On Metricizing Knowledge

“Besides, the research tradition in academe has always been to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Often a scholar has no obvious endpoint in mind when he or she embarks on a particular project but may unexpectedly make a monumental discovery. We cannot predict ahead of time if someone’s research project will be so important that it will win the Nobel Prize, or the Pulitzer Prize, so it would be counterproductive to determine in advance that scholars in any given area should not be conducting research and instead should be teaching more. That applies to every discipline, including those in the sciences.” - “How Not to Measure Faculty Productivity,” The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/tuSFFH