A talented Ph.D. candidate fails to find a job as a faculty member at a research university and eventually ends up teaching at a high school. But he still yearns to do scholarly research. A paper released last week by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, a body devoted to entrepreneurial ideas, offers a solution for people who once harbored dreams of conducting quality research, but instead ended up working outside the university system doing little or no research. The authors of the paper, Samuel Arbesman and Jon Wilkins, said these scholars, who tend to be underemployed, could be put to work as researchers under a system called “fractional scholarship.” A fractional scholarship position would involve a researcher, who could be working as a high school teacher, a professor at a liberal arts college or an adjunct, devoting a certain amount of part-time work on a specific question of interest to a freestanding research institute.
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/05/07/new-proposal-putting-underemployed-researchers-work
