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by crcarlson
5760 days ago
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One traditional way of dealing with this issue is to have a mandatory retirement age. Pre-tenure and usually pre-full professors usually do a good job of hustling for money and growing the university. And after attaining full titles the inertia of their work carries them for a while. Then some go on to continue being research (money) making machines and others start to milk it. Mandatory retirement makes room for more ambitious younger professors to bring in more work. Running a research lab at a university is a lot like running a startup. I believe the professors should get to enjoy the fruits of being successful early in their career later on after being tenured. Otherwise there would be no incentive for these guys to make the personal sacrifices required to do great work above and beyond what an 8-5er might do. It seems like a half way decent financial model and an intelligent management of investments should be able to continue to make a system like this successful. The current focus on tenure as the problem is more of a reaction to poor financial planning by the endowment managers IMO. In sports the ultimate prevention against doping (if someone wanted to prevent such a thing) would be to test frozen samples every year for say 20 years with progressively more modern technology and threaten to retroactively remove trophies or awards of those discovered to be clever cheaters. I wonder if there is a similar analog for financial institution managers where one would place their compensation in reserve and only dole it out based upon proper risk management behavior (as well as returns) as proven out by future events. |
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My guess is that universities would also find themselves having to replace that incentive with monetary incentives, at least in areas where industry options exist. Universities currently get away with paying below industry rates partly because of the lure of research freedom: once you're tenured, you get complete freedom to define your research agenda (well, universities still have a lot of levers they can use to put pressure, but it's at least relatively large freedom). But if you're never going to get to that point, and have to continually justify your research in light of current grant opportunities, what's hot versus out of favor in various fields, how much your output was this year, etc., you don't necessarily have more freedom than you'd have at an industrial research lab. So I think universities would find it harder to attract researchers unless they started paying salaries on par with industry research positions, which may not make abolishing tenure a net money saver.