In Praise of the 4-4 Load

My recent article “A Roadmap to Take Back Higher Education” got a mixed reaction from tradition-minded professors. They liked the general framework of the scale of the problem facing the humanities, the suggestion to support the new autonomous schools being developed rather than individual professors, and the suggestion that philanthropists dedicate large-scale grants for these schools. They didn’t like my suggestion that philanthropists need to focus on supporting teaching, not research: If [philanthropists] fund professors with 2-2 teaching loads and a half-dozen worthy books to their credit, they will have wasted their money. Their dollars will be far more effective...