Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
1–10 of 313 posts
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#2Please look at the comments section of that post too.
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#3>as soon as you try to measure how well people are doing, they will switch to optimising for whatever you’re measuring, rather than putting their best efforts into actually doing good work
Similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect ?
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#4>as soon as you try to measure how well people are doing, they will switch to optimising for whatever you’re measuring, rather than putting their best efforts into actually doing good work Similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect ?
The Hawthorne effect describes how any change in environment can temporarily lead to positive effects. The sentence you quote is more akin to Goodhart's law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law).
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#5> as soon as you try to measure how well people are doing, they will switch to optimising for whatever you’re measuring, rather than putting their best efforts into actually doing good work.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle has found a new refuge. While atoms are evading it ([1]), people implement it.
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/atomic-spins-evad...
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#6While I think there is a lot of truth to this, I don't see how it can effectively be applied to our existing educational institutions. They've sort of become a self-serving bureaucracy at this point, so even without misguided policy pushing them in the wrong direction, I don't think doing the best work they can is actually their primary focus.
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#7>"could it possibly be … that the best way to get good research and publications out of scholars is to hire good people, pay them the going rate and tell them to do the job to the best of their ability?"
Sounds very reasonable. Does anybody have good examples of this approach? I have the impression that this is similar to the environment of Bell Labs during the "golden years".
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#8I'm sure this resonates with university lecturers all over the Western world. The late writer and university academic Mark Fisher has some interesting points about this effect in his 2009 book "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?"[0]. He saw it as an inevitable byproduct of the infiltration of neo-liberal ideology into the academic sphere. Setting targets and measuring performance indicators are justified with efficiency arguments, but ultimately cause an increase in bureaucracy and a decline in mental health.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_there_n...
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#9I'm sure this resonates with university lecturers all over the Western world. The late writer and university academic Mark Fisher has some interesting points about this effect in his 2009 book "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?"[0]. He saw it as an inevitable byproduct of the infiltration of neo-liberal ideology into the academic sphere. Setting targets and measuring performance indicators are justified wi…
I have often argued that "being realist" is a failure in and of itself. If people said "well, there's a king and that's what it is", we'd never have got to where we are now.
Ideologies (and ideas) are, in my view, stronger than facts, which often only represent the past, while ideas shape the future.
(these days the word "fact" is a bit of a trigger, but I thought about that well before all that jazz, and the current phenomenom seemed to prove my point to many of my friends)
Re: Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
#10Reminds me of James C. Scott's "Seeing like a State", which chronicles how various attempts to make complex, organically developed institutions organized and intelligible has historically made things much, much worse, from planned cities to collective farms. If it ain't broke...