I notice that past a certain age (sometimes as early as 50), some professors tend to be significantly less productive, to the point that they essentially do not publish or have graduate students and only teach classes (as that is really the only 'required' activity of a professor).
I've also no...
In long period of time, their unproductive manner will decrease their impact in academia and little by little, they lose their professional reputation.
The career-arc of "a professor" is perhaps different than some others, insofar as they/we must take substantial risks at the beginning of careers... and some fail... but/and the reward for taking risk and succeeding is not big pay, but tenure. Yes, one could argue that the "risks" are nonsensical by some standard (the "business" standard?), but that's a different question. AND in that vein, long-term or lifetime accomplishment is the best gauge, not what's happened in the last year or two. Different timescale, I think.
Productivity is not always measured by the number of papers published. I remember reading Richard Feynman's (auto?)biography, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", in which he recounted a time when he got into a funk and just couldn't come up with anything publishable. Feeling like he was a failure he went to his department head who reassured him: "Don't worry, it happens to everyone. You're teaching your classes, you're going to talks, you're reading papers - you're doing fine". Not long after that he came up with the idea that led to his Nobel prize. And so it goes...
I haven't yet looked into the answers, but am sure they'll point out that this may depend on the country and institution. But in some cases, a professor is compared to a "nail without a head": Once it's in, it's nearly impossible to get it out. So the short answer to the title question may be: "Nothing", in most cases.
Stereotyping age ranges is unnecessary. Some of the most productive professors I know are late 50s and beyond. Of course there are reasons why the people who are currently later in their careers may be more likely to give up research. One possibility everyone may be missing is they got tenured in a less competitive time, and can't compete in research anymore. Nothing to do with age, just merit.
Because this is not a free market domain (paid by tax payers via government), there is nothing to ensure productivity beyond the minimum necessary. In the free market one is paid relative to his contribution to the revenue of a business, which is a meritocracy. A bad professor will get (I assume) the same amount of money as a good one - likely only based on the duration of employment.
This is the totally normal way of things. The higher you get on the academic ladder the more and more stuff you have to do which is unrelated to research. A better question would be "what happens to professors who fail to do their non-research related duties"?
"Unproductive" professors have finally dropped out of the publish-or-perish spiral and can now start to work on high quality, long term research and papers that are not a mere report of what has been going on the last 6-12 months.
Teaching good classes is actually much more productive than publishing a ton of useless articles. I am not saying that most people publish useless articles, I only want to emphasise that dedicating time to teaching isn't per sé more or less productive than anything else.
@gented: perhaps, but is there any actual evidence, post-tenure, that the quality of a professor's taught classes goes up the fewer papers they publish? Supervising grad students is also obviously one other use of their time. Or starting companies. Or playing golf. Also, one obvious correlation-is-not-causation caveat is that if a professor teaches the same course for N years, presumably the quality of lecture notes and homeworks improves after each cohort of students evaluates it, regardless what else is happening.
@Battle every school I've worked with has had incentives for more productive professors. In addition to summer pay and buying out classes from funding, there are bonuses and pay adjustments in the system. Of course it is nothing like a free market where the most productive gets super-rich while the unproductive go hungry. Perhaps a small factor like two or three between extremes. Administrators also employ less quantitative methods to drive unproductive people out.
@ASimpleAlgorithm - So the incentives are artificial and also made by bureaucrats. Effectively it's more like people paid by the state pat each other on the back, while everyone involved gets away quite wealthy at least. Even if everyone's involved work turns out to be useless to society (students did not get the expected skills and market value, research was about trivial topics). Also, while the unproductive go hungry this may be true for 3rd world countries. And then you need to think about who educated those people to become so unproductive. And what about minimum wage?
@Battle I'm just pointing out details you stated you were unaware of. Even socialist systems often try to include some kind of incentives, for example in the distribution of luxuries. I imagine they're better than nothing. I didn't say they solved everything, or anything for that mater. Meanwhile I don't know that the minimum wage can exist in a completely free market. A minimum wage law is a restriction of free trade (in this case in selling one's labor) by definition.
@ASimpleAlgorithm - You are right, you pointed out details I was unaware of and I want to acknowledge that. Regarding minimum wage - the context is this: Educate people in a way where their market value remains low, then impose minimum wage to bar their market entry entirely. So people can't start at let's say $8/h and improve themselves via experience, if $10/h is minimum wage. I imagine they're better than nothing - I'd disagree. You don't need the heavy hand of the state to distribute things - in fact it's even counterproductive and also takes a large commission fee.
@Battle I'm not clear what points you're trying to make. Perhaps you misunderstood me. when said better than nothing, I meant better than the same system (be it socialism or tenure) without any incentive scheme tacked on. The state already took everything. As for minimum wage laws, I made a statement about the definition of a free market excluding them. I have no idea what you;re saying there. People are born uneducated, no one had to produce them that way.
@ASimpleAlgorithm - The point was this: Bad government education system leads to people without skills to compete in the market, being only able to be employed for low wages, sometimes even below minimum wage (thus it's illegal to employ them for what their work is worth). The reason why the education system fails is due to being still near worthless after 12-13 years of school - unless the children acquired skills on their own outside of school. Thus, forced education is blocking any acquisition of skills and education that would be of real value.
@ASimpleAlgorithm - Regarding the "better than nothing" part - fair enough, I guess I misunderstood your point. I just wanted to point out that it's preferable to not have the need of government systems creating artificial incentives for quality work in the first place. But that can only work if there is a free market, meaning people (customers) have alternatives - thus force businesses (in this case schools/universities) to actually strive for continuous self-improvement or face failure and go bankruptcy, because competition would outdo them. Bad/lazy lecturers for example would be fired.
I've seen something like this happen, with a professor clearly striving for the minimum work required on a coast path to retirement, and what seemed to be a quite enjoyable non-work life. His last name informally became a verb for that approach to work.
Discussion on question by user2562609…
Discussion on question by user2562609…