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Wow, I couldn't disagree more. I can assure you that if you mean by "management" subjective evaluation by local administrative staff or "higher ups" like full p

Wow, I couldn't disagree more. I can assure you that if you mean by "management" subjective evaluation by local administrative staff or "higher ups" like full professors, then it's the worst system you could possibly have. It invariably leads to corruption, favouritism, and brown nosing. Funding authorities have been fighting these rotten structures for the past 20 years where I work (Southern Europe), but they cannot do too much because the university system is not under their control, only the funding for national research projects. There is only one reasonable way to evaluate research and researchers, that's to evaluate the content of their work and publications by external evaluation panels and tell these panels explicitly that they should not base their assessments solely on indicator counting, but on the overall merits, originality, and prospects of the research according to their subjective opinion. Metrics shouldn't even be used as a tie-breaker, they should only ever be used as weak indicators, and this must be explicitly mentioned in the guidelines. In addition, you need a few other guidelines and laws. For example, it must be prohibited that someone becomes a postdoc at the same place where they obtained their Ph.D. We have people who study at university X, do their exams at university X, do their Ph.D. at university X under the same professors they always knew, then become postdocs working for their former supervisors and being exploited by them (teaching the same bad seminar their former supervisor teaches the past 20 years), and then get tenure in a rigged call. And the worst thing about it is that they feel entitled to all of this. You've got to break this vicious cycle, but with your suggestion of using a methodology that worked in 1950s (with an order of magnitude less candidates) this could never be achieved.

cinntaile 5y ago
But optimizing for originality is one of the reasons of the current mess so why is this an appropriate metric? Reproducing research is very valuable and a way to combat fake results.
kungito 5y ago
But many less well off EU countries have only 1 good Uni and many people don't like moving away. That would mean forcing people to move out of their homeland just for tenure. I'd rather we stop having lifetime professors and limit the tenure to 10-15 years
- Beldin 5y ago
  Sorry, but I don't understand how forcing people to find a new job after 10-15 years ensures they're not forced out of their homeland.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
    The comment you reply to didn't mention forcing people to find a new job. As far as I understand, they could apply to the same job. But they would have to apply and earn it again, which means that (at least, if the process is fair) they wouldn't be able to stop caring about doing a good job due to having a guaranteed job for life.
    - webmaven 5y ago
      > [T]hey could apply to the same job. But they would have to apply and earn it again, which means that (at least, if the process is fair) they wouldn't be able to stop caring about doing a good job due to having a guaranteed job for life. But that means that a tenured professor will start acting in non-academically-independent ways at some point before their tenure is up to avoid messing up their re-applicaction. It is also quite likely that events such as departmental re-orgs could be timed around tenure expiration to eliminate specific job descriptions in order to make re-applying more difficult. You might be able to achieve the same goals though some combination of making tenure transferrable between cooperating institutions, mandatory sabbaticals, requiring review committees be partly or wholely staffed from outside the institution, etc.
LeanderK 5y ago
> We have people who study at university X, do their exams at university X, do their Ph.D. at university X under the same professors they always knew, then become postdocs working for their former supervisors and being exploited by them Independent of every other point, this is in my point of view a real problem. It happens so often and I don't understand why there's often no law that at least a postdoc at another institution has to be done.
Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
I couldn't agree more with the former and less with the latter. I think external evaluation panels (and in particular, from a third country) are the way to go. We already have good examples, for example, in ERC grant panels. The ERC uses exactly the strategy you mention and it has an impeccable reputation, I know many people who applied with or without success but I know no one who felt treated unfairly. But I'm against blanket rules prohibiting postdocs or positions at the same place of the PhD, at least from my Southern European (Spanish) point of view. This is often touted in Southern European countries because in the US no one does that so it must be evil, so clearly we should ban it to be more like Americans and see if this makes our scientific productivity closer to theirs. But European (especially Southern European) culture is not US culture. People want to settle down, be near their loved ones, and there's nothing intrinsically bad about that that should be punished. Plus, the job market is much less dynamic so even for those who don't mind bumping around, it can be hard to reconcile with a possible spouse who has a career too. And finally, if you push people in this region to move, most of the time the result will be that they end up in a Northern European country (or the US, Canada, etc.) where they make 3x or 4x more, and never come back - once you have experienced a much better salary it's hard to justify returning, I have seen it plenty of times. Bring on the external evaluation panels, and then there will be no need for any measure forcing people to move, which would reduce inclusivity and thus the talent pool.

cinntaile 5y ago

But optimizing for originality is one of the reasons of the current mess so why is this an appropriate metric? Reproducing research is very valuable and a way to combat fake results.

kungito 5y ago

But many less well off EU countries have only 1 good Uni and many people don't like moving away. That would mean forcing people to move out of their homeland just for tenure. I'd rather we stop having lifetime professors and limit the tenure to 10-15 years

Beldin 5y ago
Sorry, but I don't understand how forcing people to find a new job after 10-15 years ensures they're not forced out of their homeland.
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago
  The comment you reply to didn't mention forcing people to find a new job. As far as I understand, they could apply to the same job. But they would have to apply and earn it again, which means that (at least, if the process is fair) they wouldn't be able to stop caring about doing a good job due to having a guaranteed job for life.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > [T]hey could apply to the same job. But they would have to apply and earn it again, which means that (at least, if the process is fair) they wouldn't be able to stop caring about doing a good job due to having a guaranteed job for life. But that means that a tenured professor will start acting in non-academically-independent ways at some point before their tenure is up to avoid messing up their re-applicaction. It is also quite likely that events such as departmental re-orgs could be timed around tenure expiration to eliminate specific job descriptions in order to make re-applying more difficult. You might be able to achieve the same goals though some combination of making tenure transferrable between cooperating institutions, mandatory sabbaticals, requiring review committees be partly or wholely staffed from outside the institution, etc.

LeanderK 5y ago

> We have people who study at university X, do their exams at university X, do their Ph.D. at university X under the same professors they always knew, then become postdocs working for their former supervisors and being exploited by them Independent of every other point, this is in my point of view a real problem. It happens so often and I don't understand why there's often no law that at least a postdoc at another institution has to be done.

Al-Khwarizmi 5y ago

I couldn't agree more with the former and less with the latter. I think external evaluation panels (and in particular, from a third country) are the way to go. We already have good examples, for example, in ERC grant panels. The ERC uses exactly the strategy you mention and it has an impeccable reputation, I know many people who applied with or without success but I know no one who felt treated unfairly. But I'm against blanket rules prohibiting postdocs or positions at the same place of the PhD, at least from my Southern European (Spanish) point of view. This is often touted in Southern European countries because in the US no one does that so it must be evil, so clearly we should ban it to be more like Americans and see if this makes our scientific productivity closer to theirs. But European (especially Southern European) culture is not US culture. People want to settle down, be near their loved ones, and there's nothing intrinsically bad about that that should be punished. Plus, the job market is much less dynamic so even for those who don't mind bumping around, it can be hard to reconcile with a possible spouse who has a career too. And finally, if you push people in this region to move, most of the time the result will be that they end up in a Northern European country (or the US, Canada, etc.) where they make 3x or 4x more, and never come back - once you have experienced a much better salary it's hard to justify returning, I have seen it plenty of times. Bring on the external evaluation panels, and then there will be no need for any measure forcing people to move, which would reduce inclusivity and thus the talent pool.