A colleague at SUNY has alerted me to some inaccurate information I included in this posting of May 10.
My concern therein was to highlight the widespread lack of an appropriate link between campus executives’ often hefty compensation and the performance of units within their campuses. As evidence I cited a letter from a SUNY-University at Buffalo professor, published in the UB Reporter, who complained about lack of academic progress in his own unit. Upon closer inspection of the evidence, however, I realize that I have chosen the wrong department for criticism.
The letter from the UB professor cited an unpublished survey authored by an economics Ph.D. student in Australia, which ranks economics departments around the world on the basis of their faculties’ total number of publications in major refereed journals over a 10-year period (1993-2003).
Such ranking is determined significantly by the total number of faculty resources, so an economics department that has over 30 faculty members on board (like Iowa State, Michigan State, Penn State, and Rutgers) has a much greater chance to be ranked higher than a department with merely 10 faculty, regardless of individual faculty productivity. That the UB Economics Department was reduced dramatically in size over most of the 1990s affected its total publications over the survey’s period relative to peer institutions, which maintained, and even grew, their faculty resources.
Inspection of the data used in the Australian survey reveals, furthermore, a very different picture about individual research productivity. In fact, the UB Economics Department has a number of professors who rank significantly higher in the survey’s tally than their peers around the world. So a ranking based on the average number of publications per member
would show a much higher ranking for the department.
Recent developments in the department are even more impressive. A NYSTAR faculty development grant of $750,000 with matching funds from the university, was recently
been awarded to one of the department’s professors. It has already helped launch a Center of Excellence on Human Capital, Technology Transfer and Economic Growth and Development – cutting edge topics in economics.
According to a UB News Release, “The interdisciplinary center will bring together experts in diverse fields ranging from economics and econometrics to human and venture capital to study how economies make the transition to high-tech and biotech economies. The center also will focus on how the knowledge generated by basic science, patents and algorithms is transformed into commercial process and product innovations.”
The UB Economics Department and SUNY in fact deserve to be commended for leadership in these scientific innovations which support private enterprise and make our country the most technologically advanced and economically prosperous country in the world. Economic science can contribute important insights about the way we can maintain our lead.