All Stick, No Carrot--How to Judge Scholarship

All stick and no carrot characterizes a common administrative approach to improving the quality of academic programs at state universities. 

There are several problems with the punitive approach to fostering quality scholarship and teaching: the first involves the long term effectiveness of bullying people to work harder—as soon as the pressure is off, they start to relax.  Threats work only as long as they are applied.  Far more effective motivations are ambition, desire and a competitive urge.  Punitive measures dull these forms of inspiration by discouraging independent thinking.

A second problem with the unwavering and strict application of narrow standards is that all shades of nuance are lost in the process of pressing all scholars into the same mold.  For example, the demand that assistant professors publish in flagship journals ignores the often complex relations within academic disciplines.  Cutting edge research is often not published in the mainstream journals.  If you have an assistant professor engaged in truly innovative research, requiring them to publish in flagship journals functions as a brake on their thinking. 

Mainstream journals tend to be quite conservative; they are often the last journals to adopt new ideas, rather than the first.  Institutions are certainly capable of recognizing this tendency.  At the elite coastal universities, it is often taken as a sign of mediocrity, if a scholar publishes in a “flagship” journal. 

Before coming to my current position at a state university, I was taught that you wanted to avoid these journals at all costs because by publishing in them, you showed everyone that you could not do better and that you really had nothing new to say. 

State universities in the middle of the US often look resentfully at Ivy League expectations as just so much snobbery, while the coastal elite see state universities’ mainstream tendencies as sign of plodding backwardness.  What both sides overlook, of course, are the insecurities behind both standards. 

State universities tend to overemphasize bureaucratic standards and procedures because they fundamentally do not have the confidence required decide what constitutes “quality” scholarship.  Is an article really innovative?  State university administrators fundamentally do not trust their faculty to judge; instead they want indicators, such as the ranking of the journal in which an article appears. 

Ivy League universities on the other hand live for the marginal difference between institutions.  They want to always demonstrate that they are better than other institutions, not just their peers, but more importantly they want to keep a long distance between themselves and all other universities in the world.  Thus, they will emphasize innovation over mainstream consensus and conformity. 

The trouble with this approach is that often an argument that seems radically new has only a short lifespan and once a trendy line of reasoning has passed, little remains of the argument and the scholar who made it.  Thus the double insecurity of the Ivy League department: is this young scholar truly innovative and will he/she continue to innovate in the long run. 

Ivy League academics want to know fundamentally whether someone is really and truly brilliant, the indicators that state universities require ultimately matter little in elite departments, in fact, those indicators tend to operate negatively—the more you publish in mainstream journals, the less clever you are.