I and the other members of the HuMetricsHSS team are thrilled to announce the release of our new white paper “Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy.” I think many of you will find the challenges and the recommendations of this white paper resonate with much of the work OSI has been doing over the years.
Abstract:
Walking the Talk: Toward a Values-Aligned Academy is the culmination of 18 months of research interviews across the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA). Conducted by the HuMetricsHSS Initiative as an extension of their previous work on values-enacted scholarly practice, the interviews focused on current systems of evaluation within BTAA institutions, the potential problems and inequalities of those processes, the kinds of scholarly work that could be better recognized and rewarded, and the contexts and pressures evaluators are under, including, as the process progressed, the onset and ongoing conditions of COVID-19. The interviews focused primarily on the reappointment, promotion, and tenure (RPT) process. Interviewees outlined a number of issues to be addressed, including toxicity in evaluation, scholars’ increased alienation from the work they are passionate about, and a high-level virtue-signaling of values by institutions without the infrastructure or resources to support the enactment of those values. Based on these conversations, this white paper offers a set of recommendations for making wide-scale change to address systematic injustice, erasure, and devaluation of academic labor in order to strengthen the positive public impact of scholarship.
Online version:
https://pubhub.lib.msu.edu/projects/walking-the-talkPDF version:
https://doi.org/10.17613/06sf-ad45We invite you to share your thoughts with us through our
Twitter account or by email at
humetr...@gmail.com. And of course here on this listserv too!
All the best,
Rebecca (on behalf of HuMetricsHSS)
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