VC's corner
People are still the key indicators
Numbers, metrics and KPIs must never replace a university’s unique and vital mission. By Celia Hammond.
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Numbers, metrics and KPIs must never replace a university’s unique and vital mission. By Celia Hammond.
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Your graduate is absolutely correct.
Thanks – SB – an academic in the state of NSW
Excellent points. The part of the traditional university ethos that I feel is vanishing is the simple, uncluttered time to think creatively. This can’t be done by “metric”. It can’t be done by splitting university schools into “research” and “teaching” sub-sets (in different buildings in our case). While massive emphasis is being placed on writing papers, there seems to be no awareness that scientific papers also need to be read! And in my small area alone there are multiple papers to read every week, to keep up with the latest in the field. I guess we are supposed to do that in our “spare” time. i.e. after hours and at weekends. While all around us is the pretence that we are encouraged to preserve a “work/life balance”.
The very thing that most favours true creativity: the unfettered opportunity to speculate, float ideas, consider apparently wild concepts, has been consumed by meetings to discuss a bunch of counter-creative obligations that are thrust upon us as part of our “block” allocation. And every meeting requires preparation and documentation, so that we academics lose still more of the time in which we are expected to be productive.
Keith Gregg
I think many academics would agree with this, and express their views if they could. But the dominance of the statistical approach, KPIs, etc., often means that these views are discounted by those who should be listening.
It is important to remember that such as KPIs do not reflect the purpose of universities (or commercial organisations for that matter), but are bureaucratic tools to help in the achievement in these purposes, but should not replace them.
The purposes themselves can usually only be expressed qualitatively, or at the very least by a much more multidimensional metric.
Although academics have themselves to blame for the drift into the numerical approach by emphasising, e.g., the number of publications rather than their quality or impact on knowledge, we are now rules by accountants and bureaucrats whose primary skills are classifying and counting, not reflecting or creating things.
Perhaps little universities like Notre Dame can shame the larger ones into focussing more on their real purpose in society.