Writing at Minding the Campus, Mark Bauerlein has a splendid essay on faculty research. He makes the point that much of it is of negligible value except as padding for the CV.
I think that academic research ought to have to pass the test of the marketplace. That is, rather than assuming that all professors have plenty of brilliant ideas in them that they will be able to research and write about when given a sufficiently light teaching load, the assumption should be that professors will devote their time to teaching unless an outside party thinks highly enough of some research proposal to buy their time from the university.