A Modest Proposal...for Saving University Research from the Budget Butcher. Occasional Paper 94-2.

Raising productivity (producing more graduates per professor at acceptable quality level) is presented as one approach to dealing with American universities' fiscal crisis. Faculty can increase classroom productivity in a way that protects and even strengthens genuine research. This approach uses the publishing industry model in funding university research and writing projects, in which an aspiring author's prospectus results in an advance to permit writing to begin, and earnings are divided by the professor and the publisher. Universities could fund all research prospectively, one project at a time, as publishers do, and require any professor whose research had not been funded to fill up the rest of his/her work schedule with teaching. All faculty would be assigned a nominal 12-course annual complement of teaching. Paid time for research would be "advanced" only for well presented and plausible projects and only to some aggregate upper limit that the university could afford. A periodic decision would be made about how much research the university could afford, and the university would decide who should get a slice and how big it should be. The intent would be to ration professors' time in a way that would most effectively preserve the university as a community devoted to learning as well as to teaching. (JDD)