REWRITING THE JOB DESCRIPTION. Blogs for Industry offers a different perspective on student dissatisfaction with the Harvard economics major.

This is indeed the case, if and only if the relevant ratio is students taking economics courses divided by total econ faculty, independent of how much actual teaching the faculty do. It seems unlikely to me that student satisfaction would be increased by, say, hiring 10 new econ profs who did not teach at all, or that undergraduate satisfaction would be significantly increased by hiring new faculty who only taught graduate seminar classes.

Perhaps Mankiw is holding faculty workload constant based on the idea that it is unrealistic for Harvard to renegotiate its work rules for its faculty. After all, there were some who said that this was the faculty's real problem with Larry Summers. But don't we expect rising productivity out of other segments of the economy?

To repeat: it comes down to the measure of productivity. On one hand, Harvard could add a junior seminar to the job description of each faculty member. On the other hand, new hires (who, if they're on a tenure track, already expect to be denied tenure but grasp the opportunity to do some good research) might be less willing to take Harvard's jobs; currently tenured faculty might be bid away more rapidly (yes, the bidding war Columbia and Harvard got into for Robert Barro might have epitomized the positional arms race bubble, but there's still prestige to accumulate.) Or, if Harvard did what a lot of other universities have been doing, and hired Professors of the Practice of Economics or temporary faculty not so cleverly titled for the junior seminars, perhaps the trustafarians would call Harvard out on that. (In my experience, the person who is in the front of the class is "professor" to the students, irrespective of that person's actual job title, contract status, or eligibility for health benefits. Northern Illinois has run advertisements bragging on research faculty who teach undergraduates.)

But to ask faculty, contract status or rank notwithstanding, to meet a junior seminar and put the kind of time on task such a project calls for is to ask that person to do less of something else: research, attending committee meetings, having a life. To say "productivity" without spelling out the metrics and recognizing the tradeoffs doesn't help much.

(If I'm sounding cranky, it's with reason. When I hired out here I discovered that one person was doing what two people would do at other economics departments, and that figure has now risen to three. I'm tired. And it still takes as long to get through a bluebook as it did before computers and the internet. There are 46 on the dining room table at the moment. Sure, I could work through 60 or 100, and some REMF could hail the productivity, but I can't guarantee they'd be evaluated as accurately.)

Faculty also have the option of putting more explicit terms of work in their contracts. University Diaries has a story of a University of Florida professor whose appointment letter that stipulated how many courses she would teach in a semester. A dean, claiming fiscal difficulties, has unilaterally increased that number. It has gone to arbitration. The ensuing bull session only makes me crankier, as apparently the highest-regarded economics departments regularly ask their hires to teach one course a semester, and many of the flagships ask three courses an academic year of their economists. And our administrators act surprised when people we offer the opportunity to teach five courses an academic year while doing research and working with Ph.D. students turn us down.

It doesn't help my mood any when I consider that making such specific requests as part of a startup package would have appeared rude or unseemly years ago.