Dear Terry,
This is not simply a matter of gaming the metric. It is simply weird. We did
a study some years ago at the Norwegian School of Management to see how
much time it takes for a fully qualified researcher to write and public an article
in a peer-reviewed research journal. We came up with a number well above
1,000 hours in most management fields. This study was done based on the time
required for an article by someone on the full-time academic staff, mostly
professors and lecturers, nearly all with a completed PhD and several years
of full-time research experience or academic employment.
Since you are describing a solo exhibition, the comparison must be to a single-
author article in a peer-reviewed journal. To compare a solo exhibition by a
student that has not yet done a PhD with the work required for a single-author
article in a refereed journal is comparing apples and raisins.
The claim is utter nonsense -- nearly no student manages to publish a single-
author article in a refereed journal before earning his or her PhD. This is true
in all fields. One is normally on salary as a full-time member of academic staff
before published one single-author article let alone five.
The art people are apparently making the claim that the conceptual, theoretical,
or empirical quality of a solo exhibition by a student with an undergraduate art
degree is worth five mature single-author research publications by a full-time
member of an academic research community. Why bother with a PhD scholarship?
Why doesn't your university just award these students a professorial chair and be
done with it?
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman
Professor. (Ordinary professor. No claim for artistic genius.)
Dean, Faculty of Design
Swinburne University of Technology
--
Terry Love wrote:
Art has presented the claim they wish to be assessed by artefacts rather
than by conventional research outcomes. This is addressed by the inclusion
of exhibitions and creative work as an equivalent to refereed papers (1 solo
exhibition = 5 refereed journal papers) and by counting number of
prizes/awards/commendations as equivalent to number of research grants.
|