QUESTIONING THE GERMAN MODEL. George Leef of the Pope Center suggests that academic research is a smoke-screen to conceal pleasant make-work.

Behind the policy of giving professors light teaching loads so they’ll have time for research is the assumption that they’re all brimming with original thinking that will expand society’s knowledge base. They just need the time to do the research and writing. That assumption, however, is mistaken, on two counts. First, many professors don’t have any important contributions to make. As Dean Edward Morris writes in The Lindenwood Model (which I reviewed here), we have “too much research chasing too few good ideas.” Most academic research is remarkably trivial and is done not to expand knowledge but merely because it’s necessary for tenure and promotion.

The second count is that it is possible for a professor to teach a full load of classes and still find time to do research. Under those conditions, the research is sure to be work that he or she really thinks is important. A good example is Hillsdale College history professor Burton Folsom, who has written several books, most recently a startling re-examination of FDR’s policies, New Deal or Raw Deal, despite the fact that he teaches three courses per semester.

While the price tag for a college education has been going up rapidly, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the reasons why costs keep skyrocketing. Instead, most policymakers have been wringing their hands over ways to tap into more public money to help offset those rising costs. O’Donnell’s paper suggests that they ought to be looking at the research model’s impact on costs. Education is labor-intensive and most schools are employing far more professors than necessary to teach the undergraduates. Let’s not prop up that inefficient model with increased public subsidization.

His article summarizes a Texas Public Policy Foundation position paper that questions the value of using tax money for research universities. It raises all the usual objections: the research professors teach only small seminars, most of the research is pointless, the graduate students are doing all the teaching and the laboratory scutwork, not developing their own research skills (I suppose it's churlish to point out that it's hard to question both a research emphasis and a neglect of research skills and keep a straight face), the senior professors aren't doing enough research (I suppose it's churlish to point out that the committee work that displaces research time is often work preparing reports requested by the public officials who think quantification is equivalent to accountability), and the cost of providing a degree is higher as a consequence of all that time going to efforts other than teaching.

But toward the beginning of the report comes this.

The most prestigious universities selectively admit smart students, so they produce smart graduates, but too often add little value in between.

And your solution is? Require the smart students to attend universities that don't have research prestige? They already have that option. Regular readers know why they don't exercise it.

That noted, I want to alert readers to a passage in the initial issue of the American Economic Association's new American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

First, the editorial process has become too slow. It typically takes several months to get a fiirst decision on a manuscript, but since most papers are being rejected, it means that it can take years for a paper to be published. Second, the revision process is often protracted, with multiple rounds of revisions: it adds to the time until publication, and while it sometimes improves a paper's exposition, the improvements are not always necessarily worth the time it takes to both authors and referees. Third, in part because of the first two reasons, those who do not need official stamps of approval publish much less in journals, particularly outside the "top five". This reduces the value of the journals as stamps of approval.

Perhaps there's reason to reconsider the nature of scholarship. It's not pure waste: the world continues to offer new challenges that old models don't necessarily understand. It's not pure gain: that the process frustrates participants who could benefit from having their work available to others suggests possible efficiency improvements.