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There are important issues around diversity -- notably in terms of ethnicity/race, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation and gender -- that have been of concern to institutions of higher education for a while now. The progress made in these areas may be less than impressive, but they have a conspicuous place on our radar screens.

There is another dimension of diversity that has yet to attract the attention it deserves: the diversity of contributions that can be made by different members of an institution’s tenured and tenure-track faculty. Faculty members in these positions are pivotal to fostering the kind of change needed in our colleges and universities if we are to better serve our students. Such change would involve how faculty members judge one another, how departments view their responsibilities, how those responsibilities can best be fulfilled and how the work of faculty members is viewed by academic administrators.

Different institutions have different missions, which should be reflected in what is reasonably expected of their respective faculties. These differences have unfortunately been eroded by status-seeking mission creep. So, for openers, there is the famous advice of Polonius (who has received insufficient respect for his wisdom, probably because he conveyed it in a way that was boring to a younger person): “To thine own self be true.”

While it may seem obvious that a one-size-fits-all approach is inappropriate and undesirable for institutions with different missions and constituencies, it may also be undesirable within an institution as well, even if that institution is a research university. While the holy trinity of research, teaching and service on the face of it provides room for flexibility, differences in how each is valued and assessed yield a generally hierarchical structure with publication and attracting grant funds being the coin of the realm and relatively easy to quantify.

But even in research universities, not all members of a department need to balance their research and teaching contributions in exactly the same proportions. Moreover, one faculty member in his/her time plays many roles -- there may be times in between research projects in which a faculty member might wish to focus more on teaching. (As an aside: the pressure to publish as much and as quickly as possible seems clearly linked to the level of retractions we have been seeing on the part of major scientific and scholarly journals when major research flaws are revealed postpublication.)

A better solution would be an understanding -- reflected in the reward structure -- that not every member of a department needs to make precisely the same contribution to the department in meeting its goals and responsibilities. Crafting such a reward structure is something that the New American Colleges and Universities consortium, for example, has been working on with funding from the Teagle Foundation.

To be sure, one expects that departments in research universities would have a sufficiently strong complement of truly distinguished scholars and scientists who are making significant contributions to the knowledge base in their fields, including some who may not be God’s gift to teaching. Fortunately, many highly distinguished scientists and scholars are also superb teachers. But there should also be room for faculty members whose teaching outdistances their research. If research universities presume to educate undergraduates, they need to consider how well they are fulfilling that responsibility. They should also feel an obligation to prepare their graduate students for occupying positions at a wide range of institutions of higher education; that is, they should be preparing graduate students seeking an academic career for their work not only as researchers, but as teachers.

There have been proposals for a separate track for faculty members who would focus on teaching, as opposed to research. This, however, is a solution that is part of the problem, since it will almost certainly perpetuate a culture of relative disdain for teaching, along with a tendency for teaching-focused appointments to be non-tenure-track. While there is a place for continuing appointments off the tenure track, viewing teaching in general as something unworthy of tenure would be unfortunate both in terms of institutional culture and how universities are viewed by the public.

It would also be desirable to recognize and reward those faculty members who have a special flair for sharing significant results of science and scholarship with a wide audience of readers -- beyond even The New York Review of Books. We already have an admirable complement of public intellectuals who earn their high position in the academic food chain by the traditional measure of research excellence -- though we could always use more of them. In addition, there are those whose contributions to public enlightenment might in and of themselves merit reward beyond what the current system offers.

Barriers to achieving a more informed citizenry may seem daunting, even at times insurmountable, especially when one figures in efforts at deliberate deception by powerful figures and opinion leaders. Indeed, we may feel the need to modify Abraham Lincoln’s famous observation that you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time by observing that those have turned out to be pretty good odds. But we should reward those who give the advancement of public knowledge their best effort -- and sometimes manage to make a difference.

Earlier this year the City University of New York Graduate Center’s interim president, Chase Robinson, pulled off what amounts to an academic coup by snatching world-renowned economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman from the ivy clutches of Princeton University, where he had been employed for the last 14 years. Krugman’s appointment as Distinguished Professor of Economics was a huge boon for the Luxembourg Inequality Study, which is housed at the Graduate Center, as well as the general reputation of the university at large. Though most members of the CUNY community were thrilled to hear of his employment, the recent release of Krugman’s appointment letter has caused controversy both within and outside CUNY, and raises some serious questions about academic competition and the role of the public university.

Thanks to the intrepid reporters at Gawker — which, shamefully, seems to be one of the only new media outlets that still knows how to successfully write a FOIA request — we now have the full timeline and details of Krugman’s negotiation and acceptance letter. The most controversial bit of information by far is the amount Krugman was offered. CUNY’s initial and final overture was a whopping $225,000 per year, to which Krugman responded with incredulity, declaring that the terms of the offer were “remarkably generous.” Krugman even said he had to read the letter “several times to be clear.” Indeed, the amount offered to Krugman was quite generous as it exceeds that of any other distinguished professor at the Graduate Center by at least $5,000, and in many cases upwards of $75,000.

Whether or not Krugman’s scholarship and teaching ability warrant such a superior salary is certainly worthy of debate, but the real issue for most commentators is not how much CUNY will pay Krugman, but how little they are asking him to do. CUNY is essentially offering him what used to be called a sinecure. Like ecclesiastical appointments “without the care of souls,” the terms of Krugman’s contract require him to do almost nothing his first year and then teach just one graduate seminar each year for as long as he would like to stay at CUNY. This required teaching in the second year is less than half of the usual course load for most distinguished professors at the Graduate Center, some of whom teach three classes per year and advise several dissertations at a time. Whether Krugman will advise or sit on any dissertation committees remains to be seen.

It is clear from his acceptance email however, that he is interested in doing as little work as possible: “My biggest concern is time, not money — and your description of the time commitment, one seminar per year plus public events and commitments to LIS [Luxembourg Inequality Study] (which I would want to do in any case) sounds as if it’s within the parameters I had in mind.”

So, in essence, for the first two years CUNY is paying Krugman $450,000 (plus $10,000 in travel and research costs each year, and a one-time relocations cost of $10,000) to teach one seminar and to participate in public events.

On the surface this seems like an outrageous expenditure, but there is an obvious market logic at work here. It is clear that CUNY and the Graduate Center are banking on the brand recognition that a figure like Krugman bestows upon a university. As a Facebook friend of mine succinctly put it, Krugman is essentially “stuntcasting for cash,” and one has to wonder how long before his name is plastered on subway ads promoting CUNY’s “best and brightest.”

Of course, such anger is only partially well-placed, since appointments like this are not unusual and there is a strong case to be made for the intellectual and social value of such positions. After all, the public should support scholars and research. Krugman’s presence will no doubt be of great benefit to the Luxembourg Inequality Study, and his talks are a valuable tool for educating the general public on questions of economic inequality, precarity, and privatization. But Krugman is not a young unaffiliated researcher and his work requires no special laboratories or equipment to perform. In other words, Krugman does not need a university affiliation to do the work he is already doing. In fact, Krugman, who has a current net worth of $2.5 million, whose books sell in the hundreds of thousands, and who is paid quite well by The New York Times, has no need for money to fund his continued research and public advocacy.

And herein lies the contradiction through which the problem is revealed. A longtime champion of public institutions as drivers of economic equality, Krugman is now essentially colluding with administrators to take on private academic institutions in what has become a vicious cycle of competition for academic prestige and the elusive donor dollars that may or may not come with it. The more that public institutions like CUNY try to keep up with the likes of Princeton and Harvard, the more they become victims of their own ambitions, forced as they are to keep throwing money away on projects that are designed almost exclusively to draw in more donors and tuition-paying students and that provide little in the way of value to university stakeholders.

Such wasteful and ill-conceived competition is a clear abandonment of CUNY’s founding mission to educate the children of the poor and working classes of New York City and represents a serious misapplication of priorities. At a time when tuition costs are skyrocketing and public higher education relies increasingly on underpaid adjuncts — teaching full course loads for near minimum wages without health insurance or job security — spending such huge amounts for celebrity appointments is not only fiscally unsound, but morally untenable.

Krugman is a remarkable intellect and an important voice for economic equality — and most of us at CUNY are glad to have him on board — but to take from a public institution on its knees when you already have so much is ungenerous and unkind. As he wrote about his appointment to CUNY in his New York Times blog, “[I] like the idea of being associated with a great public university.” If this is true, I’d urge Krugman to quantify that esteem for CUNY by donating a significant portion of his earnings, say $100,000 a year, to a scholarship fund for students or the Professional Staff Congress welfare fund, which provides much-needed health care benefits and emergency assistance for CUNY adjuncts.