Re:Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
by stinkytaco on Monday April 03, 2017 @12:25PM
(#14024166)
For the sake of discussion, do you feel measurement is a way of reducing politics and discrimination, not just creating cogs? So building to that argument:
1. Right now academia is both absurdly political and largely government funded.
2. Since you can't pay people tax money to do nothing, you need managers.
3. Academics in management roles also have their own reputations to defend or their own biases.
4. That leaves academia open for political manipulation and bias. This could have the result of limiting innovation (publish what you need to get tenure) or even limiting jobs for underrepresented groups (women in science and engineering, for example).
I don't have the answer here, but it does occur to me that objective measures can be a good thing for many people.
1. Right now academia is both absurdly political and largely government funded.
2. Since you can't pay people tax money to do nothing, you need managers.
3. Academics in management roles also have their own reputations to defend or their own biases.
4. That leaves academia open for political manipulation and bias. This could have the result of limiting innovation (publish what you need to get tenure) or even limiting jobs for underrepresented groups (women in science and engineering, for example).
I don't have the answer here, but it does occur to me that objective measures can be a good thing for many people.