I could not agree more, Terry! In case it's helpful for your readers, a lot of my work these days is to create conceptual tools and action plans that help academics (especially scientists, with our traditional prestige and funding) recognize, leverage, and enact their power to improve academia. Here are some of my tools-as-papers that I think have genuine capacity to help us do this better:
1. Merkle, B.G., E.D. Broder, and R.M. 2025. Tinghitella. Embracing the butterfly effect: Institutions must support the individuals actively enhancing capacity for broader impacts. In press at Research Management Review.
2. Fisher, R.♦, M. Kocher*, J. Clapp, and B.G. Merkle♦#~. 2024. Meaningful results with limited resources: Evidence from a program to support graduate students’ scholarly writing. College Teaching early view: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2024.2407121
3. Broder, E.D.♦, B.G. Merkle♦, M. Balgopal, E. Weigel, S. Murphy, J.J. Caffrey, E. Hebets, A. Sher, J. Gumm, J. Lee, C. Schell, and R. Tinghitella♦. 2024. Use your power for good: An applied framework for overcoming institutional injustices impeding SciComm in the academy. BioScience 74(11): 747-769.
4. Barrile, G.M.*, R.F. Bernard, R.C. Wilcox*, J.A. Becker, M.E. Dillon, R.R. Thomas-Kuzilik*, S.P. Bombaci, and B.G. Merkle#. 2023. Equity, community, and accountability: leveraging a department-level climate survey as a tool for action. PLOS One. 18(8): e0290065. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290065
If these are at all helpful, please let me know! Because, as you said, we need alt metrics for review and promotion, and the wider adoption of work like this can be such a metric, even or especially if users do not also create publications to cite this work. And, given the academic prestige paradigm's disincentives, this kind of work is fated to be undercited.
100%. This is also the lever needed to get US scientists through our current disaster. Changing tenure criteria is one way to move us out of such dependence on federal $$ for career advancement.
I agree with most of this! I don’t think I would be supportive of anonymous letters, however, as we know anonymous student course evaluations have myriad biases. In the CSU system (at least at Cal Poly Humboldt) no letters used for RTP can be anonymous.
Clearly there are so many biases baked into course evaluations by students that these have very limited utility and they can very readily be harmful. I think that with former research mentees, who had been doing research with a professor for a year or longer, the situation is rather different. Also, one or two aggrieved students is a different matter than documented patterns of behavior of exploiting labor, disregarding safety regulations, depriving students of authorship who earned it, etc.
I have thought for many years that the bar for advancement has risen exponentially. What used to give you tenure now just gets you an interview. Too much stuff goes into tenure files, which encourages people to count things (pubs, $$) or practice false quantification (student evaluation scores). I'd like to see (even in my department) only three papers submitted to the file that represent intellectual progress as an assistant professor, including pedagogy scholarship. These could then be evaluated for quality by three senior faculty members. The CV could give the complete list, and senior faculty could look up other papers in Google Scholar if they wish. Proposals should not go in the tenure file, but the complete list of funding should be in the CV. Do not count dollars, but evaluate whether the candidate has developed an adequate and stable funding plan to support their research. Student evaluations are always very misleading. Our department has for a long time had two faculty known for their teaching sit in on three lectures of every course the candidate teaches, meet with the candidate, and write a report on teaching quality. We encourage that this be done twice for every course before tenure. This is far more useful for highlighting quality and discovering problems that need to be addressed than the student evaluation bubble charts. Finally, no one needs ten letters of recommendation. Five should suffice and, if the letter writers are carefully chosen, three will do.
I could not agree more, Terry! In case it's helpful for your readers, a lot of my work these days is to create conceptual tools and action plans that help academics (especially scientists, with our traditional prestige and funding) recognize, leverage, and enact their power to improve academia. Here are some of my tools-as-papers that I think have genuine capacity to help us do this better:
1. Merkle, B.G., E.D. Broder, and R.M. 2025. Tinghitella. Embracing the butterfly effect: Institutions must support the individuals actively enhancing capacity for broader impacts. In press at Research Management Review.
2. Fisher, R.♦, M. Kocher*, J. Clapp, and B.G. Merkle♦#~. 2024. Meaningful results with limited resources: Evidence from a program to support graduate students’ scholarly writing. College Teaching early view: 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/87567555.2024.2407121
3. Broder, E.D.♦, B.G. Merkle♦, M. Balgopal, E. Weigel, S. Murphy, J.J. Caffrey, E. Hebets, A. Sher, J. Gumm, J. Lee, C. Schell, and R. Tinghitella♦. 2024. Use your power for good: An applied framework for overcoming institutional injustices impeding SciComm in the academy. BioScience 74(11): 747-769.
4. Barrile, G.M.*, R.F. Bernard, R.C. Wilcox*, J.A. Becker, M.E. Dillon, R.R. Thomas-Kuzilik*, S.P. Bombaci, and B.G. Merkle#. 2023. Equity, community, and accountability: leveraging a department-level climate survey as a tool for action. PLOS One. 18(8): e0290065. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290065
If these are at all helpful, please let me know! Because, as you said, we need alt metrics for review and promotion, and the wider adoption of work like this can be such a metric, even or especially if users do not also create publications to cite this work. And, given the academic prestige paradigm's disincentives, this kind of work is fated to be undercited.
100%. This is also the lever needed to get US scientists through our current disaster. Changing tenure criteria is one way to move us out of such dependence on federal $$ for career advancement.
I agree with most of this! I don’t think I would be supportive of anonymous letters, however, as we know anonymous student course evaluations have myriad biases. In the CSU system (at least at Cal Poly Humboldt) no letters used for RTP can be anonymous.
Clearly there are so many biases baked into course evaluations by students that these have very limited utility and they can very readily be harmful. I think that with former research mentees, who had been doing research with a professor for a year or longer, the situation is rather different. Also, one or two aggrieved students is a different matter than documented patterns of behavior of exploiting labor, disregarding safety regulations, depriving students of authorship who earned it, etc.
I have thought for many years that the bar for advancement has risen exponentially. What used to give you tenure now just gets you an interview. Too much stuff goes into tenure files, which encourages people to count things (pubs, $$) or practice false quantification (student evaluation scores). I'd like to see (even in my department) only three papers submitted to the file that represent intellectual progress as an assistant professor, including pedagogy scholarship. These could then be evaluated for quality by three senior faculty members. The CV could give the complete list, and senior faculty could look up other papers in Google Scholar if they wish. Proposals should not go in the tenure file, but the complete list of funding should be in the CV. Do not count dollars, but evaluate whether the candidate has developed an adequate and stable funding plan to support their research. Student evaluations are always very misleading. Our department has for a long time had two faculty known for their teaching sit in on three lectures of every course the candidate teaches, meet with the candidate, and write a report on teaching quality. We encourage that this be done twice for every course before tenure. This is far more useful for highlighting quality and discovering problems that need to be addressed than the student evaluation bubble charts. Finally, no one needs ten letters of recommendation. Five should suffice and, if the letter writers are carefully chosen, three will do.