3 ms·
It's true that hire and tenure decisions are under the institution's control. But a lot of funding comes from external sources, and most public funding uses som
by grumbelbart2 8mo ago
It's true that hire and tenure decisions are under the institution's control. But a lot of funding comes from external sources, and most public funding uses some sort of publication-based metric. There are exceptions, but that's the game.
The CV of your PhD's is often judged by the publication list and the corresponding citations. That's research institutes where they might go, other universities, large companies etc. will look at this. It's difficult to change this system as isolated player, and coordinates efforts so far failed on the "what else" question.
- philipallstar 8mo agoA problem with the public sector in this instance is it has money to spend, but no way of allocating it particularly well. It will just pick the best allocation metric it has available, even if that metric would never stand up to scrutiny in the private sector, or any more directly measured domain, public or private.
- ahartmetz 8mo agoI think the state could simply allocate money to long-lived scientific institutions and let the experts there handle things as long as there is no obvious corruption.
- dsr_ 8mo agoSelf-regulation has a tendency to either work well for a few years, then gradually become corrupted... or be corrupt from the beginning. A distressingly high percentage of humans like zero-sum status games. More people are happier when status is recognized as a semi-unbounded positive-sum game.
- philipallstar 8mo agoWhat does "let the experts handle things" look like in practice that's much different to fakeable impact metrics such as citation count?
- ahartmetz 8mo agoIt doesn't foster bad publication practices (volume over quality).