Dear Jeremy,
You write that metrics do "very little to help anyone other than bureaucrats who are stuck in a game of comparative legitimation, which is why they need 'objective' numbers. I think it is mostly a contrivance, but it is getting institutionalized." This is too often the sad truth.
The metric mania began with some fairly reasonable impulses. The idea behind metrics involves setting international benchmarks rather than relying solely on local opinion within universities or departments for hiring, tenure, and promotion. At the government level, it involves ensuring that the public gets something valuable in return for public funding. Fpr individuals, metrics involve using some standard measure that allows people to set responsible targets.
Alas, as with most such ideas, bureaucrats get hold of things, distorting them through misapplication and one-size-fits-all prescriptions. It's a bit like MBO (management by objectives). What began as a bright idea when Peter Drucker published his first great books in the 1950s became so unwieldy and contorted that Drucker declared the idea obsolete by the 1970s or 1980s. By then, of course, the idea was just getting hold -- leading MBA-led companies to make the same kinds of quota-driven mistakes, metric if you will, that doomed the Soviet Union.
The problem as I see it -- I won't make the full argument here -- is that metrics often impede the flow of information and the development of knowledge. Thus it is the the Soviet Union crippled itself with bureaucrats working to quota-based metric targets. America's first MBA president and his multi-millionaire buddies used a combination of MBO systems and incompetent execution to damage America in much the same way that Stalinism and its heritage crippled the old Soviet Union.
One way around this is an intelligent application of Deming-style statistical quality control combined with effective leadership at the site of production in flexible systems. In other words, an educational equivalent of the Toyota way.
There are probably other ways forward as well, though most of these may involve a return to classical or rhetorical traditions of education and research that most of us can no longer afford. At least, we won't be able to afford them until governments and the citizenry that supports them take a new view on research, big science, small science, and the design sciences in educational systems.
Speaking from both halves of my brain, of course, I must add a thought. In my old life as a research professor who did not need much money to think, metrics meant relatively little to me. As a dean with financial needs and hungry researchers to feed, I must play that game. The best situation is to encourage good work first and then ensure that the work gets turned into publications that those with money can measure.
Provided good work comes first, this should not be too bad an outcome.
Your warning against metrics is well taken, though. History gives many examples of the problems that arise when metrics overwhelm us.
Job was big on metrics: "and he owned seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, and had a large number of servants. He was the greatest man among all the people of the East." (Job 1:3). Look what happened to him.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean
Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia
Telephone +61 3 9214 6755
www.swinburne.edu.au/design
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