Rutgers faculty members, citing philosophical concerns and errors, are pushing back against the use of Academic Analytics to evaluate their productivity.
By Colleen Flaherty
With the advent of Google Scholar and other metrics for faculty productivity, advancing one’s career as a professor is much more of a numbers game than it used to be. Still, the traditional system of peer review in hiring, tenure and promotion decisions has retained a good deal of nuance. Scholars in the same field as those they’re evaluating know that while one project may not be as prestigious as another, for example, a good degree of academic innovation might be worth a little professional risk.
But is that system under threat? Full-time faculty members at Rutgers University at New Brunswick say that it may be, in light of the university’s contract with a faculty productivity monitoring company called Academic Analytics.
Rutgers professors say they don’t need the system, which is based on a patented algorithm for measuring faculty productivity, and that what little data they’ve been able to obtain to so far include some serious errors. On Monday, the faculty of the School of Arts and Sciences will vote on a faculty union-backed resolution asking the university not to use Academic Analytics data in personnel and curricular decisions, and to give faculty members access to data collected by the company.
“I think in everybody in academia has an interest in collective and individual measures of productivity, but these are very blunt forms of measurement,” said David Hughes, a professor of anthropology and president of Rutgers’ American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers-affiliated faculty union. “Most universities already have a very robust system of assessing faculty output, with [numerous] categories for your scholarship, so why would we want to dilute that for these indexes?”
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