Burried in the Glymour bruhaha, Michael Kremer raises important questions: "Glymour claims that his department rakes in the grant money while teaching "the traditional subject" effectively to undergraduates. One might ask: "How?" Well, one factor is this: CMU has a two-tiered tenure-track system, with the usual ranks of "Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor" and also "Assistant Teaching Professor," "Associate Teaching Professor," and "Teaching Professor." From what can be seen on the CMU website, faculty at this second set of ranks have higher teaching loads, and carry a proportionately higher share of the teaching of the "traditional subject." I don’t quite know what to think of the institution of "teaching faculty" -- as distinguished, presumably, from "research faculty." In some ways it seems preferable to widespread use of adjuncts -- I take it the "teaching professors" at CMU have full-time employment, benefits, and tenure. At the same time I am guessing they are paid less than their grant-winning colleagues. Is a two-tiered system within the tenured professoriate a good thing? The lesser of two evils? Is giving over a good deal of the teaching of "the traditional subject" into the hands of "teaching" (i.e. non-research) faculty a good thing on balance? These are anyway interesting questions to discuss, it seems to me."
In some parts of the world the future is now; I am a "research professor" and I spend a few months each year writing and helping other folk write grants (most of these are either from Flemish Governmental or EU funding sources, but I also write grants to private foundations in the Anglophone world). One of these grants covers my own position and several others my six PhD students. (In fact, it looks like single-handedly I administer total grants roughly worth a year's worth of grant-getting at the CMU Philosophy department!) To give you a sense of the scope of the grant-writing: in my department we are about 14 FT tenured faculty (covered by student fees, etc), and about 65 additional people are on soft grant-money (this covers mostly PhDs and Post-Docs). (See Eric Schwitzgabel's critical remarks here.)
It is undeniable that the grant-system (which is becoming more widespread in Europe) accelerates the move toward a division of labor in which some folk focus on teaching and other folk focus on sponsored research. (Having said that, in our system even very successful grant-writers can have quite heavy nominal teaching loads.) The system is accompanied by an increasing emphasis on objective scientific metrics (i.e., publishing in high impact and indexed journals) and evidence that one's research can be 'valorized' outside one's sub-discipline. Applied ethics does very well in such an environment. In the coming calendar year I will blog more about some of the benefits and dangers of this system.
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