How will Time4UNIchange support HEI management to change the culture towards external engagement and entrepreneurial activities without making rigid structures and templates that risk killing initiatives?
INTRO
The right incentives for researchers to become prolific and engaged need to be clearly separated from the incentives underlying academic superstardom that might endanger the scientific endeavour itself.
ARGUMENT
Maximising the public and private investment in education and research requires scholars to become scientifically productive and fluent in speaking the language of practice, available to external engagements, willing to take an active role and responsibility in re-designing institutions, societies, processes and machines.
As the saying goes, though, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. There are risks to be aware of that higher education institutions need to control and manage. The last fifteen days have been those of the relapse of the behavioural research community into the plague of data tampering and publication misconduct. One of the most prominent behavioural scientists in the world, Francesca Gino, a professor of psychology at Harvard, was put on administrative by the university because of apparently solid accusations of data tampering. Gino’s scandal is but the last in a scientific community, that of behavioural scientists, that saw a diffuse emergence of questionable practices in the past 15 years culminating in the demise of academic superstars such as Diederik Stapel, probably the most discussed academic of the last decade.
Gino–Stapel and many other culprits of questionable scientific practices–are interesting metaphors of how the positive tension towards integrating scientific productivity and engagement might drive to counterproductive results. Two academic superstars, authors of hundreds of papers, the two delivered with impressive regularity high-end publications filled with counterintuitive and surprising results that made them two prominent figures in the consulting and speaking businesses. Figures on their salaries and proposed prices for speaking engagements give a size of their superstardom.
Economic recognition, career advancements, public visibility: the mix of incentives to motivate a scientist to perform at his or her best in research, dissemination and exploitation are all there and created situations that might embarrass the institutions employing these researchers and most of all drawbacks in terms of general trust in science, a very delicate matter as the last three years showed when Covid-19 hit and the necessary countermeasures were taken.
Retraction Watch, a widely read blog that systematically documents the retraction of papers in virtually all fields of knowledge, is currently the most rigorous window on the proliferation of attempts at tweaking results, publishing for the sake of career aims and science conducted for reasons that are alien from the objective of contribute to the growth of humanity’s knowledge.
CONCLUSION
The scientific community and higher education institutions need to re-balance the current emphasis on competitiveness between individual scientists or research groups and the mechanisms at the basis of academic superstardom. On the contrary, they need to work on building and strengthening organisational cultures that remind researchers and staff of the reason why universities exist: pursue the development of knowledge and contribute to the welfare of societies. Such a shared culture might allow researchers to explore the spaces between basic and applied research, intellectual speculation and practical engagements, individual aims, and a spirit of service towards communities.
Author:
Vladi Finotto, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice