AUTISTIC NUMBER-CRUNCHING.  Cold Spring Shops has long questioned the statistical inference and policy prescriptions of Richard Vedder and his mis-named Center for College Affordability and Productivity.  He's still active, and still offering suggestions, the most recent being an analysis of the cost savings at the University of Texas at Austin if each Texas professor did the work of the average professor.  It is like averaging one horse and one rabbit.  U.S. v. Borden Co., 370 U.S. 460 (1962).

Chris Lawrence at Outside the Beltway recommends a more detailed investigation.

Texas A&M University-College Station political science professor Joseph Daniel Ura takes a look at the numbers underlying Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder’s WSJ op-ed on faculty productivity at the University of Texas’ flagship campus in Austin (discussed earlier today at OTB by James Joyner here), and finds the analysis to be deeply flawed on a number of dimensions:

The [Center for College Affordability and Productivity] report is technically accurate but substantively misleading. In particular, the CCAP provides a muddled picture of teaching at UT by describing the distribution of teaching duties for the university’s entire faculty together, lumping together data on full-time faculty with data on part-time faculty and data from graduate colleges and programs with data from colleges and programs that mainly serve undergraduates. As a result, the CCAP report creates a false impression of inequity in the assignment of teaching duties at UT and overstates the feasibility of reducing faculty costs without undermining the quality of UT’s academic programs.

That's what generally happens when you average one horse and one rabbit. Perhaps there's a less sympathetic interpretation for what Professor Vedder is doing than the one Professor Lawrence offers.

The sad irony of this whole issue is that Vedder, as a tenured faculty member at a research-oriented university, should know better than to produce a slipshod report, but apparently is so blinded by his animus toward his own university’s redirection away from a teaching-oriented mission over the past decades to that of an emerging research university—the sort of redirection that is necessary to attract and retain world-class faculty in this day and age—that he is willing to undermine his own broader argument about the prioritization of minor, incremental research over teaching (which, like James, I share some sympathy with) by advancing a weak analysis that is an easy target for criticism from within the ivory tower.

Or perhaps Ohio's change in emphasis meant less recognition for autistic number-crunching in archival journals?