alek0

Yup, research/teaching/administration. Could understand the first two, but for the last one there are really so many things which administrative staff could handle. Why should someone who has to teach, supervise postgrads, do research, submit project proposals (since you can't survive without external funding) etc. in addition have to do this all important work which is definitely requoring a PhD like making a timetable? Blech.

And about what Splat said - definitely right.
And research performance of a person is not judged only on number of publications and impact factors of journals, number of citations also counts. Useless things get forgotten or disproven. Just look at the case of Schoen from Bell Labs. I just feel so sorry for his coauthors...Story is available on American Institute of Physics page.
<a href="http://www.aip.org/" target="_blank">http://www.aip.org/</a>

Steven S

Sokal's paper would have been ignored most likely.
Being torn apart would have been less likely to happen--in this page
<a href="http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html" target="_blank">http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/noretta.html</a>
Sokal argues that the peer review process in the field of cultural studies was such that a great deal of papers were published where the authors misunderstood the science they are writing about.

Arrowman

* shrug * You tell me. But (in my experience) try taking away responsibility for timetabling, allocation of teaching space, determination of office IT strategies, etc, etc.... In the minds of some academics, every one of these is rightly their domain and not to be trusted to administrative staff with only a Bachelor's degree if they have any qualification whatsoever. Oh, but they still have workload problems which detract from their core activities...

alek0

I guess for those who are tenured and don't do any more research, administrative work is of great importance... Blech. New staff are typically hired on renewable contract basis, if you don't bring in the money you are out.
Only the form for project proposal is 30 pages long, not counting supporting information (CVs, list of all previous projects with abstracts, list of publications for each of those, and so on for PI and all Co-Is). Administration? Certainly on the top of my list of priorities....

Shadowy Man

It's the administrative side of professorship that is swaying me away from thinking about being a professor.

We'll just see how long I can live on soft money.

Ernest Sparks

'Research' includes publication, and along with this and 'grant count', add 'advancing the fame of the institution'.

alek0

And "lasting impact" and "benefits to &lt;insert place&gt;". Blech.