Who watches the watchmen!

Al

http://grahamstull.com/index.php/2009/01/14/what-s-wrong-with-testing-iq-by-race

“Strong in the force, he is”
Yoda

There will be entities out there that will tell you that they can measure such things and charge massive amounts of money to do so, but only end up ‘possibly being true’!
We need to be aware of false prophets promising a new dawn.

Having undergone many tests in my time, I am suspicious of any and all claims to proof of intelligence. (I scored high!!)

“Binet’s method thus created a black hole for thinking that problematies, penalized those who take the time required to reflect, and could not address the issue of the quality.
A good total score on the tests may dictate abandoning just those problems that really are problems. Craft abilities are applied to depth of understadning, usually focused on a particular problem, whereas IQ score represents a more superficial management of many problems”

Sennett, R. “The Craftsman” P 284

Yours
Alan

Well, it depends on your definition of genius. Wikipedia, which is never ever wrong, says genius is defined by IQ measurement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genius#IQ_Tests

But lets not get entrenched in verbiage. What counts is that we can find some measure of aptitude highly correlated with the probability of scientific breakthrough, call it ‘genius’; ‘research wow’ or whatever we like and test it to make sure our researchers have enough of it to warrant their salaries.

Not so shocked, but perhaps the term ‘ academic chair’ works rathers as a dysphemism in the popular mind. Perhaps we should call them ‘academic treadmills’ instead.

After all, we all need good marketing

Seems rather industrial………

This is not what is meant to be academe! This is merely another business!

Academic freedom? Publish on the net? Peer? Trade union or guild?

Which is why US universities, which are the best (by far) in the world, never engage in the sort of bean counting that is advocated here once tenure has been awarded.
————————————–
This simply isn’t the case. US universities are obsessed with quantitative targets. This is endemic in the US system. After tenure you need the numbers to move up to Full Prof. Stuff about how we “don’t look at numbers” is just PR nonsense.

@ GS
IQ tests have little to no correlation with genius.

@ Karl D
Seriously- is it intelligent just to look at this in terms of lecturers.
What about the standard of students????????????
I remember one teacher saying to me a few years ago:
“Give me timber and I will make you tables!”

All the best
Al

Good Stuff!!!

Graham - its mostly hard solid consistent painstaking work , not genius. Most people at chair level …shock….work very very long hours doing chair things.

Why should research be a defining factor? How about the percentage of graduates that fail a course?

With the declining standards in social and family life in Ireland third level lecturers are finding that a increasing number of todays students are unable to function without their parents helicoptering over them. When they get to 3rd level a lot of them are unable to cope with the more hands off arena of third level.

So would one downgrade the performance of a lecturer because he spends more time assisting his students and less time pumping out research waffle?

(Work Input) x (Genius) = (Research Output)

The debate is usually about measuring output. But why not take a national accounts approach, and broaden the measurement to include the lhs?

Genius we can measure through an internationally benchmarked battery of IQ tests. Work Input can be proxied by hours devoted to research - notes taken, conferences attended, models tested, etc.

Now, I know some of you Chairs might be a tad offended by the idea of having to pass a battery of quizzes, puzzles and brain teasers in order to earn your dinner, but perhaps such a system might improve output, which after all, is the goal, n’est-ce pas?

You can start with the following classic riddle:

You are the Taxpayer. Two Lecturers are applying for the same job. They both look the same (identical pipes, patches on elbows of tweed jackets etc.) but you know one is a lazy putz; while the other is a diamond in the rough. They also both know their own type. Ask one question which will guarantee that you figure out which is which.

if that is the case, what is there to compete for? reputation? much of which isn’t won on intellectual grounds alone. we need to pay the best people the best - always a good start be it in football/business/universities.

In regards to the debate here it seems folks are closer than they seem from the postings - I find it hard to disagree with the idea that salary, tenure and peer review leading to tenure is the best way to go (as in @ernie’s last post). But I don’t think it is hard to square this off with a lot of the core arguments in the Larkin/Lucey piece which are also very important (and in keeping with much of the Australian debate).

One thing - the RAE. Remember the RAE brought income - and in a nonlinear manner (so a 5 ranked department did not get 20% more than a 4 ranked). So having more of your research of international standing generated significant benefits. And the income - or the chance of income pre RAE - brought about a sizable amount of market competition for Academic staff (within the UK as well as bringing in new blood). Finally the RAE was a complement for other activities (such as a teaching assessment - something that some schools like LSE opted out of, and regular peer reviewed research grants). As such the RAE was the Government’s investment in - and reward for - blue sky research of international standing. It was the Govt’s ‘core grant’ for research invested where there was critical mass of people more than where there was the one off scholar.

I don’t believe the RAE demonstrated to any academic that was paying attention that the UK “valued research.” Quite the contrary. Presumably, if you believe that, you also believe that the US system somehow doesn’t “value research.”

Like it or not, the US system is what Ireland has to compete with internationally for staff. The features of that system: high salaries, ironclad tenure and peer review (as opposed to bureaucratic bean counting) in the lead up to tenure, are what we should be striving to emulate rather than introducing yet another “Irish solution” that is worse than the alleged “Irish problem” it is meant to solve.

The danger with this research focus is that it may be a permission slip to to ignore undergrad students remedial/babysitting problems that occur from time to time.

@Ernie
Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.

Al

just so i have this straight, unless we are willing to grant all academics iron clad life-long contracts of employment via tenure, they will be unwilling to come here? Does this not tell you that there is something very very wrong with that state of affairs in academia, and that reform, rather than continuing as-is, is what is required?

And Ernie, if you really think that Ireland is such a “woeful little island” perhaps you yourself can go where the “grass is greener” and leave the rest of us in peace.

Hmm…. I suspect youd be quite surprised there Ernie. Most decent academics quite like the idea that they would go somewhere that research is valued rather than being seen as an optional extra.

gosh, the rolling tenure idea has really piqued you …..it must have something in it!

Your solution on this seems to me shortsighted in the extreme. The problem it seems designed to solve is one that we have no evidence even exists. Namely, it’s meant to weed out the deadwood (that we assume must be there) from current university staff.

But what happens when this system is instituted and it’s time to recruit new staff? What promising young staff member (or high-profile hire) is going to want to come to this woeful little island if something like your system is implemented? You can assure them that they have nothing to worry about but that’s not the point. The point is that all this documenting of activity and jumping through hoops takes time and energy that is better spent elsewhere. Why would any self-respecting academic come here with the rolling tenure system when they could go to a US university and get ironclad tenure for life after six years? The answer is: they wouldn’t. As a result, Ireland’s universities would be substandard, filled with second-rate busy-workers and those who aren’t good enough to go to where the grass is greener.

It’s interesting to me that economists of all people, who are constantly reminding us that Ireland needs to be “competitive” internationally, are wont to propose such measure that do nothing but make Ireland uncompetitive in the worldwide hunt for academic staff.

It’d be interesting to know how many international competitions for staff UK universities won after the implementation of the RAE. My guess is: not many.

This seems a rather minimal definition of tenure - is it proposed that after 5-7 years it will be OK to dismiss academics “by reason of pursuit of unpopular, unfashionable or dissenting research”? And if the untenured don’t have that much protection then are those pursuing unpopular etc. research going to get tenure in the first place?

Surely longwinded comments are worth more than the shortwinded kind. After all, that’s the only metric we have.

That’s not what I’d take to be a considered response to my post. And you’re not posting on politics.ie, therefore the appropriate place to respond to you is here, not there.

We can agree that quality requires activity as a prerequisite. But we cannot agree that activity is the same thing as publication. And because you seem to think that activity and publication are synonyms, everything else I wrote is waiting for your answer.

What is your problem with “Research activity and research quality are only loosely related, but quality requires activity as a prerequisite.”. Its in fact tautological that no quantity = no quality.

And that btw is one small part of the whole argument.

Turn down the rant filter, or take it to P.ie . Try to take a look at the whole argument Ernie, and take a chill pill.

Your proposed redefinition of “tenure” is nothing short of an assault on academic freedom. Which of these three principles do you disagree with?:

1) Academic research cannot be judged without being read and it can only be judged by someone sufficiently expert in the field.
2) Academic work cannot be read (and cannot be judged) until it is published.
3) The researcher alone decides when the work is ready to be published.

Is it your view that prolificness (prolificacy?), in and of itself, is a desirable quality in a researcher? If so, do you also feel the same about teachers? Should we be judging them by the number of words or sentences spoken per class?

Einstein wasn’t an academic when he published his 5 papers that changed the face of modern physics. But if he were and had he the misfortune to work in an Irish university in 2020, I can imagine him being denied tenure in favour of some other guy, Schmeinstein, who published 10 papers that were immediately forgotten.

Honestly, does anyone think:

1) That governments and their appointed bureaucrats are well positioned to make decisions about what sort of academic work should be “incentivised”?
2) That churning out lots and lots of make-work (in the appropriate journals!) is more desirable than considered research that, in some fields (obviously Economics is not one of them) takes a lot of time?

And what are these elusive “measurable and externally verifiable outputs”?

Was Heidegger 10 times the philosopher Kant was because he published 30 major works and Kant only published 3?

Here’s a corollary to my previous rule for evaluating departments (to wit: The more the members of an academic department care about idiotic and arbitrary rankings, the worse the department is.):

The more interested a university is in counting the “outputs” of its academic staff, the worse it is.

And lest you think that this is a mere correlation (e.g., Harvard doesn’t have to count outputs) let me put it more starkly:

Counting outputs makes a university worse.

Why? Because you “incentivise” the wrong things. Which is a way of reminding you of something you seem to have forgotten: if you see the aim of a university as innovation and discovery, you work at cross-purposes if you think you’re going to “administer” or “channel” such innovation (which is why the very notion of a “Vice-President for Innovation” is little more than a sick joke) and you especially do so if you think what matters is the measurable number of “outputs.” The Nobel Committee recognises this, which is why they award the annual prize in Economics to “a person who has written a work on economic sciences of the eminent significance expressed in the will of Alfred Nobel drawn up on November 27, 1895.” [emphasis mine]. Notice: a work of eminent significance. No amount of bibliometrics can tell us what is significant. And significance is all that matters in this game. Everything else is busy work. Which is why US universities, which are the best (by far) in the world, never engage in the sort of bean counting that is advocated here once tenure has been awarded. Tenure is ironclad there because it frees the researcher to pursue the sort of time-consuming and even unpopular projects that the business cycle and the bureaucrat–focussed as they are on the bottom line and the immediate present–would not allow.

Which is to say that, if your system were implemented, more would be produced but little of it would be of any significance.