Production and Overproduction

* the challenge facing academics today is how to “overproduce with dignity”.
* A big part of the problem is the way that academic institutions think about and measure productivity. It’s become increasingly common for state legislatures to hammer public institutions for more and more quantitative evidence of productivity, but even at institutions which do not have to answer to legislators, various metrics of productivity have become more and more common.
* What ends up being measured, however? First, the productivity of scholarship: numbers of things published and disseminated, grant monies secured, quantities of fellowships and memberships. In suggesting that the status quo of such productivity lacks (and needs) dignity, John Holbo is pointing to the core of some of academia’s worst ills. The drive to scholarly overproduction which now reaches even the least selective institutions and touches every corner and niche of academia is a key underlying source of the degradation of the entire scholarly enterprise. It produces repetition. It encourages obscurantism. It forces overspecialization as a strategy for controlling the domains to which one is responsible as a scholar and teacher.
* You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in.
* You could try to contest this if you wanted to measure academic productivity by looking to the importance or significance of particular scholarly work. But even that inevitably will lead to some ghastly results, whether you use a citation index or Google Scholar.
* So my simple suggestion is this: stop. Administrations and faculties need to stop caring how much someone writes or publishes or says, or even how important what they’ve published is according to some measurable or quantifiable metric. Not only because trying to measure productivity in terms of scholarship destroys scholarship, but because it detracts from the truly important kind of productivity in an academic institution.
* What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives?
* It’s the only productivity that matters, however we try to measure or account for it. What do we do by design that we can reasonably say produces a positive, identifiable difference in the lives of our students and our wider community? Scholarship enters that question somewhere, but hardly at all in the ghastly spew of excess publication that contemporary academia demands.