Duke professor Dan Ariely is engaged in research on attitudes towards sex toys and according to this N&O story a few people are upset.
This reinforces my view that faculty research ought to be put on a free-market footing. That is, the norm should be a full teaching load (let’s say 12 hours, although, and speaking from experience, it’s not hard to do more), but if a professor can get sufficient outside funding for a research project to buy a reduced teaching load, fine.
That would lead to far less waste than the prevailing system, which has a low teaching norm and assumes that professors will devote their time to useful research. What we get from that is a lot of research done just for the sake of publishing. We should put academic research to the test of the market: Will people voluntarily pay for it?
