Credit versus discovery in academia

My doctoral students and I have been chatting a lot in the past year about the tensions between credit and discovery.

Credit, in academia, includes things like authorship on a paper, reputation one accrues for inventions and discoveries, awards for research, prestigious internships, and — the most coveted of those targeting academia — a tenure-track professorship. Many aspects of credit are essential to academia as an institution. For example, we can’t admit or hire whole communities of scholars, we have to admit and hire individuals. We need some way of assessing individuals to make these selection decisions, and so we give credit. And research is hard: one of the big incentives of putting years of effort into a discovery, even if collaborative, is that people recognize you for your effort, your creativity, and your skill. Some of us need that to feel validated.

Discovery, in contrast to credit, isn’t about individuals at all. Every little bit of progress we make in scholarship is a combination of our own skills, our collaborators’ skills, all of the scholarship that has come before us, and the active participation with a much broader community of active scholars. I go to academic conferences for that special amalgam of diverse ideas, and those ideas change my ideas. The reality is that credit for discovery is always due to an entire community and the entire history of the community. When we attribute discovery to particular individuals, we’re signifying that the person deserves a “notable” amount of that credit, but we all understand that such recognition is an oversimplification. (Or at least I hope we all do).

The tensions, between credit and discovery, are therefore numerous:

• Even though collaboration and community are at the heart of discovery, such activities inherently erode credit. This forces us to carefully navigate (and sometimes artificially limit) who we work with, and who we signal gets credit.
• Because academia is inherently resource-scarce (after all, investing in us is a very long play), we obsess over credit at the expense of discovery, trying to figure out who should be admitted into our doctoral programs, who should get hired, who should get the grant, who should get the award, and who should get tenured. None of these have to do with discovery inherently. They have to do with resource allocation and research investment optimization, which are very industrialized notions of scholarship.
• When we evaluate research close to our own, we should be excited that someone is advancing the work we care so dearly about. But instead, we often feel threatened, because someone making progress before us might mean we don’t get the credit we so dearly crave as individuals. If we didn’t feel that threat, I believe we would heartily celebrate our nearest intellectual peers, actively pursuing their help and collaboration on future work.
• When junior faculty consider collaborators, they have to carefully avoid working with senior people who might write them tenure letters, otherwise there may be few reputable people left to evaluate their work. This limits opportunities for key mentorship between senior and junior faculty.
• Worst of all, in my opinion, many researchers begin to conflate discovery and credit, chasing grants, chasing publication counts, and chasing awards, rather than chasing meaningful discoveries. This makes many untenured faculty think more conservatively, forgoing the bigger, deeper, and harder problems that take more time than their tenure-clock will allow.

For many of the doctoral students I advise and/or mentor, these tensions between credit and discovery are the biggest deterrent to them wanting to participate in academia. They want to make discoveries. They want to join communities. They want to help and learn from everyone with their same interests regardless of seniority, institution, or credit. But they see that academia is more concerned with evaluating them as individuals than it is with our collective progress.

There are ideas about how to reduce the tension between credit and discovery:

• Have long tenure clocks. Give someone a decade to make their mark, and expect them to take their time.
• Limit hiring, tenure, and promotion to the evaluation of candidate’s ideas, not their productivity. After all, progress comes from ideas, not PDFs.
• Publish everything and let the entire community sort out it’s value over a decade. This lets credit correspond to value, instead of predicted value.
• Hire collaborative teams of faculty rather than individual faculty. This recognizes that individuals can’t do it all, but that when we come together, we can establish greater things.

I don’t know if any of the ideas above would improve things. Some could be disasters. I haven’t thought carefully enough about how essential it is for academia to tend to our individual desire for credit. But I do think it’s critical we start thinking seriously about how to resolve these tensions. If we don’t, I think we’ll find that not only are there fewer people passionate about discovery in the world, but academia may begin to forget why it exists.