abandon their view of faculty as profit centers and return to the abstract quest for knowledge, with faculty salaries being paid by the university, then the faculty could pursue whatever they choose. (Of course, this is naive, as appointments and tenure will be based on a wealth of factors that will in turn create constraints on "free inquiry". Just look at the departments where external funding is scarce, such as English Lit or foreign languages) I'm not sure what to make of the last sentence of your comment. Are you suggesting that reducing government funding is somehow tantamount to restricting free inquiry, access to results, and independent confirmation? At the risk of sounding like some sort of anti-government libertarian (which I assuredly am not), you seem to be conflating free inquiry with some perceived right to receive unrestricted government funding to pursue whatever research directions your heart desires, while presumably being as well compensated as a peer at an industrial research laboratory who is expected to actually contribute to the welfare of his employer. Hi there, well, to clarify, with my last sentence I just was alluding to Stephanie's comments and the fact that if you cut funding some researcher surely will feel restricted in the freedom of what they do. What I did not want to imply is that this would be threaten the broader freedom of research. But for some restrictions (at least as far as funding is concerned) would of course be inevitable. But what we really