Academics Not Productive Enough? Sack 'em

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."

Comments

That'll work well.

[sethstorm]

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.

[Samantha Wright]

Yes. Any questions?

Re:That'll work well.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Of course not. How could quality be going down if the metric we are using because it is easy and convenient is going up? That would be difficult to model and therefore unthinkable. Why, it might even require me to have some subject-matter knowledge in the areas that my human resources do! I am way too focused on lining my bookshelf with copies of books about management fads for shit like that.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd recommend a study on it. Seriously, right now unless you want to lose your job.

Re:That'll work well.

[TheRaven64]

In general, I'd agree, but publishing just over one paper per year shouldn't be hard for any moderately competent researcher. At the very least, they can publish something saying 'we tried this approach, and now we can show why it's a bad idea'.

Re:That'll work well.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Coryoth]

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 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.

[hvm2hvm]

In the short run you are better just continuing with the next approach. However if all the people keep publishing said "failures" and constantly look for other researchers' failures then in the long run, everyone does more research because they know what attempts are going to fail beforehand.

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.

[godrik]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[crmarvin42]

This isn't necessarily an "either/or" senario. Writting up negative results is just as important as writing up positive ones. That way other researchers in the field know what not to try. My bias comes from the life sciences, where a lack of expected response to a product is just as important as its presence. You may not want to go out and write up a full journal article, and instead go the route of presenting an abstract at a relevent conference, but that still counts as a 'research output' most places, even if it is of lesser impact than a journal article.

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.

[Ihmhi]

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.

[crmarvin42]

...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.

[j33px0r]

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 professional organization.

With that being said, firing someone because their articles were not in the "Top Five" journals of their field is a little ridiculous if you consider how many universities, professors, and researchers are out there. Those journals can only handle so many articles, and even then the articles must align with the theme of the issue.

Re:That'll work well.

[ceoyoyo]

Most conferences will publish method and interm report abstracts. Many journals will also publish novel method papers.

Re:That'll work well.

[PlatyPaul]

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.

Re:That'll work well.

[elrous0]

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.

[Colonel Korn]

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:That'll work well.

[iamwahoo2]

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:That'll work well.

[Attila Dimedici]

Except that Oxford did not "put up with that". Andrew Wiles was only at Oxford from 1988-1990 according to your wikipeia link. He appears from that link to be have been a professor at Princeton for much of the time that he spent working on his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. It is not clear whether or not he was teaching classes during the time that he was at Princeton.

Re:That'll work well.

[BeardedChimp]

If you don't publish, what prevents people from investing time in that less effective scheduling algorithm again and again?

Re:That'll work well.

[luis_a_espinal]

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.

[Tim C]

Good lord, are you mad!? Don't waste time studying it, get publishing papers now!!

Re:That'll work well.

[gnick]

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:That'll work well.

[MisterSquid]

As a researcher writing papers is part of your job.
Almost every job requires you to do something that sucks.

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.

[MisterSquid]

Teaching 2-3 courses per semester is a part-time job and they are not typically paying you to be a member of a professional organization.

As a former academic at a research university, I can say you know not whereof you speak.

Re:That'll work well.

[gnapster]

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.

Re:That'll work well.

[FrangoAssado]

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). Basically, the story goes something like this:

Robert Millikan, which was already a famous experimental physicist, published a (now famous) experiment that determined the charge of a single electron. 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:That'll work well.

[hairyfeet]

Has anyone else noticed that the word "quality" has become almost a dirty word, a word one never utters unless its with nostalgia for when people and companies actually gave a shit? Now some of it you can blame on the government because getting rid of lead solder was just fucking stupid because the amount of waste being made from devices failing earlier is causing more pollution than the lead was, but as we see in TFA even universities are getting into the "We don't give a shit about quality, just crank that shit out" business.

Personally i think its sad how everything is becoming cheap and plastic and worthless, that's what it really is. Hell you can't even spend more and get quality as all you'll get is the same crap and if the company has a problem with the crap they'll just rig it so it'll last one day past the warranty and fuck you over, HP Nvidia laptop anyone? Maybe its just me but it seemed that people used to take pride in things, take pride in doing a good job, but not anymore. Now its get in, get out, get paid, fuck everything else. Now we are gonna see science and learning become yet more crap factories, just churning out endless piles of stupid useless shit to meet some stupid quota. Damned shame is what it is, just a damned shame.

Re:That'll work well.

[mbkennel]

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.

[lahvak]

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.

[flyingsquid]

According to the CV on the Princeton website, Andrew Wiles published 24 papers from 1977 to 2008, which averages out to less than a paper a year. So it clearly is possible to be a highly respected, important, and influential academic while publishing relatively few papers, and obviously quantity of papers isn't the best way to measure things.

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:That'll work well.

[martin-boundary]

Because university administrators don't care about Science, they care about parking fees and paying for buildings and maintaining the greens.

Re:That'll work well.

[sg_oneill]

Books and book chapters will likely contribute to "research output"

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".

In academia, we don't say. . .

[MagusSlurpy]

. . ."publish or perish" just because we appreciate alliteration.

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[TheRaven64]

And for people outside academia, here's the obligatory SMBC...

Re:In academia, we don't say. . .

[Coryoth]

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".

Game show?

[owenferguson]

Surely they could make this into some sort of a reality TV gameshow. "So you think you can publish!" People from the general public could read the various works, and vote by phone for who gets kicked out...

Good riddance

[SirBitBucket]

There are far too many in "accedemia" who just get tenure and do nothing. How about schools focus on TEACHING, specifically undergrads.... Universities these days just worry about publishing and other things that get them grants, but don't care too much about the students, especially the undergrads, which is all the degree most of them are going to get... Put people out in their field and they will learn far more in a week than in a semester of school.

Re:Good riddance

[mwvdlee]

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

[nine-times]

The purpose of modern universities is not to teach students. They are businesses which make money by providing a resort town to 20-somethings, runing minor-league professional sports teams, and doing scientific research. The whole "education" thing is just a method of attracting 20-somethings to their resort, and publishing attracts more students than good classes do.

Re:Good riddance

[robthebloke]

Ex-Lecturer here! There are two aspects to every university. On one hand you have the academics. On the other you have the financial and admin side. Most academics care a great deal for their students! They may appear a bit aloof, they may appear to be thinking about other things, they may appear somewhat dis-interested in students, but if you understand what happens behind closed doors, you'd understand why. Most meetings between academics and admin depts go like this:

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.

Tenure

[Relayman]

That's why we have tenure in the United States. "Publish or perish" exists until the professor gets tenure and then it's not as much as an issue any more.

Re:Tenure

[O('_')O_Bush]

Or to prevent mixing whackos with experts breaking ground in radical directions. That is what tenure is supposed to grant, the freedom and protection to go iin new directions or challenge conventional paradigms without fear of being discarded for going against the status quo.

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

[Samantha Wright]

Yes; instead it ensures that they learn from apathetic and chronically absent professors. In some Canadian university departments we actually have a system of accountability for lecturers based on students' opinions; in the CS department where I'm doing my undergrad, a Scantron-based survey is incorporated into the decision to give raises. Even tenured bigshots who rake in huge multi-million dollar medical grants are prone. I've seen other departments also send out a round of automated e-mail when considering professors for tenure. The whole system works wonders for preventing the kinds of abuses and irregularities that might occur elsewhere.

Re:Tenure

[sohmc]

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

[Lehk228]

the purpose of tenure is to protect professors who do research into controversial and unpopular topics and ideas, it's a counterweight against groupthink and peer pressure

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

[Samantha Wright]

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, 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

[crmarvin42]

I don't think it's teaching that requires tenure, but research that encourages its use, and at least 3 reasons stick out in my mind.

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...

[buddyglass]

Good? If you're not teaching full-time then you'd better be publishing. If you're not teaching or publishing, what the hell are you doing? A hard quota on papers-per-time-period seems like a terrible idea, but sacking guys who legitimately aren't producing (or moving them to full-time teaching) seems like a no-brainer. Unless, of course, you have some Nobel laureate on staff and want to keep him around just to beef up your department's "cred".

Re:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

Except that the demand for publishing lots of papers results in:

1. Researchers chasing low-hanging fruit and ignoring hard problems.
2. Researchers taking one good result and publishing lots of tiny variations on that result, essentially publishing the same paper over and over again.
3. Lack of cooperation and secrecy among researchers

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...

[gardyloo]

If you're not teaching or publishing, what the hell are you doing?

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:Dare I say...

[betterunixthanunix]

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:Dare I say...

[Anonymous Coward]

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 (accountability). Finally, you need to publish - which can be a very time consuming process since most graduate students and post docs now are not native English speakers. This all assumes that the experiments work. Keep in mind that during all this, you need to keep writing more grants so that the people you just hired are funded past 2 years. Depending on the source, the probability of being funded ranges from 3-20%, so most grant proposals written are a waste of time.

After obtaining tenure, one is also expected to start performing more administrative-level functions. This includes spending countless hours serving on departmental, college, and university-level committees for all sorts of things. This is a huge use of your time but a necessary evil since your needs may not be met if you don't participate.

On top of all this, you need to keep on top of what is happening in your field and current pedagogy, teach, and deal with all of the issues students have - and there are many.

Academia at research-oriented universities has become a mad scramble for money and the students are the ones who suffer. The typically academic with a research appointment works many more hours per week than someone in industry and usually for 50-70% of the pay. Yes there are lazy ones, but after spending years doing that job I feel that it is partially earned!

Re:publish shit!

[ArieKremen]

Already Exists: The Journal of Irreproducible Results (http://www.jir.com/)

Doesn't make sense.

[langelgjm]

So, how exactly will firing professors for not publishing "enough" encourage professors to care more about students and teaching, and less about publishing?

Re:Doesn't make sense.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Don't you have that backwards?

[pavon]

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?

[mx b]

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?

Seems fairly reasonable

[MikeRT]

Another 64 academics were told they had a choice between leaving and moving to a teaching-only position, he said

If the teaching-only position is an option for most of them, then that seems to be a reasonable compromise. The West simply doesn't have the money anymore to throw at professors who are neither prolific researchers nor teachers. There are plenty of students who work very hard for the university who could benefit from having their stipends increased by cannibalizing the salaries of "researchers" who don't really publish much of anything.

I think this quote might hint at who is really being targeted:

“The mood is bloody,” agreed Jake Lynch, Director of the university’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. “The union accurately reflects the frustration of many researchers.”

There are a lot of humanities, liberal arts and social sciences professors who claim to be "researchers" but aren't productive in any sense that the sciences or engineering disciplines would recognize. Based on the friends I had in the sciences and engineering, I can't believe that most of the professors overseeing the researcher graduate students aren't regarded as highly productive by their universities because they put in solid time and effort every year at the very least guiding the researchers doing the grunt work. Admittedly, that's an American experience, but I have a feeling that their College of Arts and Letters, not Science and Engineering, is what is starting to feel the bean counters' medusa-like gaze...

While student enrollments are increasing...

[bigsexyjoe]

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.

[GauteL]

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!

[GiantRobotMonster]

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

[geogob]

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.

I've got tenure, suckers!

[in10se]

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! Do something!
Mayor Poopenmayer: I wish I could, but he's got tenure.

Publications bad measuring tool for productivity

[Reverse Gear]

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.