Academics Not Productive Enough? Sack 'em 356
ananyo writes "One hundred academics at the University of Sydney, Australia, have this week been told they will lose their jobs for not publishing frequently enough. The move is part of a wider cost-cutting plans designed to pay for new buildings and refurbishment to the university. Letters were posted to researchers on Monday 20 February, informing them their positions were being terminated because they hadn't published at least four 'research outputs' over the past three years. It is unclear which research fields the academics work in. Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said."
That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
So if they were to publish more to make up for a quota, wouldn't that'd lower the quality a bit?
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Haha no. University administrators dont care about books or papers or whatever. They care about grants, and you DONT get grants by writing books.
"Reasearch output" almost certainly means "satisfying a grant board".
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
"In this particular university and many others, the biggest losses are coming from high paid research faculty who are not bringing in external money to justify their existence."
Universities are not supposed to be businesses, and faculty are not supposed to justify their existence by making money. They are meant to advance learning. Counting 'research outputs' like they were so many plastic beans seems like a spectacularly poor way to assess the quality of your intellectual output.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Funny)
I'd recommend a study on it. Seriously, right now unless you want to lose your job.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:4, Interesting)
But which is more productive - writing up "this failed" for publication or getting to work on the next project? I'm a little biased here in that I'm a mathematician, so negative results are generally of the form "I wasn't able to show what I wanted to but still believe the conjecture is true/now believe it to be false.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ideally, researchers would also publish the attempt when they get started on it s.t. there aren't too many people working on the same approach but then you need to factor in the fact that an approach might be to tough for a researcher in which case he should let someone else do it. (Of course, this also assumes that all people are honest and their skills perfectly quantifiable which is obviously wrong)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
We academics are hired to perform a job, and as much of a PITA as publication can be, it is one of the major job requirements. Not doing a part of your job well enough is definitely grounds for termination, assuming the academic didn't have some sort of tenure protections.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as a computer scientist: negative results in my field are massively discounted, unless you are proving impossibility. Producing a less accurate image feature, or a less effective scheduling algorithm, is not generally considered publish-worthy.
^^^ This. I'll dare to say that negative results are massively discounted not just in CS, but in other fields as well. It is a lot easier to publish a rosy (and completely irrelevant) scenario than a realistic, but modest negative one. That on itself is what makes academic publishing so hard. It's not the research process that makes it hard/impossible for many academics to publish so frequently, it is the publishing process itself that is anything short of corrupt IMO.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Interesting)
But at the same time, if a computer scientist paid to produce results hasn't come up with anything but less accurate image features and less effective scheduling algorithms for the last three years, maybe the *should* be fired or switch to a pure teaching position.
Problem with that is that it will discourage people from tackling difficult problems. Say that a problem I am interested in has not been solved in over 50 years, most of the partial results that could be easily obtained has olready been done, and I think I have an idea that may give me some new insight and potentially lead to a solution. It would be great if I could solve it. On the other hand, the problem is obviously very hard, leading experts in the field has been trying to crack it for a long time, without a complete result. I may spend next 5 years trying only to discover that I simply cannot make it work. In the meantime, someone else will be solving one easy problem after another, putting out paper after paper.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
But which is more productive - writing up "this failed"
Writing up "this failed" is absolutely just as (if not more) productive. Too many published papers are "this works" and not "this didn't work". A huge part of science, mathematics, etc. is failing and then explaining how and why you failed.
What's the worst that can happen? "Oh noes, Professor Straya tried a completely logical methodology but it didn't work out?" The only fear is to be exposed as incompetent (contaminated experiment, bad methodology, etc.) and that's a good thing as well.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, all sorts of drugs are tested for all sorts of diseases, but generally the results aren't published unless there is some success.
Unfortunately a lot of failures are published, but sensationalized so that the people doing the research don't appear to have been wasting their time and their sponsors' money. Example:
Researcher: I have reason to believe that Tylenol causes cancer. If this is true, it could have dramatic effects across the planet and could possibly save millions of lives. I only need $150k to research this and believe that the possibility of saving lives drastically outweighs the cost.
Sponsor (University or whatever): If we could prove that, our public image would soar once the world learns what we've done for society. Here's a check.
[Results are inconclusive]
Embarrassed researcher: After my research, I can not say that Tylenol is safe to take from a cancer standpoint. Many people taking it did indeed develop cancer while on the drug.
Sponsor: Splendid - Let's publish and tell the world that we've done the study and can not say conclusively that Tylenol doesn't cause cancer.
Re: (Score:3)
Almost every job requires you to do something that sucks.
Your paycheck doesn't come out of thin air. If it is a Government Grant then it is coming out of Tax Payers, if it is from the university it is from Students Tuition, Grants (Public (Government(Tax Payers)) and Private (Rich People/Companies), Alumni etc... Basically a group of people who hope to see their money put to good use, that will make their lives more profitable or help the general community
Re:That'll work well. (Score:4, Informative)
Most faculty, especially ones above the Junior College level, think teaching is the part of the job that sucks, not writing and publishing.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Informative)
That's a really interesting question. I don't know about Mathematics, but in Physics, its pretty damn important to publish negative results. Feynman used to tell a story to show that (available here [lhup.edu]). Basically, the story goes something like this:
Robert Millikan [wikipedia.org], which was already a famous experimental physicist, published a (now famous) experiment that determined the charge of a single electron [wikipedia.org]. This was the first time such a thing had been done, so it was a really big deal. A lot of other physicists replicated the experiment, with lots of papers published all around. The thing about experiments is that the value measured always has an uncertainty, and experimenters make mistakes, so it's very common for later experiments to correct previously-measured values. The strange thing about this case is that, if you plot the "known" value for the electron charge over time, you get a curve that gradually grows from the value measured in the first experiment to the value we now know is correct (because today we have many different ways to measure the value, so we're pretty sure of it).
So, why is the plot a gradual curve and not a straight jump to the correct answer? Why didn't the second experiment get the correct value right away? The answer is embarrassing. Since Millikan was so famous, subsequent experimenters didn't publish their results if the value they got was too far from the "currently accepted" value -- they thought of their results as "negative results", even though they probably had less error than the "currently accepted" value. The ones that got published were the ones with similar errors to the previous ones, or the ones that kept tweaking their setup (introducing all kinds of random errors) until they got a value that was closer to the original.
Nowadays, physicists are very careful not to make mistakes like this. Part of that care means that you don't pay too much attention to the "expected" result, so you really should publish negative results. Of course, that's just the theory -- no one likes to publish negative results, because most of the time, they're just a waste of time.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Good luck getting something like that published for example in Computer Science. Reviewers won't even bother reading past the abstract. "No significant contribution", "nothing novel", etc.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree with you. The point of OP remains. forcing people to have a publication count won't solve anything. Close to the deadline, people will start submitting crappy papers until they pass the quota.
You can not put a simple counting rule to administrate people whose job is to understand, develop and bypass models. Researcher are the less suitable people for being subject to this type of rules.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
What about:
First year: "We have built up this experiment, and we are now collecting data."
Second year: "We are still in the process of collecting data; up to now we haven't seen anything interesting."
Third year: "We are still in the process of collecting data; up to now we haven't seen anything interesting."
No journal would publish any of that.
However, the following would make the headlines if the researcher hadn't been fired due to three years without publication:
Fourth year: "We have proof for superluminal supersymmetric magnetic monopoles!"
Yes, I'm exaggerating. But the point is, some things just need time.
The right thing to do if someone has few publications is not saying "sorry, you've got too few publications, you're fired" but to ask "you've got very few publications, what are you doing?" And only if he can't give a good answer to that, firing him is justified.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Informative)
Most conferences will publish method and interm report abstracts. Many journals will also publish novel method papers.
Re: (Score:3)
It sounds like they're counting more than just papers. "Research output" sounds like it includes abstracts as well. Any non-tenured prof would probably get the sack if his 5 year review came up and he'd published so little.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the expectations when hired in many academia roles is to publish papers. If you don't want to publish papers then perhaps you should be taking on a different career or different position. If you are hired on as an assistant/associate professor at a major university, they will often only assign you 2-3 courses to teach per semester with summer courses being extra money in your pocket. Teaching 2-3 courses per semester is a part-time job and they are not typically paying you to be a member of a profess
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Informative)
As a former academic at a research university, I can say you know not whereof you speak.
Re: (Score:3)
In bioinformatics you can easy publish multiple papers in a year. In high energy physics, not so much.
I just checked the web sites of a couple of friends of mine who work in high energy physics, because I found that a bit hard to believe given how often they claimed that they were in the middle of preparing papers. Even PhD students and postdocs seem to be able to publish at least one journal paper per year. Lecturers usually get their names on their students' work as a second author, so publishing one thing a year is trivial for them, if being first author is not a requirement.
Re: (Score:3)
You've never been in the academic world, have you?
You mean aside from a PhD and a postdoc? No.
Sometimes an experiment can take years just to set up. Sometimes it takes months and months of computer time to interpret the results.
And that is all that you're working on? You don't have any preliminary results that you can publish? Any small spin-off projects? Doesn't sound like any project I've ever worked on...
In a lot of fields, journals have an almost two year turnaround - so work you have done can get delayed enormously.
Latency is not the same as throughput. I've published papers in journals with an 18-month turn-around, but that doesn't mean that I only published one paper in 18 months. Papers that were submitted earlier are still trickling through the publication pipeline in the interim.
And publishing a "This doesn't work" paper? Wow, good luck finding a journal that will take that. They simply don't exist.
And y
Re: (Score:3)
"Publish or Perish" has been a part of academia for as long as I can remember (in the U.S. anyway). When I was in academia, it was the ONLY way to get tenure. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of bad stuff like profs cooking numbers and fabricating sources just to get an article out of it and insisting on putting their names as co-authors on all their grad students' papers (even if they didn't write a word).
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
...insisting on putting their names as co-authors on all their grad students' papers (even if they didn't write a word)
Not sure what the problem is here. Maybe it's because of the field you are in, but in my field (animal science) it is expected that your major advisor be on every manuscript. Usually becasue they played a major role in designing the experiment, procuring the funding, and paying the students stipend. My advisor's primariy contribution to the writing process of my manuscripts was as an editor, but he definitely made "meaningful intellectual contributions" to the research projects described, which has always been the bar for co-authorship in my opinion.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
In my field, the papers and article's authors' were the people who actually researched and wrote them. They were not treated as tribute to your academic master. I find the very idea of treating my work as some form of academic kickback repulsive. And I have little respect for anyone who would even THINK of demanding this of one of their students.
In most sciences the writing of the paper is seen as a chore and the authorship of the paper is based largely on 1) who did the work and 2) who came up with the key ideas. In the vast majority of graduate student work, the advisor played heavily into #2, usually through periodic discussions with the student. Most advisors choose to have their names listed last to place the focus on the student as the first author and the follow custom - the final author usually got the funding or laid the foundation for the project. I see no problem with this in fields where work is highly collaborative.
Re: (Score:3)
I like Colonel Korn's response. I may have written all of the papers, and even run all of the research, but without my advisor none of the projects would have come my way. Research is collaborative, especially for a graduate student with no resources and little training. That is the point of a graduate degree. In exchange for training you, and easing the procurement of resources you do a lot of the grunt work (mixing feed, weighing animals, running lab equipment, writing all first dr
Re: (Score:3)
I'm going to throw a Car Analogy out here:
Old guy walks back into bank, waits in line and when he gets to teller, asks her to validate his parking stub. She tells him no so he steps aside and requests to speak to bank manager. When manager comes over he informs them that he's closing his accounts (plural) with the bank due to poor customer service for the refusal to validate the parking stub he'd forgot to have done when he was first in. Same teller. Manager discovers that said customer holds account in ex
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you ever do research that wasn't heavily directed by your professor?
My research was always assisted in various ways by my mentor professor and many other people as well. But it was still MY research, MY writing, and MY article at the end of the day. If I had listed everyone who critiqued it, offered me advice on it, or provided information for it as co-author, the list of authors would have went on for two pages.
I was fortunate that none of my mentors ever had the gall to ask for such a thing (I was blessed to work with some very good people). But I knew plenty of other grad students who weren't so lucky. There was one prof who was NOTORIOUS for this. He would demand a co-author credit on papers and articles he hadn't even READ. If you were one of his grad students and you wrote a paper for another professor in a research class, and then you later decided to present it, he expected a co-author credit even on that. And he would openly threaten grad students who didn't want to do it (and since having a member of your dissertation committee turn on you was essentially the end of your academic career, his threats carried a lot of weight). And this prick was the DEPARTMENT CHAIR. He got that because he brought in a lot of grant money (the prick looked GREAT on paper, and wasn't above using all sorts of..."questionable" means of getting those grants).
Re:That'll work well. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is not a quota. Quota's are given in advance and you work to meet them. In this case the University needed to reduce research salaries. They just happened to choose this existing metric to make a decision on how to meet their salary reduction goals. There is no indication that this metric will be used in the future. It is very easy to criticize the use of this metric, but beeing currently part of a work force that requires similar efficiency improvements, I can tell you that their is no metric or means that will not be criticized for being unfair to some individuals. In my own personal opinion, this approach is a hell of a lot better than the typical practice of protecting the highest paid and longest retained individuals.
Re: (Score:3)
It depends. Just because the university has required them to increase their research output doesn't mean the peer-reviewed venues are going to lower their standards. They won't get too far by just doing MORE research. They have to do HIGHER QUALITY research, so that they are able to publish in higher-tier venues. One of those counts a lot more than 10 publications in low-ranked journals that no one reads or cites.
I'm a nobody grad student, yet I have papers in MICRO and HPCA. Mind you, I have a good ad
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's my opinion that if you work in academia and don't publish at least one paper a year you should probably be doing something else(either to another field which leads to results, not just food for thought or to another job).
Yeah, I hear that guy Andrew Wiles [wikipedia.org] spent 7 years not publishing any papers. Oxford stupidly put up with that instead of canning has ass at year 2, and they've gotten nothing but disrepute ever since. I mean has anyone ever heard of Wiles? Has he published anything of note at all? Oxford definitely would have been better off without him.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That'll work well. (Score:4, Informative)
Princeton, not Oxford. And he had a day job and was teaching and publishing normal papers. He 'secretly' worked on Fermat on the weekends.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, there seems to be this attitude that it's somehow inappropriate to even try to quantify academic output. But if you're a mathematician, why on earth would you be against quantifying things? Mathematicians even came up with a metric, the Erdos number, which quantifies how many publications it takes to tie you to legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, as a way of sticking a number on where you fit in the network of mathematicians. And if you're a scientist, you quantify your results and run statistical tests. Why is it expected to use numbers to describe fruit flies, dinosaur bones, or the red shift of distant galaxies... but god forbid, the university actually tries to stick a number on what you do?
The number of articles probably isn't the best metric. One article in a journal like Nature, Science, PLOS Biology, or the New England Journal of Medicine is usually worth a half dozen articles in a specialist journal. A metric like impact factor (average number of citations per article in that journal) helps take that into account. Eigenfactor takes it a step further by weighting the citations- citations coming from Nature or Science count more than citations from the Journal of Fish Biology or whatever. H-factor offers a way of ranking individual scientists- if you have one paper cited once you have an H-factor of one, two papers cited at least twice gives you an H-factor of 2, three papers cited three times gives you an H-factor of 3, etc. Admittedly it's field-specific. The sheer volume of papers in certain fields inevitably means those papers are cited more.
I think the University of Sydney is taking a simplistic approach to the problem, but I sympathize with their aims. You see really creative, productive researchers who are having trouble landing tenure-track jobs in this job market, while some tenured faculty sit back and coast. We need a way to get rid of people who aren't performing and replace them with people who will perform. And it's incredibly hypocritical of academics to say that you can't measure their success: academia measures applicants for college, grad school, med school and law school using test scores and grades. Why is it OK to examine student performance with grades and scores, but inappropriate to grade the teachers themselves? Why not figure out a way to keep the excellent academics and get rid of the bad ones, just like we weed out students? Yes, academic excellence is inherently hard to quantify, but academics are generally pretty creative when it comes to quantifying things that are hard to quantify... the idea that suddenly "oh, it's just too hard to measure!" strikes me as remarkably self-serving.
Re: (Score:3)
Andrew Wiles may be an exception. For every semi-celebrity prof like him that managed to do something notable, there are 100 highly paid tenured faculty that have more or less checked out. They make $150K, don't do research, and teach a handful of classes. They cause tuition prices to rise and require Universities to "tax" grant and external money at higher rates.
Re:That'll work well. (Score:5, Funny)
The sum of the powers of *Whoosh* is not equal to the power of the hypotenuse of *Whoosh* for any integral power greater than two.
I have an elegant proof for this conjecture, but I can't type it here on slashdot because it requires Unicode.
In academia, we don't say. . . (Score:5, Funny)
. . ."publish or perish" just because we appreciate alliteration.
Re:In academia, we don't say. . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In academia, we don't say. . . (Score:5, Informative)
The dilemma with "publish or perish" is that the metric is stupid. Saying its "Do your job or get fired" is all well and good, but it is more akin to being a programmer and the sole measure of "doing your job" is "number of lines of code written (including comments)" -- it's frustrating because it encourages and rewards what most would consider "doing your job badly".
Re: (Score:3)
Bad analogy. What adacemics have to do is akin to writing more lines of code that are reviewed by 4 or 5 other distinguished academics. There are a few bad journals out there, but most venues work very hard to get good reviewers and accept the best papers. You can write all you want, but only the good papers get published. (There's a certain amount of randomness about which borderline papers get accepted, but the exceptional ones are not overlooked.) And not all venues count the same either.
Re: (Score:3)
Sewage (Score:2)
Game show? (Score:5, Funny)
Good riddance (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Funny)
There are far too many in "accedemia" [...] How about schools focus on TEACHING
Based on the evidence presented before me, I feel inclined to agree.
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Interesting)
Admin: We're doubling the intake of students next year, and we think you can do that with 25% less staff.
Academic: We can't double intake, reduce teaching, and still maintain the quality.
Admin: Sure you can, let me show you an excel spreadsheet.....
Academics: Those sums are complete nonsense, it's simply not possible, here's the proof.
Admin: Then let's take away your classrooms and computing equipment, and you can do all your lectures via skype.
Academics: That's not going to happen.
Admin: It is happening. Deal with it.
Academics: Then we'll find our own funding....
12 months later:
Admin: You've got the largest amount of funding in the university, we're going to distribute that out to other courses.
Academics: You can't. We're 100% funded by companies. You simply cannot take that money from us, the sponsors will not agree to it.
Admin: Tough. We need to even up the distribution of funds. By the way, cut teaching staff by 25%.
Sponsor: You've used the funding for things it was not intended, we're withdrawing all future funding
Academic: We're f*****d
Admin: No you aren't, simply go out and find more sponsors for the course. You did it last year, it should be easy to do again right?
Academic: I quit.
At least, that's why I no longer lecture anyway. It's a thankless task. You're constantly screwed over by admins trying to make a quick buck here and there. Your teaching suffers as a result, and the students end up thinking you're a lazy miserable so and so. If you concentrate entirely on teaching, your students get royally shafted. I've never met an academic who didn't have his/her students as their first priority. Most of what goes on behind the scenes is rarely, if ever, seen by the students..... so students often get the wrong idea about their lecturers.
Re: (Score:3)
Everybody in macadamia is nuts!
Re: (Score:2)
You get what you pay for. Academics are paid to publish, and (to a lessor extent) get good student ratings.
Doesn't make sense. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't make sense. (Score:5, Interesting)
It won't. Clearly. But you are missing the point.
The whole publish or perish paradigm is set up because publishing professors typically have a stronger ability to get grants, which then help fund the university (which typically takes a portion of the grant money into a more general fund). Grant givers almost always look at the publication record of the applicants, and those who are publishing more are MUCH more likely to get the grant. And yes, this is even in cases where supposedly the grants are given 'blind'. Well-known authors in any field develop a distinct style and those who are familiar with the field are likely to recognize that style. Thus grants are given to people who are already productive.
In the end, science research as funded via universities is a bit of a circular situation and it's all a bit self-congratulatory for the people at the top of their field. Which is of course why anyone wanting to do research in a field needs to attach themselves to one of the top researchers during under-grad/graduate years, so that they get the chance to be 2nd (or 3rd or 5th) author on a number of papers published by the BIGNAME. Then after they do that for a while, they get to be first author and BIGNAME moves to last author, but their names become strongly associated, and eventually the rising star gets to move into their own celebrity status, while the BIGNAME just keeps getting more recognition.
If I sound bitter, it may be because this is system is hardly designed to foster innovation, and is hardly conducive to outsiders being brought in. The real rule is conformity to the status quo. If you start out trying to make your own name, or trying to publish things that go against the grain, then you will get quietly ignored by the publishers. Personally, I'm no longer in research, and I'm just as well off gone from that particular insanity.
I have a good friend who has a PhD in astrophysics, but because all he really wants to do is teach, no one will ever know much about him. Will he ever make some great discovery about astrophysics? LIkely not, even though he's as intelligent as any person you'll likely meet. But because he has a passion for passing on the knowledge he has to new students of physics rather than spend years fiddling around with galactic simulations, he'll likely always have lower pay than most professors, and he'll likely never get mentioned as an important figure in astrophysics. And let's be honest, saying, "I inspired thousands of students to continue learning about physics" sounds trite and boring, but saying "I figured out why some stars go supernova and others don't" sounds much more 'important'. Honestly though, the professors that teach the rising students the basic grounding in a subject so that *the new students* of a subject can go on and make important discoveries are the ones that deserve a lot of credit. The professors that ignore students that aren't actively doing research *with them* are often (not always) doing little more than polishing an already sparkly name. Yes, they bring in money for the universities. Yes, the research they do is *often* important, and yes, we need people who are willing to do real research. Yet, at the end of the day, if we don't have people who are competent at actually *teaching*, then we are going to eventually get ourselves into trouble when all the students decide to go get an MBA so they can actually make a decent living.
Re: (Score:3)
I have to agree with you on the issue of teaching. Some professors are brilliant at teaching, but they're looked down upon because they've taught at the expense of research.
As for getting papers published, I don't know how it is in your area, but I'm in Computer Architecture, and I haven't seen any problems with bias towards big names. My advisor's former advisor is on the boards of some conferenes. But how can anyone tell when all of the submissions are double-blind? We actually try to figure out who s
Don't you have that backwards? (Score:5, Insightful)
The professors who follow your advice and focus on teaching rather than publishing make up the bulk of the people being fired here (plus a few slackers who neither teach well nor publish). The ones being kept are the ones who can get grants and crank out papers like printing press, and most likely treat students as a low priority.
Re:Don't you have that backwards? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I recently interviewed for professor positions. I often seem to get blank/unimpressed expressions when I describe that my interest is teaching, making a good connection with students, and researching teaching methods to make my work more effective and beneficial to students. Personally, I love it. Fun job, and while my students don't believe me, I often learn as much as they do. It's wonderful to view subjects with fresh eyes, vicariously through my students. It also forces me to re-evaluate my own understanding when answering questions. I find it much more satisfying profession that research or industry work.
The come back to this statement is usually "Well what research did you do for your doctorate, what research are you in now? What papers do you have published? Do you have industry experience?". I usually tell them the relevant info, followed by "...but that's not my primary interest, I enjoy working with students better than working in a lab".
That never seems to go over well so far, but I feel like I need to stick to my guns on this subject. Universities and colleges should be focused on the students. This doesn't mean you can't do research part of the time, but students are what pay the bills, and ultimately I want enough students to come after me to continue any work I start long after I'm gone. What's the point of all of our hard work in research if we do not have a next generation to pass it to? If the next generation cannot understand it or further the research? In any case, I definitely feel like its harder to get in the door if you aren't obsessively focused on research.
Quick Anecdote: I remember during graduate school, most of the professors that were "well-known" effectively ignored me and did their best not to give me time and answer questions or help in any manner. They just gave commandments about what to do in lab for them so they could publish more papers and get their name thrown around more; if you're lucky, they might include you as a co-author. My favorite professors, the ones I actually sat and had conversation with and learned what I know now from, were the ones that spent a lot of time on teaching, but in conversation I found out they constantly had to justify their existence to the bean-counters in the administration office; being a teacher or even doing teaching research wasn't enough. They had to come up with all sorts of things -- faculty sponsor of club/organization, etc. -- to prevent themselves from ending up on the chopping block. And now i find myself in the same situation. It's a sad state of affairs, really. Why can't we be allowed to do our job without side project interference?
Re:Good riddance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
Universities aren't for teaching undergrads. They're for doing research and giving undergrads a chance to learn as part of that process. If you're an undergrad who doesn't intend to go to grad school and you want to be spoon fed, find a college with a good university transfer agreement.
Not that a good professor shouldn't be able to teach, but the primary function of a university is not to pour knowledge into undergraduate heads.
I've got tenure, suckers! (Score:3, Funny)
One of my favorite Futurama scenes:
Mayor Poopenmayer: Professor Wernstrom, can you save my city?
Professor Wernstrom: Of course, but it'll cost you. First, I'll need tenure.
Mayor Poopenmayer: Done.
Professor Wernstrom: And a big research grant.
Mayor Poopenmayer: You got it.
Professor Wernstrom: Also, access to a lab, and five graduate students, at least three of them Chinese.
Mayor Poopenmayer: All right, done. What's your plan?
Professor Wernstrom: What plan? I'm set for life. Au revoir, suckers!
Leela: That rat
Re: (Score:3)
Sadly, the same thing happened at my university in the US. Here it seems to be school policy, at my school it was department policy. My favorite and most motivating teacher as an undergrad got canned under this policy. My second favorite teacher only survived because of his patents and pending patents were bringing in massive amounts of money, and the 4 worst teachers I ever had are still teaching today (I was going to say 6, but I just checked the department listing and #5 has since retired). If I had one
Tenure (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I thought we had tenure to better prevent students from learning from apathetic and burned out professors.
Re:Tenure (Score:5, Interesting)
But just like many well intended benefits of track record and experience (see also social security), it became interpretted by many as the start of a good paying and low effort pension.
Re:Tenure (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
It Tenure what makes schools in the United States so affordable and so superior to those in other countries?
Or is it something more?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Tenure (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not an academic but my understanding of tenure is to allow the professor to publish topics that may be controversial. That way, the school can't dump the professor for publishing something that goes against the grain.
Of course, professors are still human and many of them abuse tenure but I'm sure there are professors that actually use the protection that tenure provides them to do extraordinary work that otherwise might have gotten them fired for not toeing the university line. (The easiest examples that comes to mind is global warming, creationism, etc.)
Re:Tenure (Score:5, Informative)
like any other program or institution it can be abused by some, however measures to counter such abuse need to be in proportion to the prevalence of said abuse and ideally would not introduce excessive complexity, as complexity usually just leaves more room for abuse
Re:Tenure (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple answer is that academia is powered by a completely different mindset, one where—at least officially and romantically—the importance of ideas exceeds the importance of an individual or organization. As sohmc said [slashdot.org], the point is to protect intellectuals from being fired because their ideas are radical or unfashionable. Tenure gives professors a chance to go off the beaten path without fear of reprisal, and it's delayed to make sure that they're worth their salt and can contribute in a socially accepted way as well.
If you want to get right down to it, the "right to work" model you outlined simply does not scale to universities, because their core business is obtaining the truth, and that really is a matter of resolving many conflicting and shady theories until they are all completely disentangled and the right answer is found. Teaching is ancillary, a service offered to the general public through which society is benefited by their work. Publishing is only an indirect measure. It's not business or economically sensible (unlike high school teaching); it's a post-scarcity blue-skies fantasy that gained protected status as a result of trial, error, and a lot of rich people very long ago who were convinced that it was a good idea.
What you expected to find is much closer to private sector R&D, where every paycheque comes from the lifeblood of the company and must hence be carefully weighed against each researcher's profitability. Despite the harsh reality of grant-seeking and paper-publishing, academia at its core is still imagined to be about doing the right thing, and any professor worth his or her education knows this.
Re:Tenure (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Research can be an 80hr a week job, especially for a new professor who is encouraged to forget the definition of the word 'No' for the next 6 to 7 years. Say yes to every research project, every committee, every teaching or presenting opportunity, etc. At the end of the tenure tract many professors can be a little singed around the edges and looking to dial back a little bit. In this case, tenure is supposed to prevent Universities from using up and spitting out researchers once they've passed their peak productive output. It is the academic equivalent to union protections.
2. As other's have pointed out, there is also the concept of academic freedom to consider. Many times researchers will develop politically unpopular opinions on topics related to their field. Tenure grants them the protection against politically motivated attacks on their job security for presenting their professional opinion. This may not be relevant in all fields, but I've seen some of it in play in mine.
3. There is a belief that the greatest people to learn from are the pioneers in the field. This ignores the fact that most trained researchers are NOT trained educators, but there is some merit to this idea. Those top researchers probably have insights that students would benefit from being exposed to. In this situation, tenure allows for the researchers to gradually transition from a research focus in their early career, to an education focus in their later careers. In my experience, older tenured professors teach a disproportionate amount of the undergraduate course work. This enables them to dial back the amount of research they do while still contributing greatly to the success of their department. At my current university, our department receives more than 60% of it's total budget from undergraduate tuition. That is despite several nationally recognized and very well funded research labs in our department.
Dare I say... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Dare I say... (Score:5, Insightful)
Research is not about the quantity of results that are published, it is about the quality and importance of those results.
Re:Dare I say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you arguing for ignoring productivity altogether and basically letting them do whatever they want?
That is the idea behind tenure: you work hard, publish lots of papers, and so forth to get tenure, and then you are free to work on whatever problems you want. Unfortunately, yes, that means that some professors basically do nothing, but it also allows professors to spend ten years working on a hard problem and not have to worry about being fired for not publishing anything during that period of time. It is also unfortunate in that it basically forces young researchers to chase easy problems before they can really devote much energy to hard problems, and may make young researchers nervous about collaborating or even discussing their work with anyone else (the classic, "Don't tell so-and-so about what we are working on, he is working on something similar and we want to publish first!").
I agree, we need a better way to evaluate research. We need to weigh things -- weigh the number of papers, the number of citations the papers are getting (one paper that is cited hundreds of times is probably better than a hundred papers that are each cited once), what sort of things a research is currently doing that have not been published (if someone is running a 30 year experiment in biology, that should count, it should not count against them), etc.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm sorry, the waiter and warehouse worker doesn't work 10 hour days for minimum wage to pay taxes, so that some academic can sit around and think.
Nor do we turn to waiters and warehouse workers when we need answers to hard problems.
I certainly don't grind away at my engineering job dealing with deadlines, customers... so that some academic can sit around and think.
Yet if academics had not sat around and thought about things, there would be no engineering discipline. What do you think mathematicians did, so that you could use mathematics with confidence in your work? What do you think physicists spent their time doing, so that you could apply models of physical phenomena in your work? Society needs people to think, just like it needs people to design useful things or to pack u
Re: (Score:3)
"4 papers in 3 years is nothing for computer science, but that might be a lot for a field like biology, where experiments may take several years to run to completion."
The article doesn't say papers. It says "research outputs," which sounds like it includes conference abstracts. If you can't put together four conference abstracts in a few years you need to seriously reconsider your research methodology. If you're working on long term experiments, fine, but you need to be doing some other things as well.
Re:Dare I say... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually doing the research which the publications should be based upon, and which will be taught in 30 years. Editing or writing textbooks. Pulling in grants which will pay for research equipment, laboratory space, materials and expendables, travel, publication costs, and incidentally feed, house, and clothe you, your students, and the higher-ups. Serving on administrative councils which are necessary evils, but massive time-sinks. Writing and running necessary simulations so that future research projects can be green- or red-lighted before these time-sinks are encountered again.
If you think that time researching in a University is spent either in the classroom, or at one's desk pumping out papers left and right, you're sorely mistaken.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As a academic who recently saw the light and left for industry, I can tell you exactly what they're doing (at least in the U.S.): activities related to grantsmanship and serving on committees! Getting a grant is a mixed blessing. First, you have to figure out how exactly to spend the money, including hiring people to actually do the work (e.g. graduate students, post docs, etc). Then, you need to write regular progress reports and keep track of the time and effort for people working on the project (account
This will drive up publication quality! (Score:3)
Or rather not. Counting publications is a completely useless metric. In most fields you can publish things just a little different than what you published before, i.e. basically worthless. There are conferences as well that basically take everything. The only thing this does is waste money and time. Stupid.
Skeptical (Score:3)
As an academic early in his "career" (postdoc) I'm skeptical about absolute publication quotas. While it is true that in Southern Europe, where I live, many academics are lazy, it is my impression that in certain domains, especially in the humanities, many of the people that publish a lot are mediocre to say the least. The peer reviewing system in the humanities already gives a huge advantage to people publishing intellectually modest to plain stupid papers, as it is much easier to get an uncontroversial paper that only makes minor points past the reviewers than a controversial paper with new ideas. (This is probably not such a problem in natural sciences, because they have better evaluation criteria.)
Sure, the top people in the field almost always publish a lot -- 4 or more papers a year is quite common -- but I claim that in the middle field this measure does not work. Too much publication pressure primarily encourages people not to strife for substantial results, but in the end its these rare gems that drive research.
That being said, 4 papers in 3 years is a very low demand, as long as we're not talking about indexed papers in A-tier journals. At least people should be able to demonstrate that they have written something even if they don't get all of it published in time. But perhaps there should also be an upper limit---no more than 3 papers a year.
Re: (Score:3)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
While student enrollments are increasing... (Score:5, Insightful)
The professors' union has a good point. Enrollment is increasing and management miscalculated the student fees they would need to take in. So now the professors have to:
a) publish more
b) teach more
leaving little time for:
c) publish papers that are risky and innovative (the kind that actually move human knowledge forward)
You have wonder how we can encourage the best and the brightest to be academics. We work them to death making them earn a degree, we work them to death making them actually get hired, then they have to still build their reputation. And know they are saying that they'll get fired for not publishing more when they are already teaching more.
Screw that. (Score:4, Insightful)
It is my experience that many academics these days are pushed into "pork" activities, that is industry oriented work that brings in money for the university, but has little or no academic value.
In the UK it is particularly common that research fellows are hired for specific pork-based projects on short-term contracts, and also has to cover teaching due to a shortage or unwillingness of staff on higher pay-grades. Actual research you're meant to do on your spare time.
Well screw that. These days an academic career gives you less pay, longer work hours and less job security than an industry job. You're much more likely to get a permanent job in industry. In academia you have to go through 4-5 short term contracts before you're likely to get a permanent job.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the sacked academics has been pressurised into pork work for years and then get let go when the bacon runs out, because they've been too deep in pig fat to publish.
Publish Failures! (Score:3, Interesting)
We need a lot more people publishing "We tried X to do Y, but it didn't work because of Z."
They may not be exciting and sexy, but they are good data points to have.
Are there a whole lot of academics out there who aren't writing anything at all?
Are they writing absolute crap, that journals are rightly refusing to publish?
Are they perhaps keeping all of their research secret, so that they can commercialise it themselves and diddle their institutions at the same time?
Enquiring minds want to know.
Yet again pushing quantity over quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I agree that some people deserve the boot, such a policy - like most academic policies nowadays - only encourage production of large quantities of low-quality material. (That just a polite way of saying "huge piles of shit").
Going through published material is really depressing. Most of it is either republished stuff (à la "the same article few months ago : now with a new figure") or stuff that wouldn't even find its way into a textbooks due to lack of interest.
The groups I've been working with are on the top of our field. These groups published very little (maybe a paper or two per year, for the whole group), but always groundbreaking content or content of high interest for the community - and thus hold very high reputation in the community. I like it that way. Rather than wasting my time writing worthless papers (because writing a good paper takes time if you are not writing it with 3 keyboard keys - ctrl, c and v), I rather do actual work and publish it when it's mature enough.
Sadly, this view is not very common and I believe we get through with our way only because we are closer to engineering than to what people refer to as scientific research.
We expect professors to do both (Score:3, Interesting)
Professors are supposed to be teaching AND researching. If the focus was on teaching (especially undergrads) we wouldn't need professors for that kind of work; any post-doc would do, and do it for cheap.
While turning professors into publication factories would indeed be a BAD idea, four "research outputs" over three years is not exactly a high bar to cross.
Thank you, Management Consultantman! (Score:3)
Publications bad measuring tool for productivity (Score:4, Informative)
I know from my brother who is working on a university in mathematics research that 4 publications in 3 years is extremely many in his subject, he has worked extremely hard for 3 years to make 2 publications in topology.
I have been told it is a common problem for mathematicians that they don't make as many publications as in other fields of science, in geophysics working as researcher (which I don't I work in the private) it would be a reasonable demand with 4 publications on 3 years.
Millikan was faced with this (Score:3)
http://www.aip.org/history/gap/Millikan/Millikan.html [aip.org]
After 10 years of teaching he knew that he had to publish something great or give up research and becoming a professor.
This proves that you only need one paper, if it also give you the Nobel prize.
Easy solution (Score:3)
Just need to modify the SCIgen Automatic CS Paper Generator a bit and voila! Instant publishing ;)
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ [mit.edu]
Re:publish shit! (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
Journal of Applied Numerology (Score:3)
-
*I made that statistic up. Does that make me an economist?