Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research

A couple of months ago, the dean of the college, where I teach reviewed my work over the past few years and declared that it essentially amounted to me being on the "mashed potato circuit" ... I asked him whether writing in a third- or fourth-rate journal that nobody ever reads was really worth it.  His response was even more classic--that "bean counting" was his responsibility.  (Yes, the phrases in quotes are the dean's very words!)

As I wrote in an essay in the Chronicle Review, almost ten years ago, most of the academic "research" is pretentious work that will not sell even for penny, or for a kopek according to Anton Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" that I quoted in that essay.  I am hoping that the financial urgency will force higher education to review its bizarre facade of scholarship, before the public figures it out as much as Uncle Vanya figured it out ...

In this essay in the recent Chronicle Review, the authors note:

We need policy makers and grant makers to focus not on money for current levels of publication, but rather on finding ways to increase high-quality work and curtail publication of low-quality work. If only some forward-looking university administrators initiated changes in hiring and promotion criteria and ordered their libraries to stop paying for low-cited journals, they would perform a national service. We need to get rid of administrators who reward faculty members on printed pages and downloads alone, deans and provosts "who can't read but can count," as the saying goes. Most of all, we need to understand that there is such a thing as overpublication, and that pushing thousands of researchers to issue mediocre, forgettable arguments and findings is a terrible misuse of human, as well as fiscal, capital.

The authors list a few suggestions for reform.  What is their bottom line?

Best of all, our suggested changes would allow academe to revert to its proper focus on quality research and rededicate itself to the sober pursuit of knowledge. And it would end the dispiriting paper chase that turns fledgling inquirers into careerists and established figures into overburdened grouches.

Here is the ultimate kicker: the authors are, implicitly, referring to the research universities.  If this is their set of observations on the happenings at research universities, then one can easily imagine the state of "research" at the vast number of universities that are not research universities but teaching universities ....

In another essay, elsewhere at InsideHigherEd, Arthur Levine notes that rapidly widening gap between "Digital students, Industrial-era universities" :

[It] is important to ask how much colleges and universities need to change. In 1828, facing industrialization and a Connecticut legislature that disapproved of Yale’s classical curriculum, the Yale faculty responded with a report which asked, in part, whether the college needed to change a lot or a little. This, Yale’s faculty said, was the wrong question. The question to be asked, they argued, was: What is the purpose of a college? This remains the right question today.

Ahem, 20 years ago, the late Ernest Boyer wrote about this issue of the need to (re)establish the priorities of the professoriate!