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I think one way to 'treat' this would be to acknowledge that certain things just cannot be optimized easily with outside incentives, and to simply accept that there will be some inevitable waste when you let 'good people do their job as best as they can'. It's ironic that we fret so much about professors that 'retire on the job', but at the same time think it is perfectly fine to steal time from the motivated researchers, by making them playing these silly games too. Who really thinks the next breakthrough will come from a person that was forced into writing another paper, just to pass some arbitrary performance threshold? If you consider research as a 'stochastic race', i.e. many people working on a problem with their own intuitions and approaches, it makes no sense to slow down those that are most likely to come up with a good solution (those that are self-motivated). IMHO, it does not really matter if those that are unlikely to contribute much (retired on the job) get a free pass. After all, even to receive tenure takes a lot of effort (and thus, ambition) nowadays, so at least in fields with a competitive job market (i.e. good salaries outside academia) it makes no sense to strive for a tenured position and then not do what you love (i.e., research). BTW Daniel Lemire's blog has many interesting posts on the more absurd aspects of academia, including research grants (e.g. http://lemire.me/blog/2009/09/15/the-hard-truth-about-resear...). IIRC one of his suggestions was so fund people (for longer terms), not 'projects'. This may not always be possible (e.g., if you need expensive equipment), but in many fields it would make much more sense. EDIT: language |