Talking leadership 7: Rianne Letschert on how academics are assessed

"she was delighted when several younger academics responded defending the system" - not surprising. it would be interesting to see how many of the 142 professors who signed would have progressed as much and as quickly as they did if the standards they want to impose on others were in place when they started their careers. Maybe in this particular case they all would have done it with ease. But all too often the ones who want to draw up the ladder the most after they have made it are those that got away with it. When one questions them, the common excuse is that " that was then..now times have changed". What a strong and visionary leader. Hats off to her!

Interesting.

"Letschert gives the example of an assistant professor of law who excels in innovative teaching methods: “His passion is not to write more law articles in legal journals. His passion is to build the best education for the law school.” Under the old system this meant he would never progress beyond assistant professor." Me in a nutshell... *sigh*

I have been developing a set of "Characteristics of Excellence" for faculty that address many of the various skills that faculty evaluation should be based on. The list can be found at https://bra.in/3p7zoJ

Your list is a great start indeed. One needs to think about how these things can be captured automatically, how they are to be weighted and combined, and finally how evaluation is linked to actual outcomes for staff - not just on the incentive side but on the negative side as well. For junior faculty there is always the threat of not being promoted but what about those at the professorial level? The other point is that for all of these characteristics there is likely to be a range, but these are called characteristics of excellence. How does one distinguish between average, good and excellent? or is it excellent/fail? - if that is the case then some thesholds have to be set. So for example 3 papers is excellent (so 2 papers would be a fail)?) or say one grant worth at least 500K is excellent (so a grant of 450K would be a fail?). One way out would be to specify the characteristics and then say what the thesholds are for average, good and excellent. Anyway, having a list of characteristics, that is publicly laid out is itself a brilliant start.

Good research is an order of magnitude different from other tasks.

Sure, the weight on research should reflect its importance. The issue is what criteria are used to rate research as average, good or excellent and who decides this? Is this process transparent and objective? can those evaluations be crossed checked by anyone easily? Often "exellent" research is used as a stick against those on research contracts. To compound the issue, "some" on teaching contracts dont seem to have a criteria which is of this said order of magnitude harder. Also explains why many not so good researchers go into to management and earn good money.