We need a more complex model of faculty productivity

By Maureen Mancuso. In my last column, I argued that, like it or not, we as faculty members need to participate in and lead the effort to define and measure our own productivity. The alternative is to allow others to determine the tools and scales of measurement, and try to live with the inevitable distortions, oversimplifications and skewed incentives that result. The first step is to insist that productivity measurements acknowledge all three types of faculty effort: teaching, research and service. Attempts to assess productivity that do not account for all three categories will be misguided and inaccurate; worse, such unbalanced metrics will in turn create perverse incentives that undervalue and thus undermine the types of effort that are overlooked. More...