7/12/2011: From the Texas Tribune. Motivated by the debate about measuring faculty productivity. Hamermesh is a labor economist at UT, Riley is the author of “The Faulty Lounges“. The clip is mostly about tenure. “The Hammer”, as he occasionally tries to get his colleagues to nickname him, has no hesitancy putting the blame for the current sad state of academia on the taxpayers and lazy administrators. Riley blames it on the emphasis on research.
Naomi Riley — poor little Harvard grad — discovers the evils of tenure, the wretchedness of American higher education. There are legions of them on the right these days — John Stossel (BA Princeton); Richard Vedder (retired chaired professor of economics); Thomas Sowell (Harvard, Columbia, Chicago Ph.D., retired from UCLA at 50; off to the salt mine of the Hoover Institution); Victor D. Hanson (ditto at 50 from Cal State Fresno, ditto on Hoover) — the list goes on and on.
We had our own example here in the last congressional election — Art Robinson, Caltech and UCSD, quite full professorship at UCSD, various private institutes — he is against government science funding — but has 3 kids studying nuclear engineering at OSU!
And they wonder why there are so few conservatives and Republicans in academia.