One way in which professors — tenured ones, anyway — have benefited from the great expansion of higher education is in the reduction of their teaching obligations. Back in 1993, Thomas Sowell commented on that in his book Inside American Education: “This research is paid for not only by faculty grants but also by reduced teaching loads — which is to say, by hiring far more professors than were required before to teach the same number of courses.” Many taxpayers are amazed at how little time many professors devote to the classroom, and it seems that college and university officials are concerned about that. They’re concerned enough to use misleading data when they report how many courses their faculty teach. That is the point of Jenna Ashley Robinson’s Pope Center Clarion Call this week. When queried on this, some of the UNC institutions provided misleading if not downright false information.

What is the optimal balance between teaching and research (assuming that non-teaching time is really devoted to research, which isn’t always the case)? Some profs only teach, such as Dirk Mateer at Penn State explained in this piece. Others do very little teaching, sometimes just one course per semester. If teaching loads reflected comparative advantage, the variation would make sense. To some extent they do, but that is often not the case since some professors who enjoy low teaching loads produce little research that is of any value. My surmise is that the loss to the world of good research that never gets done because a professor is too busy teaching is very slight (if an idea is truly worth investigating and writing about, a scholar will find the time to do it), while the loss because professors who would be good teachers are spending too much time working on obligatory but pointless research is far larger.