Moving mountains: the reforms that would push academia to new heights

About a half century or more, there was a movement to develop innovative practices in K-12 education and a small number of efforts to change the structure of post secondary education, including that of the university. Post baccalaureate systems, due in part to promotion and tenure has been slow to change with the easiest path being to proliferate the number of refereed and ranked journals, in part due to technology and Eugene Garfield's creation of the Institute of Scientific Information and further developments. There is one rather large volume focusing on the latter, The New Ph.D. which points out that the numbers surviving these programs has thinned and those who make it thru rarely achieved a post in an R1 institution. That makes the anecdotal information on baccalaureate teaching in this article almost historic. Academia has been slow to address the platform economy mostly seeing these as tools rather than the implications for systems change. Much that was understood in that past has only been recolored as innovation in the present. One volume on the future of the HEI's, particularly the post secondary programs, admonishes not to sacrifice the Queen (meaning the humanities writ large). While that might read not to drop such programs. In fact the greater insight is that, in a default, techno-driven world, it also implies a fresh look at the HEI's themselves as institutions in form, function and practice

"Academia doesn’t change easily, and many of my colleagues were sceptical that we would be able to adapt so quickly to this brave new world of online instruction" In this instance the interests of staff and management coincided. But the behaviour of institutions is determined by the policy landscape, not by what staff want. Why do university scientists falsify results? Because the prestige and good publicity following from their falsified results help the institution to navigate the policy landscape, to compete with other institutions, so it will reward the researchers - promotion, security, etc. If the policy landscape shifts slightly so that the short-term gains from spectacular but false results are outweighed by the negative consequences of discovery, the desires of the institution and of the academic staff will coincide and change will be relatively easy. If the institutions have no incentive to stop rewarding false results, things are much less likely to change. Eliminating the REF? Those exercises cast the landscape in black and white so that every institution believes it sees clearly how to maximise its chances of winning, of climbing higher in the landscape. The desires of academics will carry no weight in that matter.