Professor Richard Jair, former chairman of the American Science Council and chairman of the National Foundation Committee's International Assessment Expert Committee on Performance, said of Stanford's appointment."His idea is contrary to the practice of rewarding scientific research projects, especially the National Natural Science Foundation, directly as an important indicator when promoting teachers' titles, evaluating talents and evaluating daily performance.
A few days ago, I stayed in Guiyang for a few days and chatted with several university professors.We talked about the scientific evaluation topics involved in the daily performance evaluation of universities.I asked professors what they thought of the practice of some universities using the National Natural Science Foundation program as a reward for performance indicators.The two Sun Yat-sen University professors agreed that the reward was neither scientific nor reasonable.In fact, it is common for our university to directly participate in the promotion, evaluation and appointment of university teachers by scientific research projects as performance.This approach confuses the basic concepts and values of the relationship between input and output in scientific research.It is true that despite the irregularities in project evaluation, a scholar is able to lead some important research projects, especially as "chief scientists" and project leaders of some major national projects.However, when a project has just been approved or is still under implementation and the output is not clear, it is clearly neither scientific nor reasonable to award the respective "honour" or "material" awards to project chairpersons and their members.Because some scholars have poor quality and poor output, this phenomenon is not uncommon in some academic institutions in China, which is the main reason why academic circles criticize such "high-level" research projects as unfair distribution.For example, there are projects that are not allocated to young and middle-aged scientific and technological personnel who are truly capable of hosting projects.It would be counter- axiomatic to consider such expenditure as a basis for scholars to "additional government posts" without producing the corresponding scientific and technological achievements.Such rewards not only lack equity and justice, but also increase academic impetuosity and utility.
"In 2009, the Graduate Institute of Education of the Ministry of Education issued the first (seemingly the only) performance evaluation list for universities affiliated with the Ministry of Education.The main indicators used in the chart are three categories: talent (teacher), funds (education and research funds), assets; and two types of outputs: training students (undergraduate and graduate students) and achievements (published papers, awards and patents).In this list, the medium-sized Central China Agricultural University ranked 11th, in Wuhan seven direct universities ranked first, but also far ahead of some "985" universities.One of the more funded schools on the list is at the bottom.Because scientific research funds as input in the index system are denominator of performance evaluation, so the more funds are spent, the worse the performance is.I think this kind of performance evaluation, although not necessarily perfect, is also a wake-up call for those who only use various means to compete for funds and not focus on practical research.This performance evaluation should be an integral part of scientific evaluation.”
Research projects are essentially funded by different departments, such as millions of yuan per person from overseas, and many universities usually give new scholars a start-up fund.Although these new teachers usually experience complete postgraduate education and even post-doctoral research experience, the university still hopes to provide them with immediate access to scientific research.
We should not use research projects and funding as indicators of talent performance evaluation should belong to the international academic consensus.As Stanford University professor said above, the excellence of a scholar depends more on the influence of his academic achievements in his peers than on the funding of research projects.We can check the homepages of world-class universities at random, and rarely see news reports promoting their professors' research projects.These universities' professors' personal web pages are usually the most visible in two parts: resumes (research characteristics) and representative paper records, some professors list honors and awards, and some scholars list "funding programs".When hiring teachers, universities mainly focus on their contribution and influence to the field. Usually, some academic institutions in China do not pay as much attention to awarding research projects and participating in performance evaluation.