In an old, perhaps apocryphal joke, a state legislator is talking to a professor and asks how much teaching he does. “Eight hours,” replies the prof. “Well, that’s a pretty full day, but at least the work is interesting,” replies the politician, not realizing what the prof means by eight hours.

It is important for higher ed authorities to keep up the perception that faculty members put in a lot of time in the classroom. In today’s Pope Center piece, Jay Schalin takes a critical look at data in the UNC system that seems pretty hard to believe — data that make it appear that profs teach substantially more than they actually do. His analysis suggests that the system is trying to fudge the figures so as to keep state funding up: “With so much money riding on state officials’ perceptions of UNC faculty workloads, there is an incentive for UNC officials to inflate their averages.”

From Jay’s analysis, it seems that UNC is trying to game the system by overstating the average teaching loads of faculty members. That sort of behavior is perfectly consistent with public choice theory, which holds that public officials will do all they can to maximize their revenues.