A team built by numbers won’t add up to much

"Finally, look at any real population of academic staff. As with any talent-based or knowledge-based activity, you’ll see not a uniform group of similarly capable, functionally equivalent individuals, but a tremendous diversity of strengths, working styles and weaknesses. That’s something to acknowledge and embrace. To wish them all to have a single functionally equivalent form makes no more sense than wishing every instrument in an orchestra were a violin" This is absolutely spot-on in accuracy. Universities tend to treat staff as uniformly capable, although the distribution of talent among the academic fraternity is quite wide. There are some excellent academic administrators, teachers and researchers at any given University; sometimes there are even those (a rarity) who are uniformly capable across all these dimensions; the great fault however, is to treat academics as if they have the same capacities and aptitudes. Not all academics will become preeminent researchers, teachers or administrators. Too often Universities fail to acknowledge the existence of differential " comparative advantages" among their staff complements. The results is a wasteful use of resources whereby, for example, universities try to make all academics researchers who are required to generate X amount of research outputs per year, when in fact they would be much better off channeling those academics who have particular abilities, aptitudes and motivation into other just-as- crucial fields such as teaching and academic administration.

How wonderful to hear some sense. It's a great shame that the writer doesn't feel able to reveal their name. Young people are mostly terrified to reveal their identity, but senior managers surely need not be scared. Or is it that you feared you'd get too many job offers? I imagine that we can be fairly confident that you don't work at Queen Mary London or at Imperial, both of which have tried to impose the sort of madness that you describe. At least that's had the advantage for the rest of us that a lot of good people want to leave for places that work in a more sensible way. More details at http://www.dcscience.net/?p=5499 and http://www.dcscience.net/?p=182

Thank you to the anonymous author of this text. Well said. @David Colquhoun: If Imperial College managers are unable to make the distinction between 1. quantifiable measures of publication (and income attraction) reflecting the mixture of an individual's research popularity, capability, connectedeness and willingness to go along with the winds of the day and 2. an informed assessment of his research quality, then I expect that Imperial College may face a decline of standards, reputation and outputs in years to come. Indeed, I know of at least one Royal Society Fellow who moved away in search of an institution that would value research more than income generation. That Queen Mary senior management has tried to copy (more than once in the past two decades) Imperial College has been imparted to me by a number of senior professors. I would ask you, however, to consider the implication of listing these two institutions as "equivalent", even in the context that for you may be embarrassing to either: Let's not play music to the ears of those in charge of Queen Mary, whose size, infrastructure and history are quantitatively and qualitatively so different to Imperial College. Queen Mary is a wonderful College, but one that serves a special niche of collegiality, inclusiveness and diversity, with pockets of research excellence and a commitment to the less privileged citizens of East London. That it has attracted colleagues and students from all over the world was and continues to be a marvel. I am confident that if the decision of Prof. Gaskell to consult with his staff meaningfully on the use of its acronym becomes the rule, better days will spring before too long in the University that offered me my first independent post to teach and do research (they never wished to hear my views on administration).

If this person is senior or a leader then he or she should be willing to put his or her name to things. That's what leadership is - head above the parapet and all that.