Time & Perspective Quote by Roy Romer

“Productivity” is a technocrat’s loaded word, the kind that smuggles budget politics into the language of pedagogy. Roy Romer isn’t talking about professors finding better hacks for grading faster; he’s reframing higher education as a system with inputs, outputs, and measurable inefficiencies. The first move is disarming: it’s “not just about getting more time for professors in the classroom.” That sounds like respect for teaching, a nod to the romantic idea of the professor as mentor. Then comes the pivot to the real agenda: “reexamining the learning experience” and “restructuring faculty and the use of faculty time.”

The subtext is managerial. Learning becomes an “experience” to be engineered; faculty become resources to be allocated. Romer’s phrasing hints at familiar reform levers: larger class sizes, more contingent labor, technology-mediated instruction, standardized curricula, and shifting tenured faculty away from intro teaching toward research, administration, fundraising, or “high-impact” mentoring. It’s not necessarily anti-education; it’s pro-accountability in a world where tuition, public funding, and demands for demonstrable outcomes are colliding.

Context matters: as a politician associated with education reform, Romer is speaking to taxpayers, trustees, and policymakers who hear “productivity” as fiscal responsibility. The rhetorical trick is that “productivity” sounds neutral, even inevitable, while it quietly recasts the university from a community of scholars into an enterprise. The line works because it promises modernization without naming the trade-offs: who loses autonomy, which kinds of learning get counted, and what happens when “restructuring” becomes a synonym for austerity.