Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Mar 11, 2010, at 1:24 PM, Chuck Loucks wrote:
>
> > If a tenured track professor is hired mainly to do research, why
> > should undergrads
> > have to pay the cost of that research for the length of time said
> > professor spends on
> > research?
>
> Because maybe research makes better professors and enriches human
> knowledge?
And the 'obvious' answer to this, that it doesn't work that way in many cases, doesn't hold water simply because nothing gets accomplished in any activity without allowing for a considerable amount of waste effort and resources. If you want minimally accurate texts of the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Austen, then you have to have a system in whihc a fairly large number of scholars spend their time preserving texts that no one will ever want; and if you want crucial information about medieval France, you need to have rather large numbers of scholars producing more or less useless historial mono graphs. That's the way human accumulation of knowledge works: it's inefficient by its very nature. We pay for good scholarship and research precisely by subsidizing a goodly amount of piss-poor scholarshp.
And teaching is broadened and deepened by professors who make _some_ effort, no matter how futile, to increase their own knowledge.
Carrol