Knowledge is good. It’s better to have more of it than less. Therefore society benefits when college professors research their fields of expertise and publish their findings.
Who could disagree with that?
Quite a few people do, including Rick O’Donnell, president of the Acton Foundation for Entrepreneurial Excellence. Last December, his paper “Is Academic Research a Good Investment for Texas?” was published by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The paper is a wide-ranging discussion of faculty research, its costs, benefits, and the impact on teaching, including a wealth of pertinent data.
O’Donnell writes, “The key to preparing the next generation of Texans for more productive and meaningful lives is not to pour billions of additional dollars into higher education research, but to return our colleges and universities to their original mission—teaching students.”
That statement is right, and it’s just as true for any other state.
He begins by pointing out that most scientific research in the United States is not done in universities, but in private companies and independent laboratories, where there’s careful attention paid to obtaining value from the expenditures on research. In contrast, O’Donnell reports, at 9 of the 12 University of Texas campuses, the income from patents produced through university research does not even cover the cost of running the technology transfer offices the patents require.
Most faculty research, however, has nothing to do with science, where at least sometimes there is a pay-off. “When tenured faculty refer to ‘academic research,’ they generally are referring not to work done in scientific laboratories, but esoteric scholarly articles written for obscure academic journals,” O’Donnell writes. Only a small fraction of faculty research involves, for example, the search for new breakthroughs in energy or the cure for cancer. Most merely involves articles professors write to satisfy the “publish or perish” imperative that dominates at so many schools.
Here are just a few of those academic journals: Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Journal of Peasant Studies, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft, Postmodern Culture.
The drain on university resources of publishing all that research is, O’Donnell says, “staggering.” It includes the cost of editing and publishing the journals, but that is tiny compared with the cost of the time devoted to doing all the research and writing. At most colleges and universities, professors have a low teaching obligation because it’s supposedly very important for them to be able to do their research work. Most professors are paid rather well, but devote little of their time to classes, their students, grading papers, and so on.
(The trade-off between teaching and research was the subject of this Pope Center article featuring four distinguished professors.)
Behind the policy of giving professors light teaching loads so they’ll have time for research is the assumption that they’re all brimming with original thinking that will expand society’s knowledge base. They just need the time to do the research and writing. That assumption, however, is mistaken, on two counts. First, many professors don’t have any important contributions to make. As Dean Edward Morris writes in The Lindenwood Model (which I reviewed here), we have “too much research chasing too few good ideas.” Most academic research is remarkably trivial and is done not to expand knowledge but merely because it’s necessary for tenure and promotion.
The second count is that it is possible for a professor to teach a full load of classes and still find time to do research. Under those conditions, the research is sure to be work that he or she really thinks is important. A good example is Hillsdale College history professor Burton Folsom, who has written several books, most recently a startling re-examination of FDR’s policies, New Deal or Raw Deal, despite the fact that he teaches three courses per semester.
While the price tag for a college education has been going up rapidly, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the reasons why costs keep skyrocketing. Instead, most policymakers have been wringing their hands over ways to tap into more public money to help offset those rising costs. O’Donnell’s paper suggests that they ought to be looking at the research model’s impact on costs. Education is labor-intensive and most schools are employing far more professors than necessary to teach the undergraduates. Let’s not prop up that inefficient model with increased public subsidization.
Public higher education officials who dare to question the research model will undoubtedly be pilloried by faculty members who enjoy the status quo. Their job, however, is not to keep the professors happy, but to get the best education at the lowest cost for students.