A former engineer and untenured professor, who prefers to go unnamed, has responded to my posting Parachutes and Ratings, which supports linking compensation in academe to performance. In the following email he correctly observes the need also to link publicly funded academic research to the good it produces for the public:

While I would acknowledge the effort put into academic publishing, does it not frequently consist it so much one-sided, politicized, navel-gazing, especially in the “soft” disciplines? That is, can you imagine an objective, fair article on “faith-based,” i.e., unscientific social work in the mainstream, Democrat-controlled sociology journals? Or a cold, hard and balanced view of public education in the education journals? What is needed is serious consideration of what real, authentic public benefits have been derived from taxpayer-supported academia, notably the benefits that result from grants from the National Science Foundation and NAS. Producing theoretical research of interest to only theoreticians does NOT benefit the public. As a former engineer, I am hard-pressed to think of any lab in the world – commercial or otherwise — where researchers are given carte blanche to intellectually wander where they want. Rather, there has to be some positive outcome. To think otherwise is to live in some world of delusion. If that is the world some academics want, let them fund their own useless research. Taxpayers do NOT want to fund pipe dreams.