their parents… or the politicians, appear to be listening. In the area of writing, I’ve witnessed many of my colleagues making the same points, and, frankly, I imagine this has occurred in other professions as well… so why aren’t the students listening?  Is it a media culture that shouts louder that anyone can be anything? Or is it a national epidemic of wishful – or willful – thinking? I have to wonder.

This past Wednesday, the lead story on the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune was entitled [unsurprisingly] “Multiplying Mormons expand into new turf.”   The story was based on the latest once-a-decade U.S. Religion Census.  According to the Religion Census, the fastest growing religions in the United States are Islam, the LDS Church, and Evangelical Protestant churches.  The single largest Christian faith is still the Catholic Church.  I find this combination rather unsettling, because, despite their theological and sectarian differences, all of these faiths share one commonality.  Despite all protests to the contrary, all are highly patriarchal/paternalistic and sexually chauvinistic and effectively place men in a higher socio-theologic position.

In addition, the three nominally Christian faiths [I’m including the Mormons, because they consider themselves Christians, even as some Christian faiths do not] have a large and growing presence on the political front, particularly within the Republican party. No matter what people do or don’t claim, in the end what people and what the politicians who represent them believe tends to find expression in the political dialogue, in proposed legislation, and, eventually, in law.

Once upon a time, the vast majority of the United States was more highly religious than it is today, and there were considerable sectarian differences and beliefs.  Because of those fierce differences, in effect, the founding fathers created a system that attempted to keep religion out of government… and it worked for quite some time.  I’d submit that it worked because religion was a key issue for a great many people, possibly a massive majority, and no one wanted any other faith to gain an advantage through government.  But times have changed, and although 80% of Americans claim to be “Christian,” only about 50% of Americans actually actively belong to any type of Christian congregation, and another 16% are professed or practicing atheists.

This suggests that close to half the population doesn’t possess the same burning concern about religion as it once did… but the first political problem is that these more “moderate believers” and non-believers are in the position of attacking religion or “morality” when they oppose the attempts of the “true believers” to enact religious-based standards as part of government policies and law, even when those standards effectively discriminate against women. The second problem is that the entire movement of true equal rights for women is essentially a secular movement.  It has to be, because with the exception of a few faiths with very small followings [such as Christian Science or the Wiccans], the vast, vast majority of all organized religions have a paternalistic and chauvinistic tradition, and only a few of those faiths have made much effort to change those traditions.

While there are exceptions, in those countries dominated by paternalistic religions, in general, women have fewer, and in many cases no rights.  Yet here in the United States, those religious faiths showing the greatest gains in adherents are those that are fundamentalist and patriarchal. But whenever women raise the issue, such as in the recent Democratic Party effort to point out that Republican legislative initiatives are a “War on Women,” the general reaction is that women are over-reacting. And some Republican partisans have even suggested that the current administration’s efforts to strengthen women’s access to birth control and contraception were a war on freedom of religion.

But, of course, that does raise the question of whether freedom of religion extends to using legislation to reinforce the historical patriarchal male domination of women has any place in a nation that supposedly prides itself on equality.

I recently read an interview with the noted biologist E. O. Wilson, who is rather eloquent on the need for a far more environmentally conscious public, and I was agreeing with much of what he said – until I got to the part of the interview where he essentially said that human space travel was a dangerous delusion that should be scrapped, and that, if treated properly, the earth can provide for humanity for as long it needs s place to live.  Now… I understand what he was saying in one sense, because there is no physical way that we could ever move even a significant minority of human beings off Earth to another locale.  The earth is likely to be habitable for far longer than the existence of any previous species in the history of the planet, but without greater environmental awareness and action, that habitability for humans will be threatened, if not destroyed.

Am I an unrealistic dreamer in wanting humanity to reach beyond one planet – even if only a tiny minority of men and women do so?  Or am I a realist, considering that at least once a large space object struck earth and the resulting ecological and physical disasters wiped out thousands of species, among them the dinosaurs?

One of the better traits of human beings is to reach beyond the here and now, to dream of what might be.  A second trait is that we tend to do better when we’re pursuing dreams, even impossible or impractical dreams.  We certainly made far greater strides in many fields, including technology, when we were engaged in the space race with the USSR – regardless of the motivations behind that gigantic effort.  Is it mere coincidence that the ancient Egyptian civilization that pursued its dreams of immortality, however flawed the basis of those dreams, was also the longest lasting?

We also have a tendency to become insulated and self-seeking when we don’t pursue dreams, as at present, when political and social conflict after conflict is taking place in the United States, and elsewhere, over who gets control over what.  The entire debate over healthcare is an example.  Rather than finding ways to expand healthcare coverage to those who don’t have it, all the powerful political factions are arguing over why this group and that group shouldn’t have to pay for it – an argument along the lines of “I’ve got mine; you get your own.”  The anti-immigrant debate follows the same logic, ignoring the fact that the nation made massive strides in the past based on immigrant contributions.

The science budgets of almost all major nations, except the Chinese, are dwindling, and certainly U.S. politicians have turned a blind eye and a deaf ear on all but modest scientific studies.

And what are the dreams of today? A better tiny gadget for introspection [the I-phone], video games with super graphics, the establishment of a theo-political state, the amassing of great concentrations of wealth, the celebritization of society?

No thank you, I’d prefer the dreams of endless space, and the wonders of the stars. What about you?

A week or so ago, I was making airlines reservations online – rather I was attempting to do so, but found I couldn’t because my computer wouldn’t let me get  beyond the first screen or so at the Delta website, claiming that the Delta website’s security certificate had expired or was not valid.  This had happened to me once before, because the date on my computer was wrong.  So I checked my computer.  No problems that I could find.  Then I tried the other computer.  Same results.  I called my wife at her office.  She tried on her work network.  The same results.  I called Delta. The first representative insisted it was my computer, and then I got disconnected. I tried Delta’s technical support line, waited, and got disconnected.

I waited an hour and tried Delta again.  This time the representative actually knew about the problem and informed me that the tech team was working on it – and agreed to ticket me at the online price.

But my question is: How on earth could the IT staff at one of the world’s largest airline systems, a system that depends heavily on website bookings, EVER let their website security certificate get close to expiring?  Or was this just the result of hacking?  I don’t know that I’ll ever know, but when I talked to one of my daughters, who used to run the IT division of a major chemical company, she informed me that all too many companies have IT divisions that often tend to ignore or postpone the routine “necessities” – until they become a crisis. Of course, one of the reasons she was successful was because she didn’t allow that sort of thing to happen.

I’m certain that tracking security certificates is not the most exciting of IT tasks.  Nor is the business of methodically checking to see what holes may have developed in a website’s security, but both are vital.  Just last month, the state of Utah discovered that its Medicaid/Health database had been hacked, and the hackers had access to the addresses of 800,000 people and the Social Secuirty numbers of more than 150,000… and the initial investigation concluded that “laxity” and failure to follow procedures for handling data were the principal causes.

I also find it interesting that my readers often get upset over a handful of typos in a 400-500 page book, which is annoying, and which I wish didn’t happen, but does, despite my best efforts and those of editors and proofreaders.  But those errors don’t have anywhere near the potentially disastrous impact of software glitches in an economy that has become increasingly dependent upon computers.

In the end, it boils down to one thing.  Failure to do what is required, whether what is required is routine, dull, or boring, amounts to incompetence, no matter how skilled the technicians and engineers may theoretically be, and such incompetence leads to huge problems, if not disasters.

Boredom and uninterestedness aren’t a valid excuse.  Neither is management failure to recognize the problem, regardless of the “costs.”  In the case of books, costs are a valid concern, but when lives and livelihoods are at stake, costs shouldn’t be the primary focus.