Among other things, the idea that research is important is fine and the idea that knowledge accumulation is inefficient is fine but to suggest that the intensified demands on faculty to plow out completely mainstream, totally pedestrian and intellectually uninteresting research in the humanities, social sciences and natural and physical sciences is producing research more important than the damage it is doing to faculty interaction, pedagogy and students' experience of the life of the mind is wrong.
I actually think - without any data to support this argument - that a higher percentage og higher quality research was produced at most places by most faculty when faculty had more time to produce it (at least in the humanities and social sciences, with anecdotally from friends in biology). I know that the vast majority of Kuhnian normal science (whatever the flaws in that concept) has added knowledge by inefficient increments but my fellow junior faculty when I was at a Research I place tied themselves to senior faculty's ongoing projects, cranked out uninspired stuff of their own and sent it wherever it'd get published because they had to... few executed Lakatosian research programs that were of much personal interest, hoping that they could do their own stuff when they got tenure... by which time institutional momentum and the greater administrative demands on tenured faculty impeded that work. Relatedly, more than half of the senior faculty in the department that hired me indicated that they weren't at all sure they'd have earned tenure in the '00s, though it was pretty straightforward in the 70s and 80s.
On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 7:53 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Mar 12, 2010, at 12:39 AM, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
> Please, I know four kids who dropped out of CMU - no, not a NSF Research I
>> institution - this year because of a combination of rising costs and
>> falling
>> state support. Obvious to you, not exactly inefficient or corrupt to
>> them.
>>
>
> Research is important, and so is state support. I don't get what you're
> calling for exactly? Less research so the kids didn't have to drop out of
> CMU? Lots of research plus free tuition? Socialist revolution?
>
> Doug
>
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319