I posted the first link I was sent about the situation at the University of Sydney yesterday, in the long message about email. It is worth a look – a statement by a large number of faculty members about the plan for people who have not produced four research outputs (books, chapters, articles etc.) in three years to be moved to teaching-only contracts or sacked. Henry Barnes provides some context here, suggesting many of the problems are self-inflicted. The University’s policy is here (appendix one).
In the comments to these articles Alex Burns dissents from the standard critical view. To his mind, the expectation is not that high, and people who fail to hit these targets are simply not organising their work effectively. His response is to point out a number of project management advice books that people should be reading in order to know how “to outmaneuver such decision rules and the administrative, finance and management staff who formulate them”. But he is pointing these out for the running of research projects and article writing.
I’ve mentioned some of the organisational things I do on this blog in the past, but I hope it’s clear that these are for the other parts of my job – organisation of email; how to edit a big journal; how to deal with other tasks. I try to be as efficient as possible in those things, in order to protect or free up time to work on research. Research – reading, thinking, writing – is the oasis in the managerial desert, it’s the one thing I don’t quantify, measure, overly bureaucratise etc. Others might, but you can resist that, not by beating them at their own game, but by continuing to have a love of the material, an inspiration in the search, and a willingness to be surprised or to change tack. I try to act the same way in the classroom – while the bureaucracy of teaching drives me crazy, I hope that my enthusiasm for the material comes across when in the presence of students. If we turn these parts of our job into an extension of the rest, then we might as well pack up and become civil servants or finance managers.
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This is pointed out in at least one of the pieces you link, but there are at least two reasons why this four-outputs criterion is utterly unfair. The first is that staff were given no indication that this criterion would apply when they were doing their research in this period, hence no matter how organised yet were, they were not organised towards this target. Secondly, it’s not necessarily possible to reach publications targets by organisation alone. The peer reviewing process (or lack thereof) is aleatory enough that research does not automatically translate into an output no matter how it has been done.
Thanks Mark. In my wish to challenge Alex Burns’s managerial approach I probably didn’t say enough about the proposals themselves. I agree completely about the problem of a retrospective target and that it doesn’t take account of the variability of peer review. It’s a very blunt and unfair instrument to deal with a problem that appears to be a result of mismanagement.
Another interesting thing about this is the uneven impact this would have across disciplines. In the sciences, publication is usualy in the form of articles which report on research and often with multiple authors. This is in contrast with publication in the humanities and some social sciences where the writing itself is the ‘research’ in terms of the working through of concepts and usually single authored. This takes a lot longer and doesn’t generate as much sheer quantity. So, if one were paranoid, one could read this move as yet another part of the ongoing campaign to cull the humanities in universities.
Another (obvious) question – what counts as ‘output’? Is a blog one output or are individual posts counted as separate outputs – or even (of course) do blogs count at all?
Thanks Clare. There are important differences between disciplines certainly. The University’s policy is clear about what counts (http://sydney.edu.au/staff/leadership/budget/change.shtml#appendix1):
Eligible research outputs
•Must meet the definition of “research” in the ERA 2010 Submission Guidelines
•Must have been published or made publicly available over the period from 1 January 2009 to 4 November 2011 (the Assessment Period)
•Must be an eligible research output type as defined in the ERA 2010 Submission Guidelines, for example:
– Books – authored research
– Book chapters in research books
– Journal articles – refereed, scholarly journal
– Conference publications – full paper, refereed
– Original creative works
– Live performance of creative works
– Recorded/rendered creative works; and
– Curated or produced substantial public exhibitions and events.
No room for blogs, though that is hardly surprising. Perhaps more worrying is the absence of editing a book – clearly a lot more work than just writing a chapter in it. Translation doesn’t appear to count either. That said, it is more generous than what many departments count as a sufficient output, for research assessment or tenure, where the article is the gold standard and a book may or may not be valued, depending on the discipline. But getting a book valued as more than one unit is very difficult. Again, to be fair, the policy does provide for exceptions: “This would ensure that consideration is given to factors such as where a staff member has produced one or two substantial works, has made significant progress towards a substantial work or has appropriate works pending publication”. The biggest problem – as Mark identified – is that people did not know they would be judged by this criteria in advance.