You don't reward your best faculty because they're your best faculty. You don't even figure out who your best faculty are until they attract offers from other schools. You make clear to faculty that intrinsic worth doesn't matter; if they want serious promotion, they have to be found worthy by other schools. Well, the peeved Pevehouse demonstrates the problem with lacking your own institutional standards of merit. You create a culture of outside-offer-mongering, which will almost certainly result in many faculty going ahead and taking the outside offers, if they're such a terrific thing as all that...The Stiglerian in me suggests that if the tradition of raiding universities that were going through a rough patch indeed was destructive, people would have invented alternatives to it. It's going on 25 years now since California-San Diego and Duke cleaned out the Wisconsin economics department. That occured during the difficult transition from near-hyperinflation to monetary restraint and the shakeout of traditional heavy industry. (The two events are not related, denunciations of Reaganomics notwithstanding.)
Perhaps, though, there is an evolution. At one time, wasn't the academician supposed to take a vow of genteel poverty and be bound by the Old School Tie? Bust up the old-boy networks and stir in a bit of business-speak and watch colleagues turn into free agents.
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