| An
open letter to all university administrators from Richard Parncutt |
 |
The main goal of any university is the promotion of academic quality. Achieving that is not easy - but it is possible to identify some central issues and approaches:
First take evaluation results seriously, including international rankings and national schemes such as for example the British Research Assessment Exercise. If necessary, suggest improvements to evaluation procedures. If your university is still not performing well, admit it.
Then do something about it! The following tips apply to all universities anywhere in the world:
- Make the promotion of academic quality the explicit goal of all university activities
- Improve professorial appointment procedures
- Promote culture diversity and gender diversity (research questions are best answered by combining different approaches)
- Expose and stop ad-personam advertising and inside hiring
- Promote collegiality and combat academic sexism and bullying (harassment, mobbing)
- Treat sciences and humanities equally, with equal rights and responsibilities (example)
- Promote research in areas of current social and political relevance e.g. (example)
- Promote constructive political engagement
The following tips apply especially
to
German-speaking universities:
- Improve the doctorate! In all disciplines:
- Require all students to present/publish their research in a leading international conference/journal (mehr)
- Have all dissertations written in a language that most relevant international experts understand (mehr)
- Regard dissertations that comprise several published articles and an introduction as normal and desirable
- Have all dissertations 100% externally examined (supervisors are too biased to examine)
- Reduce coursework in curricula; focus
on
original
research
- Provide
more doctoral fellowships. They are the
best long-term investment in academic productivity
- Consistently promote good research! In all disciplines:
- Promote and reward publication in leading international refereed journals by all academic staff (more)
- Discourage the publication of Festschriften.
Good papers should appear in good journals; bad papers should not
appear anywhere.
- Assign the best teacher to each individual course! In all disciplines:
- Abandon the Habilitation (Ger, Eng). Instead, promote and evaluate publication in the best international journals
- Require that teachers of advanced courses have a PhD and international refereed publications in the course's topic area
- In
course evaluations, allow students to
evaluate presentation;
only
international researchers may evaluate content
(mehr)
- Promote global communication! In all disciplines:
- Promote German-English bilingualism on all levels and in all areas (mehr)
- Motivate staff! In all disciplines:
- Develop long-term strategies to improve self-efficacy