MARKET TESTS AND COMPENSATING DIFFERENTIALS.   Illinois-Chicago professor emeritus David Rubinstein recently thanked the taxpayers for his cushy life.  The Weekly Standard ran his article, and National Public Radio picked it up, and the comments at both sites might be as you would expect.  (Charlie Sykes also picked it up, suggested it was Profscam material.)

At Minding the Campus, Charlotte Allen does some deeper reading.

Rubinstein never said that he hadn't worked hard or with "passion." He simply said that he was paid by UIC mostly for doing something that he enjoyed doing anyway: reading and writing about topics of interest to him. Indeed, had any of the NPR commenters bothered to check instead of fulminate, they would have discovered that he can boast an impressive record of scholarship. Besides a major book titled "Marx and Wittgenstein: Social Science and Social Praxis," he has published numerous other books and essays about social theory, that is, the way sociologists think. Rubinstein's point was that worthy as those topics might be, they represented "exquisitely esoteric interests" that did "not match the educational needs of students" and perhaps should not be "supported by taxpayers."

There's nothing wrong with finding a line of work that's fun; the resulting work is better. And if Professor Rubinstein is able to strengthen his students' understanding of social theory without turning all his course outlines into reprints of his c.v., that's part of the job.  Perhaps Marx and Wittgenstein are too recondite for the current introductory course; once upon a time that was the case for supply and demand diagrams.  Illinois-Chicago is, as regular readers know, in the same business as Harvard or Wisconsin.

The point of Rubinstein's Weekly Standard piece was to ask whether states and their taxpayers ought to be in the business of funding expensive research universities and equally expensive research-university culture. The lifestyle that Rubinstein described—and which, as I can attest from the people I know who teach at top-tier universities—is indeed an easy one in terms of teaching responsibilities, because it is a lifestyle centered around scholarship. While some of that scholarship, especially in the ideology-polluted humanities, is worthless, much of it is not; it's simply too "esoteric" (to borrow Rubinstein's adjective) to be considered of interest, much less of value, by most ordinary people. Marx? Wittgenstein? Important thinkers both, but who should be paying for scholars to spend more of their time analyzing them—and attending conferences abroad listening to other scholars analyze them—than they spend teaching the offspring of the taxpayers who fund their salaries. At elite and well-endowed private research universities—Harvard, Notre Dame, Emory—the answer is easy. Those institutions are willing to pay to subsidize scholarship and its attendant generous perks alongside teaching, and they have the donor funds to do so. So, yes, the professors complain incessantly if they must grade exams themselves (the horror!), and they gallivant hither and yon to deliver conference papers. At state-subsidized universities—Illinois, the University of California system, the University of Wisconsin-Madison—that have ambitions to retain top-tier reputations for research, but whose endowments are typically far less generous, the answer is not so easy.

It's not about answers, it's about tradeoffs. Do the state university systems of Illinois or Wisconsin or California or Michigan wish to offer their residents a shot at developing their intellectual potential, or not?  Do they wish to subsidize that development, regressive transfer notwithstanding, or should the beneficiary bear the burden?  Or is the best strategy to go after well-off students from other states, making their payroll on the difference between tuition based on fully allocated costs and the discounted price from the Ivies?  That is, if they can make their payroll ... as long as well-endowed universities are bidding for star faculty, ambitious faculty at state institutions are going to participate in that bidding, calls to sacrifice for the common good notwithstanding.  (You'd search long and hard to find any faculty sympathetic to Ayn Rand's politics, but the Sign of the Dollar trumps ideology every day, and particularly after 20 years of retrenchments.)

Rubinstein was writing about life at the privileged top of the academic ziggurat Professors at many second- and third-tier, open-admissions "comprehensive" public universities (say, Chicago State in contrast to the University of Illinois-Chicago) consider it normative to teach a "4-4" load (four courses per semester), often to hundreds of students in each class, and to garner a few hundred dollars from their departments to attend a single academic conference per year (usually right here in the United States, not on Lake Como). Graduate seminars? Many count themselves lucky to teach an occasional specialized upper-division course that has something to do with the research they did for their doctoral dissertations ever so long ago. Professors at small liberal-arts colleges often don't have it much better, and they sometimes have it worse. The question that Rubinstein raised in his piece was: To what extent should public universities—funded by the hard-earned dollars of the residents of the states where they are located—try to compete with top-tier private universities with vast private resources in either research ambitions or in subsidizing the research-centered lifestyles of their faculty?       

Is the Chicago State model really what the public research universities ought aspire to?  Yes, Chicago State faculty spend a lot more of their week in the classroom, but to what end?  It's not the David Rubinsteins who are responsible for the low estate of public higher education, it is those open-admissions comprehensive dropout factories.