Please give this careful thought:
The concept of "productivity" applies to factories. It makes sense to ask questions such as "how many cars or pencils or cell phones does a factory produce in a year?"
In contrast, the right questions to ask in academia are: What has a researcher discovered? What questions has he asked? Which longstanding questions might he or she have answered? How has a field of knowledge moved forward fundamentally or how has the human condition improved dramatically owing to someone's research?
Compare the questions I have just posed to: How many papers have you published this year?
The concept of productivity is best left to factories. Academics must stay introspective, deep, searching.
The one concept that has caused perhaps the most damage to academia is the concept of tenure tracking based on "productivity".
Academics will be far better served if we base tenure decisions on: a) Quality of classroom teaching, b) Quality of undergraduate project mentoring, c) Quality of Masters theses guidance and d) Quality of PhD theses guidance. This will bring the focus back to who universities were established for in the first place: Students! Alongside, encourage faculty members to work on really challenging problems and give them awards/promotions when significant breakthroughs come. And till someone's research moves forward appreciably, simply don't promote them. This in itself is incentive enough for academics to pursue their research with intent. Who would like to stay an assistant or associate professor forever? Undervaluing quality teaching and quality project/thesis guidance while emphasizing "produce something somehow" by pressing the "tenure gun" against someone's head and threatening their livelihood is self defeating, it weakens academics. Do you see what I'm saying?
The question of course is: Can qualitative judgments be made and trusted?
My response: If we trust our students and peers enough to talk in detail with them, take their feedback, and then apply our mind to ensure that everyone is above board and the feedback being received is genuinely academic, I don't see why not.
We need to (very urgently) bring back a culture of introspection, depth and intellectual rigor in our universities and make them what they were mean to be: Centers of Education. The very nature of the society we are creating depends on that. And if you just step back and watch carefully, things are falling apart really fast.
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