Ioana A. Cristea, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Padova, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I have been ill for >10 days, but today as I clock another day of fever, all my anger is channeled toward the colleagues in academia who plan and corral others in myriad of ‘outreach’ and ‘training’ events, in this case one I said yes to in August (August!).
Of course, you cannot pull out of the training event, the people come for the CME credits and Lord knows our professionals love their credits and if someone misses that affects the credits, and the location is far so even getting a last minute replacement (yes, my post-docs would do it because they WANT to help me, while I know that is hard to accept in the narrative of the PI exploiting their team to “publish or perish”) is impossible.
The problem is not (only) publish or perish, my paper is on hold though I work on it quite well in the 3 hours after I take fever medication (really, very well).
The problem is colleagues who CHOSE to spend their time to invest in an infinite multitude of ‘alternative career pathway’ activities, which end up engulfing all of us. Once you create a need, the need is there.
It is not only the whole leadership/administration bureaucracy layer eating us up (in Padova, actually, this is not bad at all, because we still have the scientists in command everywhere), it’s our colleagues who are willingly, unnecessarily, with intent and purpose, giving a hand, suggesting, cajoling, coming up with new trainings, evaluations, new activities, new certifications.
But then those of us who prefer to focus on research are the problem. I am really afraid of what will happen when, as said in not unclear terms, research will start being DEVALUED in academic evaluation and this is my main problem with COARA.
No to counting publications, citations and h-index, but HELL NO to rewarding anything else on par with teaching, research and meaningful community involvement and ABSOLUTELY HELL NO to rewarding all sorts of artificially created forms of training, dissemination, certification and other activities.
(Yes, I should have not said no in August. Yes, I should cancel now, citing health. In practice, both of these choices are very constrained, and they are constrained because it is not normalized to say that many of the activities we are asked and expected to do just eat up from our research and teaching-the one with students- time).”