Summarized by James T. P. Yao, 3 April 2000

"From a practical standpoint, research is important because … research generates dollars. Personally, it generates a significant amount of my salary. … But the university benefits financially even more than I do from this activity. Grants associated with research are a major source of total university revenue for academic programs..."

"I believe that the end of rapid growth portends good news for the American research university. It means that the American research university has a reason to change and redefine its purpose so that it is more diverse and balanced. These changes … will create a university that is, on the whole, more beneficial to students and to society."

"This book … is designed to give parents and students … a window into how an American research university currently works and how it has more or less worked for the last fifty years. The book is also designed to show how the current model, the model of the Golden Age, is an inadequate one for today, was inappropriate … for the past two or three decades, and could be relatively easily changed for the better."

"As a student, the professors that I really learned from were the ones who stretched their students. … But if we raised our standards, the students could do the work. … They might be able to enjoy a well-taught class that required them to work hard because that class would represent the expectation of the university at large."

"I feel bad that I cannot challenge the best. Imagine having an Olympics where the standard for gold medals is easily attained. … The best get a gold medal along with many others, but they never find out just how much they can achieve. … The American university could easily be a place where all students are expected to enhance their intellectual talents."

"The increased attention paid to the relative prestige of institutions has in turn placed tremendous pressure upon universities. Those already deemed prestigious feel pressure to maintain their status. Those not in the upper tier have an overriding goal to attain this status. … Whatever is gained through these efforts, however, is counterbalanced by the incredible amount of money and energy necessary to obtain and maintain the components of prestige."

"Public and private universities went through an explosive period of building during the Golden Age. What they tried to ignore is that a building not only cost money to be constructed, it also costs money to maintain. … Despite the backlog of deferred maintenance on campuses across the country, universities continue to build new structures, often in grand style. …"

"Next look at faculty. Parents, students, and university administrators want world-class scholars to inhabit prestigious institutions. World-class scholars, however, if they spend all of their time in the classroom, will not be world-class scholars for very long. … In the Golden Age, universities … competed against each other to create more time for faculty members to perform research. Elite universities cut classroom time from nine to twelve hours per week per faculty member to three to six hours per week. … And to manage all of these additional faculty, universities hired more senior and junior administrators. … "

"… Given that we have both reduced class hours and lowered our standards for student performance, students here today are working significantly less than the students of the 1960's. … Why do we require less? … If students complained that they were being made to work too hard, then faculty and administrators felt compelled to reduce the workload. Another contributing reason has its source in society's overall expectations. … Universities are simply following cultural fashion by reducing requirements."

"A reduction of workload also has a palpable benefit for professors. Making students work less means more time for a professor to perform research. … It is a change that has proved 'beneficial' to both student and professor because students are generally happy to spend more time at play."

"Faced with budgetary constraints at the end of the Golden Age, university administrators across the country began viewing departments as if they were divisions in a corporation. Academic departments were made fully aware of their balance sheets where revenues came from, the number of students taught, and the amount of grant money received. …"

"… As a result, we have created a bimodal population of students. Many are busting their butts, but others likely have more free time than any college attending generation of the twentieth century. While such a change has created greater opportunities for faculty to pursue research, it has put a great deal of pressure on universities to find nonacademic activities for its students. At Duke, we have responded to this pressure in a number of ways. For example, much effort is expended toward keeping our basketball team nationally competitive. … The vacuum has also been filled with an increasing amount of partying and general carousing. …"

"… Changes were made in campus life. The most profound of these was the curtailment of beer drinking. … This change had a major impact on student attitudes about the university. Many students complained bitterly that there was little to do on campus except go to classes and study. … The real heart of the matter is not how much students drink, but our expectations of students' academic performance. …"

"… The Golden Age of the American research university spawned the Golden Age of the graduate student. … So when a faculty member is said to be an active researcher in the sciences, it tends to mean that he or she is actively supervising and raising money for several graduate students. … It's like running a company, and the financial pressures to keep things going are constant. … There is no doubt that we need to downsize most of our graduate programs, … Graduate programs are important, but they should no longer dominate the research and teaching agenda of the American research university."

"… Many faculty members were so attuned to research that their attention to undergraduate education deteriorated. … The university was now a big business with critical day-to-day concerns about cash flow. My university was telling me to get grants or say good-bye in 1990 because grants were now a staple of the university revenue stream. …"

"… The end of the Golden Age has caused a significant drop in the acceptance rates of proposals. … It's just that during the Golden Age we produced too many Ph.D. graduates. … We are all applying for grant money. So while the pool of funding has been relatively flat, the number of people applying for funding has increased dramatically. …"

"The decline in acceptance rates has had some significant implications. First, professors hired today face the same expectations to obtain grant money as when I came in 1990. The competition for grants is too great for this to be realistic. … Second, the types of proposals that are currently being funded are conservative in scope. … The end of the Golden Age of federal funding has created financial disincentives for working on cutting-edge, high-risk problems. Third, the lower rates of success mean that faculty members have to write more proposals in a given year to pay for summer salary, research, postdocs and the occasional graduate student. …"

"Research allows me to pursue my intellectual passions. Some of my research interests are motivated by societal needs, but for the most part it is simply a pleasant coincidence that much of what I do has real world applications. … But my job requires a fair amount of juggling. There are other projects that need work, grant proposal deadlines to meet, graduate students to supervise, university committees, and department meetings to attend. …"

"It is a legacy of the Golden Age that evaluation of research productivity is partly based on counting the number of papers someone has published. Hence there is pressure to slice up research results into thin pieces, with each piece forming a research article with one thin idea. … The end result is not better science, but a further increase in the glut of papers already in scientific journals. … There is also pressure to publish results quickly. … Even with tenure, I don't dare to wait until all my work is complete before I begin to publish papers. …"

"Nowadays it's a buyers market. Universities are no longer growing, yet we continue to pump out large numbers of Ph.D. graduates. …The market is currently so highly competitive that even mediocre colleges and universities are attracting excellent faculty who potentially can both teach and perform research."

"Searching for new faculty is a process that I enjoy a great deal. It is always nice to get fresh blood into a department and it is especially nice because the quality of the post-Golden Age applicants is excellent. ... When we made decisions, I have felt confident that we have truly found valuable and impressive additions to our staff. …"

"The problem of too much competition has recently been exacerbated by the reluctance of faculty hired in the Golden Age to retire. … These retirements would create a little room for the many talented individuals nearly begging for the opportunity to become professors. …"

"It should also be noted that the Golden Age of the American research university was not the Golden Age of undergraduate teaching. … Faculty became overly focused on research funding and publishing research results. University administrators encouraged this behavior by linking tenure and promotions almost entirely to research productivity. Research universities also erred by hiring a significant number of faculty who were outstanding researchers but had little affinity for teaching. …"

"Ideally, gifts to universities are unrestricted. But most people and most corporations want a say in how their money is spent. … First, there is the question of who runs the university? If someone from outside the university gives money to enhance a particular program, they strongly influence the direction of a university and in essence, they become part owners. … The other key problem associated with private donations … is that they can compromise the integrity of the university. … Corporate grants to support specific research projects also potentially compromise university integrity. …"

"… It was the result of an accumulation of observations in which it was clear that the benefits of the research culture spawned by the Golden Age came with some serious problems. The chief problem was that it caused us to discount our effort toward undergraduate education. My own view is that the public's and corporate world's focus on undergraduate education over research is a good thing. Ultimately it may cause us to better balance our teaching and research missions. …"

"… The rewards are based on a system that strongly values individual achievement as recognized by fellow academicians at other universities. The one avenue of the job with direct societal involvement, teaching, is not considered to be all that important by the powers that be and by most fellow faculty."

"Despite the fact that women are underrepresented in the faculty and administrative workforce, the entrance of women into academia has influenced the workings of universities. … We have to create a university that is more community minded and less obsessed with the glory of the accomplishments of individual faculty members. In this different kind of university, careful teaching and interactions with students in general would be more than just encouraged. Promotions, raises in salaries would take into consideration significant involvement with students. The promotion and tenure process would have enough flexibility to allow both women and men to take extensive … leaves for having and rearing children. … If the current way we operate is so great, then where are the women?"

"In the audience of untenured faculty was someone who I came to know fairly well. He was a nice guy, loyal to the institution, who loved students. … At the end of six years of service, he was denied tenure on the grounds of insufficient quality of scholarship and insufficient quantity of research dollars. …"

"It is true that because of tenure, we probably have more deadwood than most corporations. … However, my own observations suggest that they represent a small percentage of professors. … In the first place, we have a formal annual review. Every year, I have to prepare for the department chair a document that details my teaching, research, and universities activities for the previous twelve months. … In the second place, there is strong peer pressure for faculty to be productive. A professor who is frequently absent from his office and does little research will likely be ostracized by faculty in his department. …"

"Wholesale transplanting of corporate organizational models to universities is, however, not a good idea. Universities differ from corporations in many ways. One key way is that corporations have many employees who aspire to positions of management. … University administrators across the country share many more personality traits with politicians than with corporate executives. As a group they are a strange mixture of those who have chosen administration out of a sense of duty to the institution and those driven by a personal need to be in charge. … Under a tenure-based system, the balance of power belongs to university administration, but faculty have a significant say in the running of the university. … Faculty provide a valuable filter to change. … Tenure allows faculty a small, but meaningful, role in university governance. It also allows faculty to publicly criticize universities and to suggest where changes could be made regardless of whether these changes would be popular with university administration. …"

"For me, higher education is principally about teaching students to think well independently and exposing students to the best intellectual achievements of civilization. … Over their time at the university, I want them to develop the skills to learn on their own and to understand that there is always value in learning more. …"

"Our lack of institutional effort in creating inspired undergraduate education that stretches the best and the brightest would be mitigated in a piecemeal fashion by the many professors who care about teaching undergraduates. … The Golden Age was gone for good. Perhaps we would recognize that future growth was neither necessary nor desirable."

[Readers who are interested in this book are encouraged to read the original version in its entirety. Other summary notes on faculty reward systems are available on the Internet at http://lohman.tamu.edu under the heading "Summaries of Papers ..."]

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