The Pope Center has just published a discussion featuring four economists on the question “does the obligation to produce research get in the way of good teaching?” You can read it here.
My view is that in a sensible world, professors would be paid mainly to teach and research would be funded by parties who felt that the prof’s work would be sufficiently valuable to be worth supporting. Mandatory research usually leads to blathery articles that do nothing to advance knowledge, but merely fill up space.
