My research was not for sale – and I would be an awful poker player

Money often costs too much. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Isn’t this all very boring?” whispered my seat neighbor to me, while our department chair praised the research of a senior colleague whose academic merits we had to review. I gave my neighbor a smiling nod, while we proceeded to learn more about that colleague’s achievements, and to polish a letter to administration, arguing that he was not just excellent (which is considered a bare minimum at UCSB), but exceptional, and possibly even outstanding. Each of these magic (yet meaning-deprived) words translates directly into a specific salary raise.

The ritual intrigued me, back then in the fall of 2013. Not only did it appear to serve an important goal (keeping each of us engaged in cutting-edge research, teaching, and service) but it did so in a seemingly fair manner and was carried out in good spirits. It encouraged everyone to give their best while supporting those who struggled in one area or another. The reviews took roughly eight to ten hours of meeting time each fall but taught me more about my colleagues and the department than I could have learned in any other way. The lively, sincere, and always good-humored discussions also reminded everyone that the department was more than the sum of its parts.

This experience and many others added up to a refreshing Pacific breeze that I thoroughly enjoyed. At my former geosciences department in Germany, success provoked resentments, suggestions of merit rewards faced formalistic objections, and faculty meetings dragged on twice as long with half the fun. The ambitious yet jovial and inspiring atmosphere that surrounded me now made me joke that I moved to Santa Barbara for its climate – the intellectual one.

Three years later it was time for my own review. Somewhat grudgingly, I assembled my BioBib, which is a list of everything one has produced as a researcher, teacher, and service provider. Collecting and formatting this exhaustive and exhausting inventory of all my academic peeps and poops took a couple of months (aside from my regular work), cutting into time for research. I was progressing slowly as I hate bookkeeping (especially of the naval-gazing kind) and worried a bit that my achievements were rather lame. Yet, the exercise was a useful cleanup operation, the review went quite well, and I could finally return to focus on what they had hired me for, with the extra benefit of having a little more money left over at the end of each month. Yet, doubts about the adequacy of academic meritocracy had started to creep up.

As I learned recently from a post by Richard Reich, “the term meritocracy was coined by British sociologist Michael Young in his 1958 satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy to depict a society so wedded to standard measures of intelligence that it ignored many gifted and talented people while overlooking character flaws in those who tested well.” As there are always people taking satire too seriously, time has stripped the term of its satirical coating, and meritocracy has become widely accepted as a fair and even desirable way of rewarding productivity.

When it comes to academia, Young’s standard measures seem to be less of intelligence than of a self-imposed intellectual immaturity. At Immanuel Kant’s recent 300th birthday, I daydreamed that he – the most famous geography professor of all times – shouted his Sapere aude! at us: Have the courage to use your own reason. Such a call for enlightenment in academia is overdue, as the effects of ignoring “many gifted and talented people while overlooking character flaws in those who tested well” are becoming painfully obvious within and outside of academia.

In my end-of-May Confession, I will reflect on what it means for academics to be productive. For now, I’m just recalling some of the absurdities that ensue when grown-up intellectuals minimize publishable units to produce more publications; lower their standards to boost their teaching scores; maximize their grant money to keep administration happy; and seek administrative duties or create new ones to exert power and raise their pensionable income.

My own experience has been that the more successful I was at acquiring grants, the less interesting my research became, and the less engaging my teaching and advising. I was simply too busy acquiring and spending money, once it approached and then surpassed a million euros a year. The situation gets worse when one is too busy even just writing grant proposals (with success rates in the single-digit percentages for NSF). The broader impacts (a term that NSF loves) of meritocracy in academia are, ironically, that some really important and impactful research and teaching don’t get done. Earlier or later we all realize (or are told) that this kind of research would not be fundable or that students expect to be taught something else.

Yet, as Kurt Brassel told me when I was still a graduate student, academics tend to produce their own stress. With the exceptional freedoms we enjoy (sponsored by taxpayers, many of whom cannot even afford to dream of such liberties), we only have ourselves to blame when we don’t enjoy what we do, feel trapped in a rat race, and produce fewer and fewer valuable ideas and insights. Is there anything in our work ethics, hiring letters, office oaths, or other commitments that obliges us to hold our potentially most impactful ideas hostage to a perceived duty of amassing grants and thereby subsidizing administration? I admire those colleagues who figured that out long before me and thus became highly respected scholars, rather than empire builders. They also tend to be the most interesting conversation partners, as they allow themselves to have a life beyond academia.

Conversely, academic meritocracy can become rather ugly when it aligns with greed, whether cultural, individual, or both. With merit scores translating directly into salary raises, the number game turns into an addictive poker game for some. I should explain that my limited admiration for poker and its players may result from a memorable night at the end of my first year as a postdoc. A handful of intellectual leaders played real poker (for money) at the home of my mentor, who opted out and chatted with me at his fireplace – while the players emptied his bottles of single malts. Yet, their behavior was harmless compared to the nasty rounds of meritocracy poker that I witnessed toward the end of my career. I’m afraid I need to be rather explicit here to avoid platitudes and generalities. So here goes my little poker florilegium, progressing from the silly to the nasty:

• A revered poker player (of both kinds) bragging how he pushed a struggling research center to seek more grants, not wasting a word on the center’s real problem, which was a lack of ideas and courage, not of grants;
• A frugal donor voicing his utter dismay (in his only ever phone call to the beneficiary) that our administration retained 4% of his gift;
• A senior faculty (whom I highly respect) introducing himself to the incoming graduate cohort as doing “research on whatever gets funded”;
• A letter from a dean pointing out that the productivity of a junior faculty up for promotion had dropped from publishing two dozen journal articles one year to ‘only’ one dozen the year after;
• An excellent applicant for graduate studies in digital humanities being told to get lost by a financial offer for three years, right after the department had decided to make it five years for all (to avoid that qualified candidates like him went elsewhere);
• A graduate student who was already under serious personal stress due to his nationality and religion, getting harassed by a faculty beating the sack and meaning the stubborn donkey (yours truly), and subsequently relieved of his teaching assistant job without even being told;
• A selection process for a senior faculty position getting ricked, in order to expand an old boys network supporting Napoleon (see my Prologue to get that reference);
• A proficient colleague getting trashed in his merit review and relieved of his graduate students as well as lab spaces (one of which Napoleon then turns into a party room, to make the farm “more social”).

How can such travesties of academic ideals and violations of human decency occur, under the watch and willful direction of us, the academics themselves? Are they just the results of greed and of the shockingly common desire to reign over those who are weaker, different, or better? Most academics believe that quantitative measures of merit are needed for hirings, promotions, awards and other career milestones. While this sounds reasonable, I have seen too many botched hirings, inappropriate or denied promotions, and ridiculous awardee selections, all well supported by fitting numbers, to retain that belief.

Ignoring cultural and individual traits for a moment and thinking about the why question as an ontologist, I wonder whether an underlying problem may be that one is trying to assess qualities of individuals, but dealing with qualities of individuals in relation to collectives. Have you ever witnessed an academic excel at a place after (or before) disappointing at another? Such surprises are not uncommon and reveal the difference I mean between qualities of individuals and qualities of individuals in relation to a place. In any case, the solution to the assessment problem is most likely not to optimize the measurements or reviews, but to treat numbers as secondary to a serious engagement with the work, thoughts, character, and potential of candidates.

Increasingly haunted by such subversive thoughts, I had lost my enthusiasm for merit reviews by the time the BioBib bucket came around for a second time. The reviews had meanwhile been made more “efficient” by replacing our engagement and conversations with the sanctioning of a single slide proposed by the chair, containing only numbers (h-index, grant money, PhD graduates, etc.). These slides were then translated into the magic words of excellence, triggering (or preventing, as the case may be) a corresponding salary raise. Thus, in a remarkable strange loop, a department famous for its unwavering commitment to quantitative methods started to apply these methods to its merit cases, eliminating the earlier mixed methods approach that included intellectual engagement with the subjects. As a result, I procrastinated my BioBibbing for just long enough that the chalice passed – and then jumped ship to live happily ever after.

Trying to end on an even more uplifting note, here is the story of how a vegan cheese beat dairy in a big competition. Clearly, academia is not the only sector where meritocracy addicts play nasty poker games. Which brings us back to the surely less stinky halls of academia for an insightful debate on the broader social concerns raised by meritocracy. Enjoy it while you can!