"Putting a Price on Professors" (Review, Oct. 23) is an interesting idea that certainly appeals to popular sentiment but which, like most overly simplistic remedies, isn't enough to make things better.
I am not an academic, but I do understand that the power of the American university system is precisely that it doesn't require a well-defined quid pro quo. It is the only space where new ideas and knowledge can be encouraged, explored, debated and developed without the requirement that a predictable profit be generated. Where else can truly revolutionary ideas come from? The struggle to find balance between pure and applied research isn't new and no simple idea, such as a spreadsheet, is likely to ease that struggle. It will simply push the balance more toward the applied. How could demanding predictable productivity and revenue from university professors not stifle scholarly research?
As a parent with two daughters in college and a third preparing to go, I, too, am dismayed by the cost of an American university education. I believe the cost has increased at such a high rate over the last 30 years because of landscaping, food courts and lavish building programs. As a society, we've simply acquiesced to the kids' desire to go to school at luxury resorts. "Putting a price on professors" won't fix that problem.
Hank Wohltjen
Bowling Green, Ky.
Using the stated criteria for faculty members, it would be enlightening to learn how the football coach at Texas A&M would stack up if his annual salary was weighted against the number of students taught, tuition generated and research grants obtained.
David Roll
Granbury, Texas
Like business owners, the taxpayer owners of public university systems have a right to know what their funds are buying and the extent to which the money contributes to the government's goals for higher education. The Texas A&M project should be closely watched and possibly imitated.
Jane S. Shaw
President
John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy
Raleigh, N.C.
Professors do make some original contributions to our store of knowledge, usually in the sciences, but all too often all we hear about are expensive investigations of the already known.
Faculty bristle at any suggestion that they are employees in a business enterprise, workers with a product to sell, customers to please and a bottom line to consider. But maybe they should relent and accept their corporate destiny, which would include a public-relations department to get their story out. As your story illustrates, however, it's hard to know what the story might be.
Edward Stephens
Syracuse, N.Y.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 