academe

[Brad DeLong]

>On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
>>  The superstar surrounded by the cognitariat (intellectual proletariat i.e.
>>  graduate workers and research assistants) who toil for subsistence wages to
>>  produce the value (i.e. do the actual research and write about it), which
>>  the superstar then appropriates by adding his/her name to it
>
>That's not quite how it works in the humanities, where grads don't cook up
>vats of research results and then deliver these in a box to the
>superstars; the superstars write their own books, and the profits made
>from publishing a humanities book are pretty feeble compared to any
>managerial textbook. What you get is a class struggle over the
>distribution of teaching-time, as it were: the serfs do the entry-level
>teaching and go crazy correcting papers, while the superstars get a
>limited amount of time to work on Great Theory, and hone their skills
>teaching to a limited audience of grad students, and both face off against
>the university system as a whole, which as we know is just another
>business.
>
>-- Dennis

So supposing that you were a very senior academic administrator 
interested in getting the senior faculty of an Ivy League university 
re-engaged in teaching. How would you go about doing it?

Brad DeLong