And there it starts. Don't do that. In Germany we had this discussion in the 90's. All kinds of measures where taken into place to catch the slacking professors. Now we are left with a system the most talented don't want to work at.
Most academic people I know love their work. They do overtime although they are paid much less than a comparable position outside academia. Just live with the 5 percent or so slackers. The rest of the pack will squeeze out much more when not tortured with bureaucracy.
See, we have two ends to optimize the system and we have to choose one. Either the system encourages the most talented to thrive or it's designed for mediocre individual performance where the worst performers are kicked out. In the former high performers thrive while in the latter the best we get is guaranteed non-zero output.
There is a beautiful dualism in rewarding and measuring. It's actually quite hard to invent good measures for creative work, so whatever measure you come up with probably does not measure what you want it to measure. The second problem is from intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators. Extrinsic motivators like pay rises or the risk of losing ones job work fine only if the task is simple and mappable to linear performance - like, say, logging. For any creative efforts extrinsic motivators kill performance.
Thus, it's very hard to measure creative work, and even if you could, you would not really want to use that data for anything because that would kill performance.
If one were being truly radical about this, a possible solution is to replace researchers' salaries with pensions -- remove the incentive to retire in place by allowing you to retire at home if that's what you want.
And then you have a pool of professors made up of people who can afford to teach for free, or perhaps create a system where some finance leech buys your future pension for NPV payouts now.
a system where some finance leech buys your future pension for NPV payouts now.
Isn't that called a loan?
I imagine that smart finance-leeches will tend to avoid loaning against 100% of the value of the pension, for much the same reason it's hard to get a mortgage that takes 100% of your income to repay. Beyond that -- where is the problem?
Beyond that, the problem would be getting the same results as paying someone directly, while reducing efficiency by inserting a middleman to take a piece for... why, exactly?
Retiring in place is actually quite boring, and the feeling of uselessness that results is depressing. People won't actually do that unless the alternative is worse. If you hire people who are passionate about whatever it they were hired to work on, they might not do work that is profitable, but they'll do work that is interesting and has some benefit.
Those people will still have a passion for something, or they're going to be profoundly unhappy. Consumption (whether it be TV, video games, drugs, etc) can only provide some distraction from the pain, it doesn't make it go away. In fact, the longer you try to deal with the pain by distraction, the worse it gets.
Most of Polish professors are actually retired in place. They do the minimum required amount of teaching and put their names on (usually completely unoriginal) papers of their subordinates. Most of them didn't do any significant original research in decades. To pass the time (and to gain power to protect themselves from being kicked out etc.), they take on administrative functions such as deans, heads of units etc.
You must rate teachers. Using explicit external criteria, which as the article indicates, is inherently manipulative and biased, and thus counterproductive. Or you can use implicit internal criteria -- feedback from the participants who were hired to embody the objective function, to walk the walk. Given the tradeoffs, what better way is there to judge than anonymous peer review?
