Let us face it. Society is walking away from higher education. And they use us in the process of killing serious academics by evaluating us to death. Many a mediocre faculty member is eager to manufacture the rope. See the beautiful article by Professor William Weber (attached)
One way is to commit to separate the quantity which is purely factual, from quality which is a matter of judgement. It would even be better to agree on a scale of evaluation of articles published.
Very difficult, no matter what you do, since the larger and controlling population is mediocre, their influence would be overbearing. Every measure to institute quality and standard would be resisted in many ways. Gang up and subtle blackmail should be expected as turf war strategies.
Dear Mohammed,
This is a pertinent and relevant question today.
Protecting the 'competitive minority', as you call it, seems far fetched in the context of today's highly corporatized and neoliberal universities. As the idea of universities as sites of knowledge withers away, the pursuit of knowledge and the production of innovative, high-quality research wanes too.
The economization of both education and scholarly work explains why the bar to measure research progress in institutional frameworks is higher than it has ever been (evaluation currently encompassing both quantity, quality and other measuring tools like H-Index and other similar metrics). This problem of economizing research is particularly impacting young academics, who juggle research and teaching at heavy loads.
I guess there is no easy answer to your question and there are plenty of related matters that continue to feed this exploitative dynamic in the tertiary education industry. The problem needs to be targeted at its root and that is the corporatization of the industry as such.
It's a pathetic situation in our higher institutions of learning. I agree with Alejandra. Without uprooting the growing corprotization in higher institutions, the mediocre would constantly cripple the intellectual and competent minority.
One can require letters from external experts (academics) in the candidate's fields. These should be obtained from universities of comparable size and quality. We always require external letters for tenure and promotion cases. It is hard for the incompetent majority to argue against strong letters. However this might not help to evaluate teaching and service performance.
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