SEB Bulletin January 2007 - Ratbag
Dr Workhard was a worried Head of Department. He was concerned about the Department's score in the next RAE. Under his predecessor, Jim Peerless, the Department had got a 5* rating and Workhard was not convinced they could achieve the same outcome this time. Therefore he had arranged an interview with each member of staff to discuss their recent publications record. Now, at the end of three days of constant conversation, he was reflecting on the lows - there had been few highs.
Workhard's delicate questioning about the rather low publications from Davina Makepeace, Director of the Paws and Claws Institute had been met with aggression. Makepeace had even threatened to make the Institute independent when Workhard had pointed out that income, commitment and patents were not metrics the RAE placed much emphasis on. He had been summarily dismissed as an apologist for narrow-minded careerist who were seeking self-glorification by serving on the RAE Panel.
His next interview had been with the inseparable Drs Soks and Sandells, the two mainstays of ecology in the Department. They had jointly been sympathetic to Workhard's plea for more papers but had cited the long-term nature of their studies. Workhard had suggested that perhaps after fifteen years of intensive investigation of a single site some results must have emerged. They promised to look through the ten PhD theses the study had so far generated, all of which were so far unpublished, to see if there was anything worthy of submission to a journal but they were not optimistic as the results were all contradictory.
Workhard had his head in his hands by the time of his last interview with Dr Minnie Picksel, a bioinformatician and the youngest member of staff. However, far from defending her position, she lauded her publications; twenty in the last four years. Workhard was ecstatic. Until it transpired that they were all in e-journals that had yet to achieve Impact Factors. Worse, the websites for several of them were no longer accessible so no proof existed that some of the papers were real. Minnie was unconcerned. Workhard had suggested that perhaps she might send some papers to journals that were published on paper but she had refused and had accused him of “Gutenbergism”.
That night Workhard had a brainwave. He would use some of the Departmental slush funds to pay bonuses for every paper published in a journal with an Impact Factor greater than 4. He sent out a memo outlining the proposal and waited for the flow of manuscripts. Instead he got a river of invective. To a person, his colleagues said they would not submit any papers while this craven market-led policy remained in place. Reluctantly, Workhard withdrew.
Remarkably, though, his initiative had the desired effect. Within a few weeks he was told of several papers that had been submitted and some that were accepted in good journals. Drs Soks and Sandells had sent two manuscripts to one of the best ecological journals and had got encouraging feedback from the editor. A number of the staff in the Paws and Claws Institute had reported success in getting papers accepted and even Minnie Picksel had relented and sent a paper to a “Gutenberg” journal. Workhard was perplexed by all of this and could not figure out what was going on. Then, by chance, he met Jim Peerless who explained that one of his favourite ploys was to announce a policy that he knew would be universally hated: He had worked out that the united opposition it invoked seemed to get people thinking about the underlying reasons and they would then unconsciously respond to these. Workhard didn't exactly understand the logic but felt rather proud that without being so obviously Machiavellian he had, nonetheless, stumbled upon an approach used by one of the aficionados of the dark arts of manipulation. He was clearly much better at this sort of thing than he thought and, as a reward for hidden talents, promised himself a nice glass of wine when he got home that evening to celebrate the possible saving of his and the Department’s reputation.”