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Posts tagged as “metrics”

AVP Ellen Herman has no records on status of Faculty Track Software

4/23/2020: 

Another year, another budget crisis, more questions about where UO’s money is going. I emailed VP Herman, who is charge of this project, on March 25th:

Hi Ellen,

I’m heard a rumor that the administration has abandoned or perhaps just delayed this effort. I’m hoping that you can provide some details on where this proposal currently stands. Thanks,

Bill Harbaugh

She didn’t answer, so on April 1st I filed a public record request. Yesterday I got this response:

Dear Mr. Harbaugh,

The University has searched for, but was unable to locate, records responsive to your request for “…a public record showing the current status of the Faculty tracking / Insights project”, made 4/1/2020.

It is the office’s understanding that this project has been placed on hold, however there are no records documenting this decision.

The office considers this to be fully responsive to your request, and will now close your matter. Thank you for contacting the office with your request.

Sincerely, Office of Public Records

5/8/2019 update: 

With the budget crisis, you’d think this proposal would be in the trash can. Apparently not.

3/18/2019 Faculty tracking software vendor explains time-suck & “thought leadership programming” junket

So why isn’t the provost’s office being clear about what this will cost?

New faculty tracking software will implement Provost’s metrics scheme

A letter from Provost Banavar, here: The project, called Faculty Insights, will result in a sophisticated online system that enhances our ability to capture the wide range of research and creative activities that our faculty do. The primary purpose of the system will be to manage the faculty review process…

On the Work of the University, from Prof Ken Calhoon

It’s not just Nobel Prize winning economists and the UK Research Councils who think the administration’s research metrics plan is a mistake. Ken Calhoon, head of UO’s Dept of Comparative Literature, provides a less mathematical but no less thorough dissection: February 27th, 2018 Dear Friends and Colleagues, Mozart wrote forty-one symphonies,…

CAS faculty meet today at 2PM for “Metrics, Humanities, and Social Science”

Dear Humanities and Social Science faculty, Please join your colleagues Scott DeLancey (Linguistics), Spike Gildea (Linguistics), Volya Kapatsinski (Linguistics), Leah Middlebrook (Comparative Literature), Lanie Millar (Romance Languages), and Lynn Stephen (Anthropology) for a discussion of metrics for measuring our departmental research quality and the quality of our graduate programs. The panel…

UK research councils & Nature unimpressed by VP Brad Shelton’s shiny new metrics plan

2/7/2018: From The Times: All seven of the UK’s research councils have signed up to a declaration that calls for the academic community to stop using journal impact factors as a proxy for the quality of scholarship. The councils, which together fund about £3 billion of research each year, are among…

The Tyranny of Metrics

InsideHigherEd’s interview with Jerry Muller about his new book. Published by the high impact-factor Princeton University Press. One excerpt: Q: Some colleges, government agencies and businesses promote tools to evaluate faculty productivity — number of papers written, number of citations, etc. What do you make of this use of metrics?…