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New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, New York  10036
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Book Review Editors;

	Roger Kimball's Feb 19 review of Profscam by Charles
Sykes ignores some important considerations that justify the
research university.  Professors like me mostly do research, and
that's what we are paid for.  About a quarter of my time 
goes into teaching, and I get about a quarter of my pay for
doing it.  Now ask why I would want to teach part time, why
Stanford University would want to hire people who mostly do
research and why graduate and undergraduate students would want
to come to a university where the professors divide their time
in that way.  In each case there are alternatives.

	I could get a pure research job or a pure teaching job.
There are plenty of colleges where graduate study isn't done, and
Stanford could have gone in that direction.  Students also have a
choice between liberal arts colleges and universities.  All the
variants flourish.

	I chose a university career, because getting research
contracts and grants from a variety of sources provides the
best opportunity to choose my own direction of research.  Since
World War II, America has consistently been the first country to pioneer
most new fields including my field of artificial intelligence.
The grant and contract system has made this possible.  While
companies pay more than universities, getting projects started
requires lobbying management and producing quick payoffs.
Professors working with graduate students combine fresh minds
and experience.

	Stanford is a research university, because it values
both research and teaching, and because they go well together,
though not without friction.  Research implements the collective
curiosity of humanity, whether this curiosity be about the
properties of numbers, the possibilities of computation,
the composition of the stars, the behavior of politicians
and journalists or why Shakespeare and Aristotle did what
they did.  Curiosity has practical payoffs too.

	Why are research universities popular with students?
Obviously if you want the latest information about anything,
you have to go where discoveries are being made.
If a student only wants to learn standard material
taught in standard ways by people whose own curiosity
is entirely satisfied by reading discoveries by others,
I wouldn't be surprised if he can do better elsewhere.

	Tenure in research universities is mainly granted
on the basis of outside evaluations of the quality of published
research.  The outside reviewers put a lot of effort into
these evaluations, and they would not do it for five year
appointment renewals.  Elimination of
formal tenure might result in effective instant tenure;
a university not faced by a tenure decision would often
procrastinate, hoping that the person would
do better next year.  This is what happens in nonacademic
research institutions.  It would also intensify internal power
struggles and make universities more hierarchical, i.e.
make them more like corporations and government agencies.

	There are two problems.  First, individual dedication
to research is more nearly universal in the sciences than in
the humanities.  The research university took its model from
the sciences.  Apparently many scholars in humanities do not
value the research they do and the resulting publications.  I
don't know what to do about that.  Maybe different terms of
employment should be developed for humanist scholars.  However,
other humanists do value their research.

	Second, it needs to be recognized that the interests
of research and undergraduate education are not identical,
even though most university presidents find that saying so
leads to the most peace on campus.  Some friction is inevitable,
and there have to be compromises.

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Sincerely
John McCarthy
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