New Research by Mixon Investigates Scholarly Ethos among Clinical Faculty in Economics

New research by Turner College economics professor Frank Mixon and his colleague Kamal Upadhyaya of the University of New Haven points out that during the 1930s famed Harvard University president James Bryant Conant created the concept of a “clinical professor,” his term for a talented professional who not only is familiar with the problems of instruction, but is also well-versed in the theoretical advances in, and in the instruction of, their chosen subject. As Mixon and Upadhyaya indicate, the concept of the clinical professor – sometimes referred to as a “professor of practice” or something similar – is now in widespread use in academe, including in the various business disciplines. As Mixon explained to Turner Business, “At research universities, clinical faculty are often viewed as key inputs into the production of scholarship, given that their utilization allows more research-oriented faculty to enjoy reduced teaching loads and advising responsibilities. At the same time, the skill exhibited by clinical professors in the classroom environment often results in a student experience mirroring that traditionally enjoyed by students at prestigious liberal arts colleges.” Interestingly, in the middle of the 1980s the top liberal arts colleges began witnessing a change in scholarly ethos among their economics faculties. “We sought to investigate if a similar scholarly ethos exists now among clinical economics faculties,” Mixon added. The new study, set to be published in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Economics & Sociology, examines the Google Scholar Profiles of the clinical economics professors affiliated with the 90 national universities in the U.S. that employ these types of economics faculty. “This process produced a list of 206 clinical faculty employed across the 90 institutions, where the mean number of citations for all clinical faculty is about 608 citations, which is quite impressive for faculty who are not generally expected to conduct research,” Mixon explained to Turner Business. The study provides a ranking of the top 100 clinical faculty in economics, a list that is headed by Jonathan Ostry, a clinical professor at Georgetown University whose research has garnered more than 25,000 citations to date. Lastly, Mixon and Upadhyaya offer some explanations for why clinical economics faculty would want to engage in academic research. The simplest of these is that these faculty are, like others, risk averse, and in their effort to avoid any macroeconomic risk associated with the academic labor market they seek to produce published scholarship, which has for some time been viewed as academic currency. Other explanations include the rational choice notion that incentives for reputation and group identity tend to motivate contributions from all individual members of the group toward its project or goal, or that the teaching load for clinical faculty at national institutions is smaller than the teaching loads faced by traditional faculty at institutions of lesser stature. Thus, individuals who choose the former are, paradoxically, choosing situations where the crowding out of research by teaching may be less of an issue.