<p>There are several important points that this article either fails to address or glosses over. I’ll preface this by saying that my experience is in engineering and hard sciences so social sciences / liberal arts people might have a different argument. Academic research is not the same as industrial research. Where in industry you’re just a cog in a wheel working on a small part of your boss’s project, in academics you are the principal investigator and you have your own projects that you are totally responsible for. It can take years to set up a decent lab with working protocols just to study one specific area. Imagine having to set up a new lab every 4 years (anyone who follows the technology sector knows how short your stay can be at any given company as they get bought out/go out of business). Now take into account that you have 20 or more people working for you, 10 of which are PhD students whose thesis research depends on you being there since you’re the only one on the faculty who fully understand the project. So you get fired and now 10 PhD students have to find a new advisor and a new thesis after working for two years on their current project. How many people would want to go into a situation where they’d loose 2 years of their life just because the college felt that their advisor was unproductive. So you need tenure to secure grad students as well. Now look at government funding. NIH R01 Grants get awarded for periods of time to specific labs. They’re granted because the reviewers feel that the PI has both the experience and resources (lab equipment and graduate students) to meet the goals of the grant. By removing the fact that these PIs are guaranteed to have the same resources at their disposal will complicate the grant process. Again, this might only apply to engineering/science research, but for professors who’re at large research universities and not small colleges their salary can often come mostly from research grants. I know one of the professors I worked for got more than half his pay from research grants. It’s this incentive that keeps people productive and getting new grants even when they have tenure. There is of course another problem that everyone who passed kindergarten should be keenly aware of and that’s sharing. If every professor has to compete with others at the same institution then there’s no reason for any of them to work well together. In my own experience having someone more senior than yourself teach you and mentor you can be very important for leaning what is not in the textbooks (e.g. what excites people at the NIH versus the NSF in grant proposals). If the professors who’ve been around for decades have acquired this knowledge through hard work and failures then why would they give this information to the wide-eyed, young assistant professor who they have to compete with just to keep their job?</p>
<p>The argument that tenure is the ONLY significant protection for our academic freedom is very unfairly dismissed. In the humanities, this protection is utterly crucial, especially at state-funded (or what used to be called "state-underfunded, and what I now call "state-located," since funds have been cut almost to nothing) universities. </p>
<p>Legislators constantly try to eliminate tenure (and research leaves, and raises, and departments they don't like, etc.) based solely on their own (usually vastly underinformed) personal and political agendas. The elimination of tenure would, in fact, lead to universities in which only scholars popular with administrators and legislators would retain their jobs. (See the "pork and ethanol" point made in one response to the article.) </p>
<p>This is yet one more in a long line of specious (and again, underinformed) arguments for the elimination of tenure. I'd be happy if I never had to read another one of these in my lifetime.</p>
<p>Tenure does little more than provide the incentive to sit on one's posterior at a time when one's collective knowledge and expertise should be leading to quality research.</p>
<p>
[quote]
So you get fired and now 10 PhD students have to find a new advisor and a new thesis after working for two years on their current project
[/quote]
</p>
<p>And of course graduate students would know this and choose to work with more productive professors from the outset. I don't see how this is a bad thing. And for a good number of students this happens anyway. Who wants to do research with somebody that is out of the loop and 10 years behind in cutting edge technology and techniques?</p>
<p>Graduate students face uncertainty all of the time, but they still go to graduate school. There is nothing guaranteeing that a professor will remain at your university for the etirety of one's graduate career. Either choice or the denial of tenure will lead to the exact same outcome. </p>
<p>
[quote]
If every professor has to compete with others at the same institution then there’s no reason for any of them to work well together.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Professors already compete with others in the same institution for tenure, yet there is plenty of collaboration. Graduate students often work together and yet compete with eachother every year on the job market, etc. People will work together if they believe it is in their best interest to do so. Often two or three heads are better than one. The competitition for tenure does little to disuade professors from working together.</p>
<h2>The problem is that you're looking at this from a zero sum perpsective. Just because another prof is doing well doesn't suddenly mean that another profs job is in danger. That's not the way things work.</h2>
<p>
[quote]
Legislators constantly try to eliminate tenure (and research leaves, and raises, and departments they don't like, etc.) based solely on their own (usually vastly underinformed) personal and political agendas. The elimination of tenure would, in fact, lead to universities in which only scholars popular with administrators and legislators would retain their jobs. (See the "pork and ethanol" point made in one response to the article.) </p>
<p>This is yet one more in a long line of specious (and again, underinformed) arguments for the elimination of tenure. I'd be happy if I never had to read another one of these in my lifetime.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>And how is this argument either specious or underinformed? If that's your thesis, then perhaps you should back this up? You do realize that the author of that is a tenured professor at the University of Chicago. Moreover, your sole argument completely ignores, as Levitt pointed out, that there exists a market for professors. The "pork and ethanol" comment made would hold water if Iowa were the only state in which there were universities, and only if public schools were the only institutions of higher education.</p>
<p>You also ignore the fact that the same could be said about any job in the public sector-that if one isn't "popular" that they could be fired.</p>
<p>There was certainly one specious argument made, but it wasn't made by Levitt.</p>
<p>The author's position at Chicago does not prevent his argument from being underinformed. His perspective as an economics professor does.</p>
<p>He has not worked in the humanities at a "state-located" university, wherein entire departments, as well as scholars with productive and distinguished careers, are regularly threatened by the whims of legislators. Said legislators believe they are acting in the interest of "the market," whereas said scholars are essential parts of the academy, which differs in many critical respects from "the market." If universities existed primarily to serve "the market," the vast majority of state universities soon be reduced to departments of education, nursing, computer science, and -- shocker -- business and economics. Given the composition of many state legislatures, many departments already live under constant threat. In order to survive in a non-tenured "economy," departments of sociology would need to retool themselves to produce only market researchers and statisticians, departments of psychology would be pressured to produce only therapists, social workers and consumer and industrial psychologists, and departments of english would be reduced to teaching "business communication." Good freaking luck to departments of art history, classics, religion, etc.</p>
<p>I hereby abdicate this thread. Articles like these touch me too personally, and anger me so much that I only care to hear opinions from those whose livelihoods are also threatened annually by clueless state legislators. These elected officials, with their brilliant insights about the ridiculously high salaries of professors (ha!), the wastefulness of research leaves (which they describe as "paid vacations"), and their abysmally circumscribed ideas about what constitutes an informed citizenry, are fueled by such articles. They wave them about like gospel, and use them as excuses to cut state education budgets. Meanwhile, families scream about rising tuition costs, and re-elect these fools who promise to "run state universities like businesses."</p>
<p>
[quote]
It can take years to set up a decent lab with working protocols just to study one specific area. Imagine having to set up a new lab every 4 years (anyone who follows the technology sector knows how short your stay can be at any given company as they get bought out/go out of business). Now take into account that you have 20 or more people working for you, 10 of which are PhD students whose thesis research depends on you being there since you’re the only one on the faculty who fully understand the project. So you get fired and now 10 PhD students have to find a new advisor and a new thesis after working for two years on their current project. How many people would want to go into a situation where they’d loose 2 years of their life just because the college felt that their advisor was unproductive. So you need tenure to secure grad students as well.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, I don't know about that. I think I have to agree with theghostofsnappy on this one. It is true that graduate students would take a risk in working with a prof who could get fired if tenure did not exist. But the truth is, graduate students also take a risk in working with a prof under the current system of tenure. Let's be perfectly honest here. A lot of tenured profs really do just sit around and do nothing academic - instead choosing to spend their time in private consulting or building their own startup firm, or so forth. For example, what if he just decides one day that he's no longer interested in the project that both of you have been working on? What if he decides that he wants to get rid of all his students and projects so that he can spend his time consulting instead? If he's tenured, there's nothing that will stop him from doing that. </p>
<p>
[quote]
If every professor has to compete with others at the same institution then there’s no reason for any of them to work well together. In my own experience having someone more senior than yourself teach you and mentor you can be very important for leaning what is not in the textbooks (e.g. what excites people at the NIH versus the NSF in grant proposals). If the professors who’ve been around for decades have acquired this knowledge through hard work and failures then why would they give this information to the wide-eyed, young assistant professor who they have to compete with just to keep their job?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Along the lines of theghostofsnappy, I don't find this to be particularly debilitating - at least no more so than what happens in the private sector. A lot of firms run highly successful internal R&D departments that are highly collaborative where workers do not feel constant fear for their jobs to the point where they won't collaborate. Heck individual technology firms compete against viciously each other in the market, but that doesn't stop them from engaging in alliances and joint ventures when it's in their interest to do so. For example, the most successful American cell-phone service provider is probably Verizon Wireless, which is actually a joint venture between Verizon and the British telecom company Vodafone. That shows that 2 competitors can get together to form a highly successful and profitable partnership. </p>
<p>Furthermore, I don't think we should romanticize the cooperation that happens today in academia. Let's be honest. There is a LOT of internal politics and backbiting that happens in academia, and this resistance serves to retard the advancement of knowledge. Part of it has to do with the fact that you have all these old, tenured profs who you can't get rid of, and will just spend all their time shooting down new ideas that threaten the status quo. </p>
<p>To quote Max Planck:</p>
<p>"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”"</p>
<p>If you haven't read them already, you may wish to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", and Barber's "Resistance by Scientists to Scientific Discovery" (1961) in the journal Science. From the general perspective of the sociology of science, old scientists tend to exhibit great resistance to the development of new scientific ideas. If these old scientists are given tenure, that also means giving them a permanent perch from which they can shoot down new ideas, even when they're valid, until they die, as per Planck. </p>
<p>Look, don't get me wrong. I am not taking a position either for or against tenure. I personally don't know whether it would be a good or bad thing. What I am saying is that the topic is complex. Tenure reduces competition in some areas, while increasing it in others. For example, I strongly suspect that tenure doesn't so much reduce competition overall, but rather just shifts it to the * tenure-track * process (where assistant profs are competing with each other for tenure). And graduate students have to undertake risk with their advisors anyway, whether the tenure system exists or not. </p>
<p>
[quote]
The argument that tenure is the ONLY significant protection for our academic freedom is very unfairly dismissed. In the humanities, this protection is utterly crucial, especially at state-funded (or what used to be called "state-underfunded, and what I now call "state-located," since funds have been cut almost to nothing) universities. </p>
<p>Legislators constantly try to eliminate tenure (and research leaves, and raises, and departments they don't like, etc.) based solely on their own (usually vastly underinformed) personal and political agendas. The elimination of tenure would, in fact, lead to universities in which only scholars popular with administrators and legislators would retain their jobs. (See the "pork and ethanol" point made in one response to the article.) </p>
<p>This is yet one more in a long line of specious (and again, underinformed) arguments for the elimination of tenure. I'd be happy if I never had to read another one of these in my lifetime.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>
[quote]
The author's position at Chicago does not prevent his argument from being underinformed. His perspective as an economics professor does.</p>
<p>He has not worked in the humanities at a "state-located" university, wherein entire departments, as well as scholars with productive and distinguished careers, are regularly threatened by the whims of legislators. Said legislators believe they are acting in the interest of "the market," whereas said scholars are essential parts of the academy, which differs in many critical respects from "the market." If universities existed primarily to serve "the market," the vast majority of state universities soon be reduced to departments of education, nursing, computer science, and -- shocker -- business and economics. Given the composition of many state legislatures, many departments already live under constant threat. In order to survive in a non-tenured "economy," departments of sociology would need to retool themselves to produce only market researchers and statisticians, departments of psychology would be pressured to produce only therapists, social workers and consumer and industrial psychologists, and departments of english would be reduced to teaching "business communication." Good freaking luck to departments of art history, classics, religion, etc.</p>
<p>I hereby abdicate this thread. Articles like these touch me too personally, and anger me so much that I only care to hear opinions from those whose livelihoods are also threatened annually by clueless state legislators. These elected officials, with their brilliant insights about the ridiculously high salaries of professors (ha!), the wastefulness of research leaves (which they describe as "paid vacations"), and their abysmally circumscribed ideas about what constitutes an informed citizenry, are fueled by such articles. They wave them about like gospel, and use them as excuses to cut state education budgets. Meanwhile, families scream about rising tuition costs, and re-elect these fools who promise to "run state universities like businesses."
[/quote]
</p>
<p>ProfessorX, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like the whole premise of your argument is that state governments (and by extension, the taxpayers) are obligated to support the breadth of academic programs at the public universities. If that's your premise, then my response is that that's false. The states are not obligated to fund academic programs in art history or classics or religion or other such 'non-market-driven' academic programs. The states have the freedom to fund whatever programs they deem important. They're not obligated to fund anything they don't want to fund. </p>
<p>Take it back to a historical perspective. You say that if public universities acted to serve 'the market', then they would only fund programs in technology, education, nursing, business, and the like. Yeah, probably true. But why would that necessarily be wrong? That's EXACTLY how many (probably most) public universities started off in the first place. For example, the Morrill Land Grant College Act set aside land not to set up for just * any * educational institutions, but specifically for those institutions that would teach agriculture and engineering (hence technology), as well as military techniques (a specific blend of technology + management). Many of these specifically targeted land-grant colleges served as the precursors of many of today's top public universities. Berkeley, for example, started off as a merger between a private college(the "College of California") with a land-grant college that specialized in agriculture and mechanics/mining. The old agriculture division is now the Berkeley College of Natural Resources, the mining/mechanics division is part of the Berkeley College of Engineering (and many of the old mining vestiges still exist on campus today, i.e. the Hearst Mining Circle, the Hearst Mining Building, etc.}. Similarly, many public universities started life as 'normal' schools (a.k.a. teacher colleges). For example, the oldest public university in California is not Berkeley, but rather is San Jose State, which started life as a normal school (a school to train elementary school teachers): the so-called "California State Normal School". Similarly, UCLA started life as a branch campus of the California State Normal School. Only later did it become a fully fledged university as part of the UC system, changing its name to UCLA. </p>
<p>State legislators decided to expand these highly specified institutions into broad-based universities. But they weren't obligated to do so. They could have simply decided not to. These schools were founded to serve specific market needs, and the state governments could have kept it that way. Heck, in many cases they still effectively do. For example, the strongest programs at many of the universities that can trace their heritage to the original Morrill Land Grant College Act are still largely engineering/technology programs (i.e. Virginia Tech, Illinois, Penn State) or agricultural programs (i.e. UCDavis). </p>
<p>The upshot is that I can't agree with the notion that the non-market-driven programs that currently exist at the public universities are somehow 'owed' an existence by the government. Look, the government doesn't "owe" academia anything. If you say that your programs are not amenable to market forces and therefore should not have to be subject to market demand, that's fine, but if you want to continue to have government funding, then you at least have to subject yourself to * political * demand. After all, there has to be some sort of control system, as the money has to come from * somewhere *, and whoever is providing that money should rightfully be considered to be a stakeholder who has some say over how that money is spent. It seems to me that you just want the government to hand you free money with no strings attached. But that's not the way the world works. Nobody owes you anything in this world. This is not a charity here. </p>
<p>After all, think of it this way. You complain that state legislators are moving to cut the funding of various departments in the public universities that do not have strong and direct market demand. Well, * those departments wouldn't even exist in the first place were it nor for prior government largesse *. It's actually a perpetual problem in modern politics that governments can create programs but can never eliminate them because those programs become vested and institutionalized with their own political constituency that believe they are now somehow 'owed' an existence from the government and so will lobby to perpetuate that existence. Look, nobody owes you an existence, and certainly the taxpayers don't owe you an existence.</p>
<p>Now let me be clear. None of this is to say that I support the evisceration of public schools. However, I do think we have to be clear that government money does come with strings attached, and rightfully so. The government (and by extension, the taxpayers) are never obligated to continue funding you if they don't want to.</p>
<p>Sorry Sakky but you’re not quite correct in asserting that governments are not duty bound to fund even non-market driven programs like the arts. Unfortunately I cannot read through every state constitution (and these are state institutions) but according to the Massachusetts constitution;</p>
<p>"Wisdom, and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislatures and magistrates, in all future periods of this commonwealth, to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them; especially the university at Cambridge, public schools and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings; sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people."</p>
<p>Note how it mentions public institutions for arts and spreading opportunities among all orders of people. Notice how it doesn’t say “let the forces of the market place determine what programs we will and will not promote.” Besides if market forces were really as perfect as neoclassical economists would like to believe, there’d be no public universities at all and the Federal Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act would have been unnecessary.</p>
<p>“But the truth is, graduate students also take a risk in working with a prof under the current system of tenure”</p>
<p>They take much less of a risk under the current system. Many people advise student not to work for untenured professors for the explicit reason that they might not be at the institution when they finish. (see Dr. Peter’s book for a more thorough explanation). If you look at the tenured professors who do leave an institution, they can often take their students with them since the new institution would have to want the professor really badly to offer immediate tenure and other incentives that would convince them to pack up and leave.</p>
<p>"A lot of tenured profs really do just sit around and do nothing academic"</p>
<p>Define "a lot." None of the profs I met with are focusing on their "start ups." If professors have funding for RAs they need to have grants. To get grants they need to submit requests to the government or private institutions to do research. They then need to actually DO the research (see my next comment below). </p>
<p>"For example, what if he just decides one day that he's no longer interested in the project that both of you have been working on? What if he decides that he wants to get rid of all his students and projects so that he can spend his time consulting instead? If he's tenured, there's nothing that will stop him from doing that."</p>
<p>This would of course be illegal. When you submit a grant proposal to the NIH or NSF you promise to complete the research. If you don't complete the research, you've broken the law.</p>
<p>"Professors already compete with others in the same institution for tenure..."</p>
<p>I know of no academic institution where this is correct.</p>
<p>""Professors already compete with others in the same institution for tenure..."</p>
<p>I know of no academic institution where this is correct."</p>
<p>MIT is notorious for hiring more professors than they expect to give tenure. But many colleges do not take this approach</p>
<p>Sure, MIT and the Ivys and plenty of institutions expect to only tenure a third of assistant professors and the rest don't tenure everyone, but that doesn't mean that the competition is between the assistant professors at the institution. The % that gets tenure varies from year to year. There's no quota where you have to be in the top third of assistant professors who are coming up for tenure that year, a system which would require untenured professors to compete against each other.</p>
<p>momfromme,</p>
<p>You make a good point and in general there are no quotas, but the only way to determine whether or not a assistant professor deserves tenure is to compare him or her to colleagues. The MIT policies on tenure appointment state;</p>
<p>"Each appointment or reappointment to the Faculty should be based on the reasonable belief that the appointee is an outstanding candidate among his or her peers" [emphasis added]</p>
<p>from dictionary.com
outstanding: marked by superiority or distinction; excellent; distinguished: an outstanding student.</p>
<p>It would be strange to have every candidate be superior compared to his or her peers, would it not?</p>
<p>I can understand how you misunderstood what the policy referred to, but I can assure you that the MIT tenure candidate's peers ARE NOT other faculty who are coming up for tenure at the same time at the same university. </p>
<p>All universities that are interested in faculty as researchers solicit letters from external reviewers, scholars who are experts in the same field as the tenure candidate. These are a key component of determining whether the tenure candidate's research is up to snuff.</p>
<p>Elite colleges ask the external reviewers to define a list of the top junior scholars in the tenure candidate's fields and to compare the candidate to those individuals. That is the peer group used for comparison. </p>
<p>Those peers are at universities all across the country and often also, the world. A peer of a MIT asst professor may be at Cal Tech or Oxford or Berkeley. Given the tight focus of researchers, it is quite unlikely that there will be two tenure candidates with the same research focus who are coming up for tenure at the same time.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I only care to hear opinions from those whose livelihoods are also threatened annually by clueless state legislators
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Your entire thesis boils down to "he doesn't see the world like I do, thus he is uninformed and wrong, and I don't want to anyones opinions unless they echo mine." wow....just wow. Quite compelling. I can see why you may fear for your job. And so much for the theory that education leads to an open mind. <em>rolls eyes</em></p>
<p>and ohnoes, departments may have to change? OMG, change. Change is bad. we can't deal with change! ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! /sarcasm</p>
<hr>
<p>
[quote]
"Professors already compete with others in the same institution for tenure..."</p>
<p>I know of no academic institution where this is correct.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I didn't necessarily mean compete in a direct sense...sorry, I should have been more clear. I simply meant that young profs are often hired together, work toward tenure at roughly the same time, etc. So in that sense there is a bit of healthy competitition...not in a zero sum game sense. But there's still plenty of competition in depts. </p>
<p>Ultimately I was trying to draw a parallel between the process of tenureship and what it would be like without tenure. For all of the proposed problems, I'm not sure that things are really any different now. Instead of firing decisions, you have tenure decisions. Things still come down to the whims of the faculty. You may be a great prof, but you can still be the odd man out and denied tenure.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Sorry Sakky but you’re not quite correct in asserting that governments are not duty bound to fund even non-market driven programs like the arts. Unfortunately I cannot read through every state constitution (and these are state institutions) but according to the Massachusetts constitution;
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So does it then follow that Massachusetts was violating its own constitution during much of its existence? After all, the Massachusetts state constitution was written in 1780, yet the first iteration of the University of Massachusetts wasn't founded until 1863. And that iteration was a land-grant state college called the Massachusetts Agricultural College that specialized in engineering and agriculture. It was only after WW2 that its name was changed to UMass. Sorry, evoke1080, but that's the truth of the matter.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Note how it mentions public institutions for arts and spreading opportunities among all orders of people
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Even so, how does that then necessarily mean that government is * obligated * to do so in the form of broad-based university education? Seems to me that this particular clause can be fulfilled simply by the funding of museums and vocational programs. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Besides if market forces were really as perfect as neoclassical economists would like to believe, there’d be no public universities at all
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, there probably would be no public universities. Would that necessarily be a bad thing? There are no "public restaurants" or "public supermarkets" either, even though everybody has to eat. The private sector seems to do a pretty decent job of taking care of our food requirements. You don't have mass starvation in the country. Many of the best universities in the country are private. Heck, even if you just want to look at the case of engineering, which the Morrill Act was designed to address, the 2 best engineering schools in the country (MIT and Stanford) are private. Seems to me that the private sector does a pretty decent job of providing educational services. Nowhere is it written that the government * needs * to build public universities. </p>
<p>
[quote]
They take much less of a risk under the current system. Many people advise student not to work for untenured professors for the explicit reason that they might not be at the institution when they finish. (see Dr. Peter’s book for a more thorough explanation). If you look at the tenured professors who do leave an institution, they can often take their students with them since the new institution would have to want the professor really badly to offer immediate tenure and other incentives that would convince them to pack up and leave.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Oh really? What happens if you work for a tenured prof who decides not to do anything anymore? </p>
<p>
[quote]
Define "a lot." None of the profs I met with are focusing on their "start ups."
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Well, let me put it to you this way. Compare the publishing productivity rates of profs before and after they get tenure, and especially, if they've had tenure for a long time. Plenty of long-tenured profs are doing other things. I can't give you a "statistic" because obviously academia doesn't like talking about this. But consider this snippet from the book "High Stakes, No Prisoners"</p>
<p>"LECG (the Law and Economics Consulting Group) is the largest corporate antitrust consulting firm in the United states with revenues of more than $50 million [in 1999]...Rich Gilbert [Professor and current Chair of Economics at UCBerkeley] was a founder of LECG. When he entered the government [by taking a leave of absence from Berkeley to become senior Economist at the Department of Justice in 1993], he sold his LECG stock back to LECG, thus avoiding conflict of interest restrictions. Then, when he left Justice two years later, he repurchased it; his LECG stock is now worth more than $30 million. [Two other senior economists at the DoJ, Carl Shapiro and Dan Rubinfeld, were, not coincidentally, also Berkeley Professors of Economics, and were also members of LECG]. Carl Shapiro formed his own antitrust consulting firm with Michael Katz, another Berkeley professor who had just been the chief economist of the FCC. Their firm, the Tilden Group, was recently acquired by the other large corporate antitrust consulting firm, Charles River Associates. Katz and another Berkeley professor, Glenn woroch, run a research project, the Consotium for Research on Telecommunications Policy, which is funded almost entirely by the Ameritech Foundation (now run by SBC/AT&T). Woroch also consults for BellSouth. Daniel Rubinfeld, the Justice chief economist until late 1998, owned more than $6 million in LECG stock while working for Justice, representing the overhwleming majority of his personal wealth. LECG's newest seniors partner is Laura Tyson, the [former] dean of UCBerkeley's business school [and now the dean of the London Business School], whoc is also a director of Ameritech and was the chariwoman of the National Economic Council in the first Clinton administration.</p>
<p>Berkeley is in no way unique. MIT's Jerry Hausman recently published a highly polemic paper in a Brookings volume, attacking the FCC for not giving the telephone monopolies more freedom in the Internet industry. What Hausman did not mention in the paper is that he has received millions of dollars from the telecommunications industry for regulatory consulting and expert testimony. NYU's William Baumol, another famous economist and a past president of the American Economic Association, has a confidential consulting veresion of his curriculum vita containing a fifty-page supplement listing his expert witness engagements, for which he is paid more than one thousand dollars per hour...Peter Temin, former chair of the MIT Economics Department, has consulted for AT&T on antitrust and regulatory matters since the 1970's. Robert Crandall [former professor of economics at MIT, George Washington, and the University of Maryland and current Brookings fellow], consults for Bell Atlantic [now Verizon]."</p>
<ul>
<li>pages 346-347, "High Stakes, No Prisoners", Charles Ferguson.</li>
</ul>
<p>
[quote]
If professors have funding for RAs they need to have grants. To get grants they need to submit requests to the government or private institutions to do research. They then need to actually DO the research (see my next comment below).
[/quote]
</p>
<p>And why are we talking about RA funding? What does that have to do with anything? Plenty of graduate students are on fellowship or are on TA-ship. Hence, they don't need any research funding from a prof.</p>
<p>And even if a student does need RA money, that doesn't mean that he needs to get it from the particular prof he wants to work for. Plenty of students do RA work for one prof, while doing their personal research work with another. You don't need to have a RA relationship with a prof for that prof to be your advisor. </p>
<p>And that's precisely the problem . What if you choose a particular program because you want to work with one particular tenured prof, and then that prof just decides that he doesn't want to be academically productive and that he'd rather just do other things? Because he's tenured, there's nothing anybody can do. </p>
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This would of course be illegal. When you submit a grant proposal to the NIH or NSF you promise to complete the research. If you don't complete the research, you've broken the law.
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<p>What's illegal about it? I never said anything about breaking any grants. First off, plenty of fields don't even require grants for research - the humanities, many of the social sciences don't need grants for research. Furthermore, even if we are talking about a grant-heavy subject, what if he just decides not to pursue any more grants? He just finishes the grant work he's obligated to do, but decides not to obtain further grants, because he decides he's going to instead spend his time consulting. He's not doing anything illegal. </p>
<p>Let's be honest. There is a lot of deadwood out there in the form of tenured profs who aren't actively publishing, aren't writing any grants, really, aren't doing anything academic. And since they're tenured, you can't get rid of them.</p>
<p>"Yeah, there probably would be no public universities. Would that necessarily be a bad thing? There are no "public restaurants" or "public supermarkets" either, even though everybody has to eat. The private sector seems to do a pretty decent job of taking care of our food requirements. You don't have mass starvation in the country. Many of the best universities in the country are private. Heck, even if you just want to look at the case of engineering, which the Morrill Act was designed to address, the 2 best engineering schools in the country (MIT and Stanford) are private. Seems to me that the private sector does a pretty decent job of providing educational services. Nowhere is it written that the government needs to build public universities. "</p>
<p>MIT and Stanford might be good engineering schools but they do not serve the interests of the state simply because they do not produce all the engineers necessary for the American economy to be competitive. On the other hand, public schools like the UCs, VTech, Michigan and others produce well-trained engineers in the quantities that are needed. To argue that schools like Stanford and MIT can replace public engineering schools seems to be very misguided.</p>
<p>“Let's be honest. There is a lot of deadwood out there in the form of tenured profs who aren't actively publishing, aren't writing any grants, really, aren't doing anything academic. And since they're tenured, you can't get rid of them.”</p>
<p>Ok can anyone find 10 engineering professors (not department heads or deans) at research universities listed in USNWR (edit: graduate school guide) (this covers most major universities in the US) who haven’t published in the last 2 years? Bonus points if they still have graduate students working for them. I only request engineering professors because I can verify the claims. This is not only open to sakky even if it’s his quote. I really would be interested in seeing totally unproductive professors in research universities, so if anyone can find them it’d be much appreciated.</p>
<p>
[quote]
MIT and Stanford might be good engineering schools but they do not serve the interests of the state simply because they do not produce all the engineers necessary for the American economy to be competitive. On the other hand, public schools like the UCs, VTech, Michigan and others produce well-trained engineers in the quantities that are needed. To argue that schools like Stanford and MIT can replace public engineering schools seems to be very misguided.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I'm not saying that Stanford and MIT * by themselves, and at this time * can replace all public engineering schools. I am simply pointing out that there are 2 private schools that, arguably, provide better engineering education than arguably any public school. </p>
<p>MIT and Stanford are not the only private schools that offer top-notch engineering education. You also have Carnegie Mellon, Caltech, USC, Princeton, Columbia, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Duke, Rice, RPI, University of Rochester, Case Western - all relatively highly ranked engineering schools that are private. </p>
<p>And besides, let's imagine a counterfactual world where public schools really didn't exist. Then I would surmise that in such a world, the top private engineering schools (i.e. MIT, Stanford, etc.) woud be BIGGER than they currently are in order to accomodate the engineering demand. Hence, while it is of course true that the private schools can't handle ALL of the current engineering demand, that's because they don't have to. The public schools handle much of the demand. Hence, one could say that, ironically, it is the simple presence of the public schools that make the presence of the public schools necessary. Read that sentence again and I think that ironic point will make itself clear. </p>
<p>Look, you have to ask yourself what would have happend if the US had never built any public schools via the Morrill Act but had perhaps instead fostered engineering education in a different way. For example, instead of the Morrill Act what if the US government had instead provided vouchers for students to obtain engineering degrees at private schools? Then you'd probably have much larger private engineering programs that cater to those students. In short, the private engineering schools would have moved in to fill the gap.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Ok can anyone find 10 engineering professors (not department heads or deans) at research universities listed in USNWR (edit: graduate school guide) (this covers most major universities in the US) who haven’t published in the last 2 years? Bonus points if they still have graduate students working for them. I only request engineering professors because I can verify the claims. This is not only open to sakky even if it’s his quote. I really would be interested in seeing totally unproductive professors in research universities, so if anyone can find them it’d be much appreciated.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>First off, we have to be clear about what we mean by 'unproductive'. I am talking about unproductive in the research publication sense of the word. Going around doing consulting, or founding nonprofit organizations or creating your own tech startup, or those sorts of those things are not my idea of 'research productivity'. Nor do I consider textbook writing to be 'research productivity'. Nor do I consider writing in popular, non peer-reviewed publications (i.e. Popular Science, Scientific American, etc.) to be true 'research'</p>
<p>But since you asked for a list, I'll give you a list. And not from just from any old school, but from MIT itself.</p>
<p>Hal Abelson (last publication was in 2000).
Joel Philip Clark
Sheila Widnall (to be fair, she did a long stint in the government, culminating in becoming the US Secretary of the Air Force from 1993-1997, but since returning to MIT in 1998, she has published a grand total of 2 articles, both in 2000, and nothing since)
Deborah Nightingale
Ernest J. Moniz (unless you want to count that 2-page 2006 comment in 'Issues in Science and Technology', which was just an opinion piece, and of which he was just the 3rd author, as 'research')
David Hunter Marks
Yossi Sheffi (unless you want to count his 2005 papers in Harvard Business Review and the MIT Sloan Management Review - I don't count them, as these are not research journals).
Warren P. Seering
Nigel H.M. Wilson
Jerome Connor
Amedeo R. Odoni</p>
<p>Now, to be fair, these people all published plenty of academic articles and engaged in plenty of serious academic research in the past and where otherwise extremely productive academics in the past. But that was then, this is now. These people are no longer actively publishing, yet because they're tenured, MIT can't get rid of them. </p>
<p>To reiterate, I would not call them "unproductive" as a whole. I am quite certain that they remain quite productive in whatever tasks they are now doing. But that productivity doesn't really serve to help a graduate student trying to complete his PhD. For example, the fact that Hal Abelson is writing another textbook doesn't exactly do a lot of good to any graduate students who wanted to work under him.</p>
<p>Nor do I mean to single out MIT. I am quite sure that if I looked at Stanford, Berkeley, or most other top engineering programs, I will find tenured profs who aren't actively engaged in academid research. I don't think MIT is any better or any worse in this regard.</p>
<p>I've met lots of professors and I can tell most of them are multitasker freaks. In other words, no matter what they do, the works pile up and they are on the verges of catching up with deadlines, or competing with others for publications. </p>
<p>In my field, it's definitely true that things take a while to be put together. I do science and whether the results work out is partially miraculous. However, people judge scientific works based on how many miracles or how good those miracles are. It's one of the most frustrating thing on earth because in most situations we are on the cutting edge. I can tell if my cell samples look weird, but I can't tell if it's worth looking into it further or discarding it and dealing with other things. A lot of time it's a matter of guessing. If I make the right guess, then I might make enough contribution and then (that) might get my professor a tenure. That's why MIT realizes it, so they kind of know that most people will not make enough miracles to get tenure. Those who do got really terrific works done. </p>
<p>Why are we talking much of research here? There's another big thread out there debating how many instructors are in tenure track. If tenure value only research, then we are not on the right track for proper education. Most professors have to devote their time to research because that's what will take most space on their CV's. While research is very cutting edge and frustrating, teaching is just a matter of communicating something known to the students. It's just two very different things. </p>
<p>I know a great instructor, an assistant professor who decided to leave this university. Andrew Shatte taught 2 large sections of a class every semester, each of 400 - 600 students (for the semester that I took his class, people who were on time had to sit on the floor). There was a fire alarm that interrupted a class once, but everyone went back into his lecture after 45 minutes of waiting. He was darn impressed because for most other classes students would disappear seconds after the alarm. He left last semester... never got tenure. If you are a computer science student, you probably know the Cormen book for Data structures and Algorithms. Everyone uses it. I love it. He's NOT a full professor. Did these people make a contribution to the field? Definitely. Giant contribution.</p>
<p>Some professors took more active roles as teachers, advisors and such after they get tenure. These professors are still very valuable, as I can see, even though they might not have time for their research anymore.</p>
<p>In most cases, their jobs are to find money to feed their labs, make sure there is no fire in the lab, and make sure there is some work going on. Very rarely do I see any of them actually doing wet work on the bench. </p>
<p>What I'd say is: the tenure system needs a reform. Sometimes things go nasty because of tenure. Sometimes people stop working because of it. Many people take advantage of it and do things that benefit others with the tenure position. Yet while we debate these things we never know that so many professors are burnt out and most of them don't even get 6-digit salaries.</p>