FIND THE MISSING MARKET. Wisconsin historian and Minding the Campus columnist John F. Witte, in the course of making a case against system- or state-wide unionization of faculty, recognizes an arbitrage opportunity the universities down the pecking order haven't acted on.

Public university systems contain a range of campuses that are not at all equal. The major difference is the research component. Four-year, non-Ph.D. granting campuses may well engage in research activities and writing, but the expectations, time available, and access to funds is much reduced over the Ph.D. research campuses like UW-Madison. Two-year campuses would have even lower expectations. Further, schools and departments across campuses vary considerably in prestige and certainly pay. Medical, business and law schools have often three times the average salaries of those in the humanities, with sciences and social sciences (led by economics) in the middle. There is also considerable variance within departments, at least at major research campuses where rewards are based on differences in teaching quality, but more importantly in research productivity. Difference within campuses and departments are primarily affected by external markets for skills and quality research and internal markets based on beliefs in merit.

Teaching loads at research universities are commonly at 2 and 2: two courses of 15 to 16 weeks in each semester. That comes out to about 6.5 certain contact hours per week (150 minutes/course plus 90 minutes of office hours). If the load is 3 and 3 (on non-research campuses) add in another 2.5 hours for 9.0. Obviously there are other time commitments involved, such as preparation, grading or supervising teaching assistants. But without research, and the mentoring of graduate students that research entails, undergraduate teaching rarely comes close to a 40-hour week.

Finally, tenure standards are inherently and rightly different for different types of campuses. At Madison, approximately 50% of those hired as assistant professors ultimately receive tenure. No other work sector in the world fires as many people as American research universities. And the reason remains valid - university tenure means essentially lifetime employment and we simply cannot afford to make a mistake and end up with individuals who do little research. Thus if you believe in the ultimate value of university research, as I do, tenure practices must be protected at all costs.

Leave aside the truth, or not, about the propensity of other employers to fire people (investment bankers on the rank and yank track might be able to refute his claim with some evidence). Focus on the conclusion of that first paragraph. External markets for faculty, and for grants, and internal markets (within disciplines?) based on merit. There is also an external market for enrollment, whether it's driven by prestige or signalling or a flight to quality, and its presence, along with the excess demand for those degrees (a regular theme at Cold Spring Shops) is an incentive for some of those four-year, non-flagship institutions in a state to become more like the flagships. Whether a more uniform academic profile is an inducement to unionization or not is left to others as a project.