What does the federal budget mean for the post-secondary sector?

Reforming universities is difficult. Cures tried elsewhere, like the UK Research Assessment Exercise, have induced people to publish more. Yet, to the extent that research comes at the cost of time spent teaching or engaging with students, "incentivizing" research could actually decrease the social value of universities.  

University reform is doubly difficult in Canada, where universities are a provincial responsibility, and coordinated action is problematic. I suspect that Prime Minister Stephen Harper would like to pull a Margaret Thatcher, and end tenure, or whip academics into shape with frequent assessments. But the federal government has no jurisdiction to act in this area.

Hence the government is pursuing a multi-level strategy.

First, it is funding winners; Canada's big, research-intensive universities. The federal budget set aside $225 million for the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI). The CFI funds large institutional projects - $18 million for superconducting electron accelerators, for example. Some of the projects benefit social science or humanities researchers at mid-ranked institutions, such as the $5 million the CFI gives to the Research Data Centres. But most CFI money goes to Canada's larger universities, for big projects in health, science and technology. There's not much there for, say, a political scientist at Trent University or a historian at the University of Victoria.  

Second, the federal government is putting money behind commercial, business-oriented endeavours, and public-private partnerships. $121 over two years goes to the National Research Council "to help the growth of innovative businesses" - not those folks at NRC headquarters on Sussex Drive. There is $165 million for Genome Canada - serious funding for commercial, bio-tech research, especially that carried out in university-industry collaborations. 

Third, it is giving greater prominence to colleges. One third of the new money going to the granting councils (NSERC, SSHRC, CIH) is earmarked for enhancing the "College and Community Innovation Program." There's another $20 million over three years "to help small and medium-sized enterprises access research and business development services at universities, colleges and other non-profit research institutions of their choice." 

Colleges also feature in the centerpiece of this budget, the new "Jobs Grant". Under this program, the federal government will give $5,000 - to be matched by $5,000 from provincial sources and $5,000 from an employer - for job training.

The Grant will be for short-duration training, and will include eligible training institutions, including community colleges, career colleges and trade union training centres.

The job grant is a response to a perceived problem - this country's lack of skilled workers. By omission, the budget document makes it clear: universities aren't part of the solution.

Academics often tout the value of curiosity driven research, pointing to the phenomenal technological breakthroughs that build upon basic science (see, for example,  here, or here, or here. Yet arguments about the total value of curiosity driven research, or the value of the best curiosity driven research, says nothing about the value of marginal curiosity driven research. 

As someone who spends more time blogging than doing conventional academic research, I am probably more skeptical than most. The numbers give me good reason to be skeptical. One vaguely interesting post on Worthwhile will get more views in a few days than all of the articles I have listed on the Ideas website combined get in a year. The most read article in the journal Applied Economics wouldn't come close to making WCI's annual top 10 list. Hardly anyone cares about mid-level social science, humanities or even scientific research.

Over the next 10 to 20 years, population aging will put enormous pressure on provincial budgets. The provinces will be looking for places to cut. It is bound to occur to someone that redirecting professorial time from research to teaching could result in substantial cost savings. If academics at mid-ranked universities don't want this to happen, we need to show that our research is of value.

But is it? 

Comments

[Andre Vellino]

Dear Professor Wooley - I'm surprised that you think anything significant could be infered from the fact that the greater number of viewers on your blog compared to the readership of one of the most read articles in Applied Economics. It is true that this implies that "Hardly anyone cares about mid-level social science, humanities or even scientific research", but that's because hardly anyone is *able* to read articles in Applied Economics - only trained economists have the education or inclination to understand what's published there.

But to infer from that that the research that's published in Applied Economics doesn't have value is unwarranted. The number of people who have read Stephen Harper's Master's thesis (dspace.ucalgary.ca/bitstream/1880/24345/1/1991_Harper.pdf) can probably be counted on the fingers of two hands, but I don't think anyone would conclude that it's insignificant. Ditto with Stephen Cook's 1971 paper "The complexity of theorem-proving procedures" (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&id=805047). It's impenetrable to all but the 200 mathematicians working in the field of complexity theory, yet it has enormous importance and practical implications (if the problem he sets out here is solved, it will make it to the front page of the New York Times, that is certain.)

All this to say that "popularity" has nothing at all to do with importance or value. Demonstrating importance and value is't going to be achieved by counting clicks - or even citations for that matter. As a friend of mine put it in the Citizen the other day (re: measuring kids' performance in schools) “Because we can’t actually measure what we care about, we start caring about what we can measure”.

[Jim Sentance]

Hate to say it, but it probably isn't. At the margin anyways.

My take on this is that the shift in federal funding in the 90's from operational grants to a larger focus on research funding helped push the whole university system towards a more research/less teaching balance. And for much of the system the payoff just isn't there.

If teaching does get ratcheted up again though, publishing standards need to be lowered as well. Not eliminated, I think we should all be doing something, but there needs to be a reasonable workload balance.

[Frances Woolley]

Andre - I must have got you wound up - you forgot how to spell my name!

Sure, page views aren't everything (and you would know better than I would how much page view #s are inflated by those programs that trawl the web).

So how do we actually make the case that the research that's done at Carleton or at U of O (outside of the life science building) matters and is worth funding? How do we demonstrate importance and value?

Jim, interesting.

[Simon van Norden]

"So how do we actually make the case that the research ... matters and is worth funding? How do we demonstrate importance and value?"

If all that you need to do is to demonstrate *relative* importance, then you rely on peers; i.e. citation rankings or similar. (Okay....those have problems, most notably that they can be gamed....but Google manages the same problem on a day-to-day basis and keeps it under control, so it seems that viable approaches to "crowd-sourcing the ranking" exist.)

If instead I need to show the value of, say, international macroeconomics compared to cognitive psychology, that's going to be really, really hard. We know that the market values of such research will be distorted by, among other things, to extent to which the value of the knowledge is excludeable (can I keep people from getting the benefits if they don't pay the owner of the knowledge for it?) Boosting market value often requires keeping research secret, whereas we think publishing (and encouraging critical review) of research is more productive.

I think the case for Canadian universities is even tougher to make given that the frontiers of world knowledge will advance pretty independently of the amount that Canada contributes to that goal. That means that we don't just need to value the relative value of research in different fields, but we need to measure the relative value of the marginal research dollar in those fields.

[Frances Woolley]

Simon: "I think the case for Canadian universities is even tougher to make given that the frontiers of world knowledge will advance pretty independently of the amount that Canada contributes to that goal."

The flip side of this observation, as Herb Emery and Wayne Simpson discuss in this recent article http://ideas.repec.org/a/cpp/issued/v38y2012i4p445-470.html is that Canadian academic economists have never done a lot of research on specifically Canadian economic issues, and the amount of "Canadian content" (their phrase) produced by academic economists in Canada is gradually declining. I've written about this before, asking Is the rest of the world subsidizing research on the American economy?".

[Andre Vellino]

Dear Frances (Professor Wool*l*ey :-))

Yes, I *am* flustered - so much so that I also didn't edit my first sentence to be (even vaguely) grammatical! It looked to me like you were (uncharacteristically) pandering to the standard conservative line - if it (any kind of research) doesn't have (demonstrable) economic value then it doesn't have any value.

First of all, I disagree that "Google manages the same problem on a day-to-day basis and keeps it under control, so it seems that viable approaches to "crowd-sourcing the ranking exist." Google's 200 or so factors for relevance ranking searches *are* unfortunately, not only gameable but also gamed by SEOs. But also, PageRank (the dominant factor) *is*, actually, a popularity measure.

My point is, knowledge just isn't a commodity whose value can be measured by supply and demand. On those grounds we should just get rid of departments that teach ancient languages or archeology or even philosophy for that matter.

Consider "Sleeping Beauties" for instance. Those are articles that are poorly cited shortly after they are published but suddenly acquire relevance later on in life (typically when something happens in society that makes them relevant)

http://www.researchtrends.com/issue21-january-2011/sleeping-beauties-or-delayed-recognition-when-old-ideas-are-brought-to-bibliometric-life/

If you are going to rely on supply and demand to dictate where money is spent on education, then let's start with Math departments (I know this hits home!) Who cares about Banach Spaces or the Poincare Hypothesis? Obtuse philosophising about how many angels are dancing on the pin of a needle, no? Let's trash all that to start with - after all, only a few dozen people can understand it anyway, so who cares?

Then we can move on to the Arts departments. Why waste taxpayers' money on professors who will write books on 4"33 by John Cage? After all, anyone can compose a piece of music where not one note is played. Or indeed paint large canvases with three stripes of colour.

What I'm suggesting is - don't accept @Simon's premise that "we need to measure the relative value of the marginal research dollar in those fields" even if that's what the funding agencies (governments) say is required.

[Frances Woolley]

Andre - yes, this is the standard conservative line, and I'm putting it out here - where hopefully no more than a few hundred people will see it (right now we're at 135 and counting) - in the hopes of that someone like you will come out and give me a convincing counter-attack. But I'm not hearing one.

Let's take mathematics, for example. There are very few people who are smart enough to make original contributions in mathematics. There are even fewer who are able to keep on making original contributions in mathematics when they're 50, 60, 70, or 80 - and there's no standard retirement age any more. There are just over 1000 professors of mathematics in this country - average salary, according to caut.ca, $115,895. Let's say all those 1000 professors spend half of their time doing research - that's 500 full-time equivalent people devoted to mathematics research. Is that too many? Too few? How would we know? What happens when mathematics professors stop - as most do, eventually - making original contributions?

Undergraduate mathematics education is something else entirely - it's valuable is a way of building intellectual capacity, learning how to think, and - if nothing else - as a training for a career in economics or finance!

It's a good question: "Why waste taxpayers' money on professors who will write books on 4"33 by John Cage?" If you have a convincing answer, please let me quote you on it!

[Giovanni]

Frances,

While I agree universities will come under much more intense scrutiny in coming years, I doubt public criticism will take so clinical a form as cost-benefit analysis of academic research. As a way to get voters' attention just too boring and emotionally unsatisfying. Instead, I think, politicians will try to target la dolce vita enjoyed by many tenured professors, the amount of double-dipping that goes on and the failure of universities to enforce their own rules. Assessing the social value of Professor Jone's latest may be well beyond the ken (not to mention attention span) of most taxpayers. But a professor who is on campus only two days a week and disappears entirely each summer, or one who doubles or triples their income working on university time as a consultant/textbook writer/think-tank hack/journalist/start-up CEO/boardroom decoration...now that's the stuff public outrage is made of.

[Shangwen]

I agree that “what’s it worth” is the standard conservative line, but the other ideologically motivated lines--”it’s inherently valuable” or “it fosters a cultured society”--aren’t better arguments either (they’re not even arguments, they’re all anti-intellectual assertions).

I’m not an academic but I’m heavily involved in systems for consuming research output and transferring knowledge into practice, in this case healthcare. Areas like higher mathematics may have very few arenas in which their research is consumed outside of academia (probably medical physics or computer science), and likewise for the humanities. In the healthcare case you have a pretty clear example of how research is consumed and implemented by non-academics. How well is this working? I think the general public would be shocked at (a) just at how non-scientific a lot of healthcare is, and (b) how few practical answers we are able to abstract even from the voluminous output of medical research. This is basically because it is hard to get research to speak to practical issues. This does not mean the research is bad, or that the people who do it are venal opportunists.

What it means is that the incentives to do research are mostly highly individualized, rather than part of some broader goal-oriented activity in the economy, and research is organized as a highly self-reflexive system. (Yes, there are tons of exceptions to that.) Many times I’ve approached scientists with money and support to answer issues that are seen as key problems--e.g., how do we assess pain in people with severe brain injury--and the reply is often along the lines of “No, because the N isn’t big enough, or I couldn’t do a methodologically rigorous paper, or I couldn’t get it published in XYZ, or I have money for something tied to a big high-profile project,” etc. It sounds crazy, but from their perspective, it makes perfect sense given their environment.

There are huge issues in arriving at an intelligent consensus about the contribution of research, but discussing how to value it intrinsically is not the road to go down.

[Alice Woolley]

These are difficult (almost existential) questions. Perhaps, e.g., it is necessary to create the structure that permits the generation of 1000 crap articles in order to produce the 1 great article. That doesn't make the 999 articles of value, but without the structure you won't get the one that is. Is the metric of an article how many people read it, or how important an article is to a particular question that, itself, matters. E.g., it may be that very few people care about the question of how proceeds from the disposition of a utility asset are distributed (although I was pleased to run into one of the handful of people who does at a cocktail party once - he and I were the life of the party) but that question may in fact matter a great deal to the people whose task it is to determine the rates of the utility, and utility rates matter to almost everyone. What if an academic article makes people in authority cross - e.g., it tells them what a bad job they are doing. They aren't likely to view that as very valuable, although it may in fact be accurate and elucidating.

Also there is (maybe) an assumption in your post that teaching uncontroversially creates value. I am not sure (and I think you agree with me) that as we make post-secondary education more accessible we are in fact delivering value to people that we teach. I often encourage people to think seriously about a trade rather than going to university. Would reshifting our mandate to teaching make the world better off? I am not sure whether it would or not - and I mean that non-rhetorically.

I do agree that post-secondary education needs evaluation and rethinking. But I am not at all sure that we have any idea how to do that sensibly. And I am very sure that neither the federal nor provincial government, nor most people who work in universities, do either.

[Frances Woolley]

Giovanni - "Instead, I think, politicians will try to target la dolce vita enjoyed by many tenured professors" Yup. It's like the discussion of public sector sick days - much easier to understand than a debate about the value of goods and services provided by the public sector (Though your list of things that double-dipping professors do to increase their income should *not* include journalism!)

Shangwen "but discussing how to value it intrinsically is not the road to go down." So which road do we go down? We have to allocate resources, and so we have to have some way of choosing between alternatives, and that choice implicitly assigns value.

Simon pointed out earlier the difficulties with a business-oriented model - businesses value what is profitable, which may or may not be what is socially valuable. Perhaps for medical research one could tie research funding to solutions to particular problems e.g. the example you gave, pain in people who have experienced brain injury. I just don't see that working as well in social sciences - as often as not the answers are already out there, or they're not attainable without millions of dollars worth of data collection exercises, so the research becomes more like a consulting exercise - pull together all of the various things that are already out there.

Alice - interesting observation about the merits (or otherwise) of teaching. I agree with you on the limitations of bibliometrics. I guess I'd like o see much more weight placed on things like producing good quality open access textbooks (or case books!) - things that people actually read and find useful - as opposed to a more narrow conception of research. I think that's my point, rather than a blanket dismissal of books on 4"33 by John Cage or articles on obscure (yet vitally important) points on utility regulation.

[Alice Woolley]

I would add this too, that I think there is a tendency in universities to think that any attempt to change or recognize the inadequacies - the useless scholarship, the unrewarded teaching, the pointless committees - will necessarily mean eliminating the things that are good. I can't believe that that's true. And I question, e.g., whether the best use of CAUT's resources is defending a professor who used research funds for personal matters. I understood that to be your point as well, and my point was really about the challenges that go in figuring out how to make it better.

[Giovanni]

Frances,

Yes, you're right. By and large, academic contributions to journalism improve the quality of public discourse (particularly when the academic in question happens to share my opinions). And nobody gets rich doing journalism except for a small number of the very worst journalists. No offence intended. Kindly scratch "journalist" from my list and replace with "paid 'expert' witness".

[Nick Rowe]

Slightly off-topic, but I'm trying to remember that quote about Velvet Underground. Something like: "The album sold very few copies; but everyone who bought it started a band".

[Giovanni]

Yeah...but if the metaphor is to be truly apt the quote should continue: “Every one of those bands put out an album that no one listened to. And so forth. Pretty soon shop shelves were groaning under great stacks of completely unnecessary records, all heavily subsidized by the Ministry of Rock on the absurd belief that “all music is good”. And the really weird thing? Most of the people caught up in this massive outpouring of mediocrity ended up getting cushy, lifelong gigs as guitar teachers – which, in truth, is why they bothered with the whole damn thing in the first place. (OK, OK...that, the drugs and the groupies.)”

[Frances Woolley]

Giovanni - ouch! It's not that bad.

[Giovanni]

Frances,

Alright...I exaggerate for comic effect. But, alas, not by a huge amount.

Thought experiment. Suppose every young academic economist was told on being hired: "Look, if you want to do research as a hobby that's your business. We'll even let you spend your summers doing it, if you want. But don't expect to be rewarded for it. All we care about is the quantity and quality of your teaching, which we will monitor rigourously. That's what will determine whether you get tenure and promotions and how quickly you move up the pecking order." In that kind of alternative universe how long do you think an outfit such as the CJE would survive? My bet is that they'd soon find themselves having to commission articles to get enough copy to put out an issue.

[Andre Vellino]

Let me have a go at ""Why waste taxpayers' money on professors who will write books on 4"33 by John Cage?" and the "waste" of having "unproductive" 50+ math professors who, in all likelihood won't crack P=NP (the biggest open problem in math / computer science and for which Steve Cook - U. of T. got the NSERC Gold Medal award this year).

The point about Cage is this - the entire University system - starting with ancient Greece, is predicated on the fact that we have an intellectual elite in society who have the privilege (nay duty!) to devote their unique talent and knowledge to thinking, reflecting, criticizing on the subjects they consider deserving of their research (not, I might add, what the government of the day considers to be economically valuable.) So, society gives you an academic position as a musicologist and you have the responsibility to report to us what matters by publishing a peer-reviewed book. If that book is about a piece of music that is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence - so be it. [Actually, what musicologists have to say about this piece is quite interesting, IMHO]. And if nobody buys it - that's perhaps a good sign - so what? Bestsellers by intellectual superstars (viz. Stephen Pinker) aren't particularly novel or interesting.

So the academic institution is a luxury in a rich culture. I don't see how (@Shangwen) this argument, broadly construed as ”it’s inherently valuable” or “it fosters a cultured society” can be construed as anti-intellectual assertions. On the contrary, I'm asserting that institutions that are devoted to intellectual pursuits are inherently valuable - knowledge is good for its own sake as Plato might have it. How is that anti-intellectual?

Granted that the reward system at Universities is terribly wrong - making decisions about what you do as a function of where it gets published, how it gets funded or how many hits your blog will get. But I put the blame for that on the comodification of knowledge. Bibliometrics as a way of measuring research impact is terribly broken as well (I'm working on a fix to that problem, BTW).

To answer Frances on "how many mathematicians is enough" - the answer is simply "let the mathematicians decide". Isn't that how a meritocracy works?

[Jacques René Giguère]

I am sure society would have been way better had Einstein stopped wasting time on incomprehensible elitist relativity and concentrated more on his very useful refrigerator business instead ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein_refrigerator

"Except the very worst journalists". That's why nobody has any business buying the New York Times, especially since we now have one of the most striking advance in punditry, namely the Tom Friedman Op-Ed Generator

http://thomasfriedmanopedgenerator.com/Iron+Empires+and+Iron+Fists+in+Nigeria+bdb9d4

[Frances Woolley]

Jacques Rene - great link. It took me a couple of minutes to work out why I wasn't encountering a paywall!

As an academic i personally find this extremely useful: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1121 and also this one http://www.artybollocks.com/ .

The problem that a typical academic has when using the Einstein example to justify the fact that he/she gets to spend time doing research instead of teaching is that it leaves one wide open to the response "Sorry, but you're not Einstein."

[Chris J]

Frances,

Please get yourself a good dose of "Mike Lazaridis". He once asked the question, Which would change the world more: sending a Blackberry back to 1850 or sending a high-school physics text? (He used a much more poetic setup.)

Please just find a speech online that he gave about fundamental research. Read it. You will feel better. You will also understand why he created the world's best theoretical physics institute.

(But he won't defend average. Write thoughtful papers that matter.)

[Frances Woolley]

Chris J "but he won't defend average"

Anyone can defend great and/or big and/or fundamental research - if you read the post, you'll see that this is precisely the direction things are going in Canada, with the serious $$ going for big CFI projects like TRIUMF out at UBC.

It's the average researchers who need defending - your comment does nothing to counter the view that research activities by mid-ranked scholars (or social scientists - what would Lazaridis think of sending an ECON 1000 textbook back to 1850?) should be curtailed. This is what's at issue here.

Andre - yup, I find the work you're doing in bibliometrics really fascinating. I do find it interesting (and slightly surprising) that you appeal to the idea of an intellectual elite - not that this is wrong, but I would have expected a more rational/egalitarian response. I guess another way of stating your view that only those at the frontiers of knowledge can recognize a contribution that expands the frontiers - and that's a defensible position.

I'd be happy to let mathematicians decide the merits of mathematics. Letting them deciding the optimal number of mathematicians is another matter entirely! (Would you let chess players decide who the best chess player is? Yes. Would you let chess players decide how many people get to be government funded chess researchers? No.)

[Giovanni]

"The problem that a typical academic has when using the Einstein example to justify the fact that he/she gets to spend time doing research instead of teaching is that it leaves one wide open to the response 'Sorry, but you're not Einstein.'"

There's a bigger problem than that. Einstein is the poster-boy for independent scholarship. The revolutionary ideas that established Einstein's reputation (published in his four "Annus Mirabilis" papers of 1905) were developed in his spare time while Einstein worked eight hours a day, six days a week as an assistant examiner in the Swiss patent office. No colleagues, no seminars, no research assistants, no sabbaticals, not even much access to scientific literature. He did his job and when he finished early he took out his pad and pen and worked on his theoretical physics.

Einstein got the patent office job after two futile years looking for a teaching position (the result of Einstein’s relatively poor academic record and - Einstein thought – the machinations of a former professor who didn’t appreciate his open contempt for institutional rules and authority figures). But rather than seeing his seven years at the patent office as some kind of exile from intellectual life, Einstein apparently thought of this time as his golden period. He later wrote "A profession with practical purposes is a delight for a man such as I. An academic career requires young researchers to produce science, and it takes a strong character to resist the temptation of superficial research." He is also reputed to have said that had he obtained a university position after graduating he likely would not have done the work that won his Nobel Prize, as in that case he would have felt tremendous pressure to do the kind of “normal” physics to which more senior academic physicists could relate.

[Frances Woolley]

Giovanni - yup, the pressures academia creates for "normal science" are a serious issue. Don't have any snap answers.

[Chris J]

Frances,

An econ textbook would (I hope) prevent the great depression and put a stop to much misery. If nothing else it would avoid the gold standard.

Much of his point is that pure research with no immediate application is important.
I think this very much jives with your concerns.

As for the big center/small center issue: hard for me to translate to economics. But I do know many succesful scientists at Laurentian. Also I have friends who work in fruitful collaborations with larger centers.

So maybe I should have said that he will inspire you on the importance of basic understanding before thinking of application.

[Jacques René Giguère]

Chris J: We have sent an econ texboook from the past. The Austerians didn't read it.
There is a parable somwhere in the Bible about someone telling Jesus (I think) that they wouldn't have sinned if God had sent them someone from the dead to tel how it was there. He replied that God had sent prophets who weren't listened to anyway.

[Giovanni]

Frances,

Agreed, no snap answers. But one step in the right direction - to bring things back to your original post - would be to avoid rewarding the production of journal fodder with rents amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a career.

[Chris J]

Frances,

My phone ate a comment earlier. The point I was trying to make wrt to Mike Lazaridis was that fundamental and pure research matters. What we do /is/ important.

Now the big center/small center issue is real. I work in a subfield that requires larger centers. But people in smaller centers can do great and important work, but perhaps not in any speciality. At Laurentian there are great lake ecologists. Also, and I don't know if this is possible in economics, we work a lot in collaborations that allow the smaller institutions to make contributions to a "big thing".

(My comment was meant to be a positive "keep the faith" one. If it didn't come across that way it was my inartfulness.)

[Frances Woolley]

Chris J - sorry for misinterpreting your comment! Will try to keep the faith.

[RebelEconomist]

The RAE in the UK was poison. Out of a desire to do something socially useful by teaching and research, I tried to become an academic in the UK after a career in central banking / finance. As the next RAE approached, however, it soon became apparent to me that, because I had no interest in producing tedious and half-baked papers for unread journals, I would either lose my job or become an overworked schoolteacher, so I quit after a couple of years. I was in the fortunate position not to need the job. I recall being told to choose a fashionable research topic that would be of interest to the higher-scoring journals, and avoid researching anything that was a real problem, because a real problem yet without a solution must be hard and therefore unyielding of papers. Few of my colleagues had what I would consider to be much talent for research - by which I mean an ability to come up with original, worthwhile ideas. For many of the most successful, their ingenuity was dedicated to finding how to publish as many papers as possible in the highest scoring journals and wheezes to minimise their teaching load.

In my view, academics should be paid a low basic salary for teaching, with secure-but-not-unbreakable tenure, given research facilities and left alone to decide how they want to manage their own career. They can either make a good living by doing research that attracts funding from interested parties, or remain poor like the proverbial artist in a garret but follow their own curiosity, with of course the possibility of big rewards in the event of making a breakthrough. They should only be fired if their teaching is unacceptably poor or they are not making any genuine research effort. Establishing themselves as recognised experts by writing rigorous books or media articles should be regarded as a legitimate research activity.

[Shangwen]

Frances, my earlier comment about medical research was not to suggest that academic research should be a business, or business-like. My (intended) point was that, even in a field where there is not only an audience, but an active consumer base, there are institutional issues that hamper what we would conventionally call the relevance of the research output. I agree that trying to attain clinical-like relevance (a better term would be "perceived immediacy") for research is a foolish thing to pursue in most areas. The problem is that academics often try to make these justifying arguments as if they had taken up their activities as free agents, whereas the issue is institutional and it's universities who need to articulate better arguments, and perhaps make more thoughtful decisions.

Andre Vellino, it's a fallacy to argue that criticism of the academy = philistinism. I think one has to accept that many people, even informed people, will look at some academic output and feel, in good faith, genuine bafflement or scepticism. The charge of philistinism is most often made by those who maybe could be described as soft targets, but whose areas also have the lowest impact and the lowest citation rates (i.e., English professors). Universities aren't helped when their employees act like they want order a blasphemy trial for those who don't support them. But one of the problems universities have is that their academics are mostly allied to their departments; the university is just a heating system with a payroll office.

[Jack P.]

A few comments:
- Research is much like slowly creating a large building, one brick at a time. We may not care about a specific brick, but we do want the edifice to be solid and reliable.
- Even though much research turns out to have negligible value, we are funding the collective research process, and we accept some, or a lot of, ex post unremarkable research so we can glean the gems. We do not know ahead of time what will turn out to be gems.
- Much research is done out of passion for the work. Teaching and admin take up more than 40 hours a week, and research is evenings, weekends, summers, so I do not think you could increase teaching much by requiring less research. You'll just have less research, period.
- However, I believe research "transaction costs" are high (breaking up research into minimum publishable units, multiple rounds of revisions and resubmissions). Might we have nearly as good results overall if we required fewer publications, but better journals?
- Where does new course content come from? Research, the marketplace of ideas.
- If Canadian academics do not conduct research, course content will not reflect Canadian realities.
-

[Frances Woolley]

Jack P -

I feel as if I'm in the situation of someone who believes in God, and wants a logical argument to prove God's existence. But every logical argument has holes in it (though C.S. Lewis and others have certainly tried). So one has a choice - either take it on faith that God exists, or stop believing.

Likewise, it seems that one just has to take it on faith that research has value, because just about every logical argument on the value of research as practiced in Canadian universities is flawed.

In response to the serious and thoughtful comments you raised:

"If Canadian academics do not conduct research, course content will not reflect Canadian realities" - there is a paper by Herb Emery and Wayne Simpson in the Dec issue of Canadian Public Policy which argues that economists, at least, strive to get published in internationally recognized journals, so many don't produce Canadian content.

- "research "transaction costs" are high". Agreed. The only way that fewer pubs/better journals would help is if it caused people who really don't have anything worth saying to stop trying to publish. Otherwise it would just increase the value of each publication, which I would expect would lead to more effort per publication, and unchanged transaction costs.

- "we accept some, or a lot of, ex post unremarkable research so we can glean the gems" I'll agree that we accept some. But at some point it's reasonable to say enough already. As I responded to Andre Vellino above - how many mathematicians is enough?

"Teaching and admin take up more than 40 hours a week" That's true for some people, some courses, and some times of the year. But I don't think it's uniformly true. (If you're finding it is, write to me privately, I'll share some slacker tips).

"Where does new course content come from? Research" Actually, one reason I spend so much time on this blog is that I find it a good way to generate new course content. We have serious conversations about pedagogy here - more than you'll find in most academic journals.

[Frances Woolley]

Shangwen " the university is just a heating system with a payroll office" Zing!

[Giovanni]

Regarding Canadian course content...in economics, at least, there's tons of applied stuff done outside the universities that bears directly on critical Canadian policy issues. Some of this is not very sophisticated, some outright rubbish, but much of it is solid, on point and accessible to students with a grasp of basic concepts and terminology. I'm thinking of work on labour market patterns and distribution done at StatsCan, on money/international macro/modelling at the Bank of Canada, on the economics of Canadian healthcare at CIHI and the PMPRB, on Canadian tax policy at the Conference Board and C.D.Howe...

[Frances Woolley]

Giovanni "there's tons of applied stuff done outside the universities that bears directly on critical Canadian policy issues"

"How come Canadian academic economists don't conduct research on Canadian policy issues?" "We do. It's called consulting."

B.t.w. on Canadian tax policy, take a look at the Canadian Tax Journal - Kevin Milligan is editing it now, and seems to be working hard on getting some interesting policy debates going there. Also the very excellent book on called something like Tax Policy in Canada put out by the Canadian Tax Foundation.

[Giovanni]

"How come Canadian academic economists don't conduct research on Canadian policy issues?" "We do. It's called consulting."

Right...but that does of course raise the musical question "Why Must Jane Taxpayer Pay Twice for the Same Damn Work?" (Unless, that is, we redefine the 40 percent or so of professorial salary supposedly compensating research effort to be a sort of retainer paid out in case we ever need the prof to do something of immediate usefulness.)

[Jack P.]

Underlying the debate is, I think, the question whether research output should increase proportionally with population (as does total quantity of teaching required, roughly speaking), or whether it is closer to a constant.

If society's teaching needs increase but research needs do not, then it is logical to substitute lecturers and PhD student instructors for professors.

@Giovanni: Actually, consulting saves Jane Taxpayer money, because it makes it easier to attract faculty in very marketable fields for less pay. In fact, having a standard, almost fixed salary across fields (often the case in Canada per faculty collective bargaining agreements), plus the possibility of consulting, is a useful alternative to US-style market-driven salaries, where some faculty earn 2x or 3x more than do faculty in other fields. Indeed consulting pay is directly related to marketability of the fields.

[Frances Woolley]

JAck P:

"Underlying the debate is, I think, the question whether research output should increase proportionally with population (as does total quantity of teaching required, roughly speaking), or whether it is closer to a constant"

That's an excellent way of framing the question. To the extent that research, especially theoretical research, scales, the answer has to be no. Put another way: One of the most important arguments for subsidizing research is that research is a public good. This means that everyone benefits from research. It also implies that we only need a limited number of studies of, say, the effectiveness of duct tape in curing warts. Once the question is answered with some degree of certainty, that's it. We don't need more studies, even if the population doubles or triples - unless there is some reason to doubt the generalizability of the original wart study to the larger population.

[Frances Woolley]

Jack P "having a standard, almost fixed salary across fields"

Are you at Concordia? That's the only Canadian university I know of that has field-specific compensating differentials stated in its collective bargaining agreement. Or perhaps MUN does too. At most universities they're negotiated on an individual basis - see my post on "the intercept is negotiable, the slope is fixed."

[Giovanni]

Frances,

You write: "...we only need a limited number of studies of, say, the effectiveness of duct tape in curing warts. Once the question is answered with some degree of certainty, that's it. We don't need more studies, even if the population doubles or triples..."

First...agreed, but it is not just about outright redundancy. Even research that is unique may be of so little social value it is not worth doing. (In this respect, I'm afraid academic economics research may have reached a zero-lower-bound equilibrium.)

Second...the dynamics of all this need to be considered. To put it in textbook terms, at any instant in every field there is a down-sloping marginal social benefit of research schedule. The policy problem is to subsidize research in each field just enough so that we remain in the vicinity of field-specific sweet-spot where marginal social benefit equals cost. But the whole thing is complicated by the fact the MSB schedules are likely to be shifting over time, largely in response to opportunities created by earlier research successes/failures (as well as exogenous factors). When this is taken into account, optimal policy might very well require increasing research subsidies in proportion to (or even faster than) growth in population or national income for a very long time.

[Bob Smith]

The point about Cage is this - the entire University system - starting with ancient Greece, is predicated on the fact that we have an intellectual elite in society who have the privilege (nay duty!) to devote their unique talent and knowledge to thinking, reflecting, criticizing on the subjects they consider deserving of their research (not, I might add, what the government of the day considers to be economically valuable.)

While, I agree that there is likely an "intellectual elite" who should "devote their unique talent and knowledge to thinking, reflecting" yada, yada, yada, I'd just question the implied assertion that "the entire University system" is made up of such people. I mean, let's face it, there's no shortage of professors at many Canadian universities who haven't contributed anything interesting to their own field, let alone to the broader society. Having them teach an extra couple of courses a year likely won't impoverish the culture, but might make keep costs down for some starving students.

Moreover, in a globalized world, it's questionable whether the "intellectual elite" are even likely to reside in Canada (present company excepted, of course) or whether they are likely to be drawn to more prestigious institutions south of the border. Let's face it, Socrates taught in Athens, he didn't set up shop in some remote country-town in Greek Sicily.