Number 19 - University's mission

 The paper mills are on fire; but not our minds

Always, questions about the purpose of social institutions are hard to answer and differ wildly based on the individual's point of view. Specifically for education, the answers one might get usually are a variation of performing cutting edge research and/or educating a new generation of free thinkers. However, evaluating how good a university is at performing research or educating thinkers is notoriously hard.

The most used metric by far is the number of publications, especially in prestigious journals, that a university's staff produces. At first glance, this makes absolute sense: submitting papers is all about documenting interesting research.that one has done and the process of getting published is difficult and based on the evaluation of top scientists in the associated field. Furthermore, the metric should also somehow link to the educational aspect of a university, since phd students are typically the ones doing the bulk of the work.

Considerable problems pop up when one thinks of the implications of relying on this metric. An easy point is that this evaluation method trivializes higher education to a mere score. A more insidious realization is that this method determines how grants are awarded to universities. Universities with a higher ranking will simply get more money to fund their research. This survival of the fittest method pressures universities to publish a lot and the best way to do that is to deliberately pick topics that are less risky and will guarantee more publications. Consequently, professors have to incentivize their students to also publish as much as possible which of course leads to a race for who gets to publish more, not necessarily to the benefit of research.

While the impact of this "publish or perish" phenomenon is of course clear to the lives of the people doing the actual research, I'd argue that the real victim is free thought. The whole education system has been turned into a for-profit pipeline. High schools try to optimize acceptance to prestigious universities by making students educational "super-athletes". Once these educational sportsmen breach the university, they are suddenly called to innovate and conduct novel research. For those who stay, this is all but impossible; not only are they not properly equipped for this but they are also punished. The system awards its resources to boring, predictable work that will get prints. Work that you will have to do all your professional time.

In my opinion, this is why we have the feeling that science has sort of reached a plateau. Our universities no longer make scientists, engineers, artists and thinkers. Instead, they make well oiled paper printers. It is high time we re-think our priorities and find alternative ways to tell a good university from a poor one.