Economist Writing Every Day

Francesca Gino has been acused of academic fraud. She claims she is innocent. I am not going to adjudicate here whether she committed fraud. What I am going to argue is that she and many other high volume researchers aren’t actually engaged in research. They are grant procurers, managers, high volume writers, globetrotting presenters. But they are not researchers because they are too far removed from the actual production of research. Now, to be clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean the world is worse off. Their comparative advantage may lie in everything from management to carnival barking, but there is a threshold, a degrees-too-far removed from the problem solving at which point you are you no longer a scholar. What that threshold is, I can’t say, but I would argue that if you can’t defend your work, investigate it’s own integrity, if you don’t know who your research assistants are or what they did, then you have likely crossed that thresold. From Gino’s (since updated) website:

We’ve all see the presentations or heard the stories of the leading scholar called on the carpet about something in their project or analysis, only to respond “I’m not sure. My RA did that.” Which is fine. But at some point that started to become assumed as characterizing whole researchers, whole agendas, whole fields. There are always going to be the prodigiously productive, but those people used to be one or two in a generation. Glorious anomalies. Universities are now littered with faculty with hundreds of publications, sometimes dozens in a single year, and we all know that it is physically impossible for them to conduct that work themselves. Gino received her PhD in 2004 and in the 19 years since has 460 (!!!) publications listed on google scholar. Some of those are probably duplicate listings, but it’s probably safe to say she has more than 20 publications per year for 20 years. It’s hard enough to imagine having energy enough to write and present that many papers even if they are produced entirely by others. This is not unique to Gino and there is no doubting the prodigious work ethic in evidence within her and others. What is in question is whether the ever raising bar on output is lowering the quality of work done by the field as a whole. It’s a tax on us all if research concentrated within the labor of the most qualified, competent, and creative no longer produces an acceptable return to scale. Some people really are better managers of other people’s work, at some point the work has to be attributable to one or more people. Who is doing the work? Who is responsible for the work?

Maybe this isn’t really useful and I don’t feel like yelling at clouds for 5000 words. As I was saying…

But I’ll tell you this- truly great researchers work with other greater researchers, employ smart people, mentor promising RAs. And they know who they are and what they did. Because when you’re in the weeds trying to answer questions, its almost impossible not to know. That doesn’t mean mistakes won’t be made and errors overlooked. But when it comes time to audit your work, you’ll know where to start and what might have gone wrong. If you don’t know, well, maybe you’re lying, but maybe more likely you just weren’t around when the work was getting done. You were promoting your last project and getting your next grant. Because you’re not a researcher. At least not anymore.

You’re a manager, promoter, figurehead, pitchman, traveling roadshow. You’re likely useful and valuable. Publication and Grant, LLC.

But you’re not a scholar. And the institutions employing you aren’t producing scholarship. These faculty are following their incentives, and those incentives are at the moment treating research as a game to be played. Not science. Not the answering of questions. An expensive hustle to grind and empty race to win. They’re getting what they’re paying (and tenuring) for.