Ilya Somin has a reaction to the discussion of Moneyball hiring in academe sparked by his recent post.

Prof. Karlson posts an initial reaction to the contributions of Eugene Hicock to the debate over the future of higher education in the United States:

Answer me this: why isn’t there a reality show titled Who Wants to Marry a Ph.D? You’d think that casting would be able to identify gold-diggers willing to feign an interest in Proust or obscure varietals to land someone as overpaid and underworked as columns like Mr Hickok’s suggest populate the ranks of the professoriate.

I am not totally unsympathetic with Hicock’s broader interest in assessing the quality of higher education, at least to the extent that taxpayers ought to be entitled to some measurement of the effectiveness of the educations they are subsidizing and the efficiency of use to which those funds are put, but his rhetoric—and factual errors—are hardly recruiting allies in the professoriate.