THE END OF FREE AGENCY.  Although resource allocation decisions occur at the margin, the inframarginal traders benefit by the price movements.

Professors who published a lot gained the opportunity to move from one institution to another. As we all know, however, in the zero-sum game of academic workloads, an increased emphasis on publishing has meant a decreased emphasis on institutional service and teaching. That's because research is global, while "teaching and service are profoundly local," noted Grafton.

That game of musical chairs suddenly stopped in the 1970s. The economy tightened, the production of doctoral degrees outran undergraduate enrollments in history, and the straitened contours of the modern academic job market quickly took shape.

But the game didn't stop for everyone. Some senior faculty members could still move if they gained enough distinction—and they didn't need to attain the reputation of a Gates, either. Elite institutions continued to hire at the senior level, and so did many other large universities. A faculty member who wanted a change of scenery or to move to a university higher up the food chain could, albeit with difficulty, write himself (or herself now) out of one job and into another. That is the central feature of the star system: free agency for professors.

The standards of the star system have rippled across all departments and all institutions. Even colleges that don't hire at the senior level may lose faculty members to those that do. Faculty mobility, Grafton pointed out to me, is "an ecology," a system in which disruptions at one level cause changes throughout—like higher salaries for everyone. The norms of the star system have consequently penetrated all of academic culture, and the universal currency of publishing has gained in value everywhere. I'm not sure when the phrase "my own work"—used to describe one's publishing agenda, as opposed to one's teaching or service—arose, but it's certainly of relatively recent vintage.

Will the balance between department and discipline reverse if tenured-faculty movement stops? If they no longer have a chance to move elsewhere, will professors go back to identifying with their home departments instead of their discipline writ large?

First of all, star-faculty movement won't stop entirely. Field-defining intellectuals like Judith Butler—who is being courted by Columbia University and will soon leave the University of California at Berkeley for a visiting appointment there—will always be able to move. And as long as demand for diversity exceeds the number of faculty members who belong to racial and ethnic minority groups, those professors will retain mobility as well.

The exceptions notwithstanding, academic mobility has surely decreased, and it shows no signs of resuming. So again, will the loss of movement change professors' priorities?

Not very likely, and economics is the reason. The intramural gold standard remains publication. One need not be a published economist to conclude that if most raises are awarded for publication, then most professors will direct their energies toward publishing. And the entire academic value system is built around publication: All of those vexed ranking systems that everyone complains about, but that everyone looks at anyway, measure faculty value mostly through publication and citation records. Publication is still the attainment that is most easily understood across institutional borders—and within them.

Perhaps those attempts by administrators to measure other dimensions of productivity will work against them. What is to prevent a professor who grades out favorably on one of those Texas-style spreadsheets from negotiating with a department someplace else on the basis of his or her potential contribution to the spreadsheet of the department being negotiated with?  If you can measure it, you can value it, and if you can value it, you can trade it.