Imagine a community of farmers who produce many types of foods and other needs: cereals, pulses, vegetables, fruits, cotton, jute, rubber, timber, dyes. Now imagine a university that produces, shares, and applies knowledge to aid social progress and individual self-realization. And note that universities should not tell all of their professors to focus on the same type of knowledge product – any more than the leaders of the farming community should artificially boost or suppress the prices of certain products. The market of both goods and ideas should determine their value by the needs and priorities of the community and then broader society.
A globally common framework says that all professors should do three things: teaching, research/scholarship, and service/leadership. But if we look closer, in the same way as we see rice farmers growing wheat in the same field in winter, as well as many kinds of vegetables and fruits around the house across the year, we can see that professors do a huge variety of things within what they call research or (more broadly) scholarship. If you look at the resumes of the most talented, impactful professors, depending on the discipline, career stage, and interest, they create, share, and apply knowledge through many knowledge products and academic activities.
Here’s a short list: journal articles in international and local journals, contributions to academic magazines, public engagement through emerging media platforms, books and edited collections or chapter contributions, textbooks and teaching materials, policy briefs and concept papers, reports and handbooks, training and curricular materials, op-eds and expert commentaries, dataset or research tools, prototypes and patents, designs/models and software applications, legal analysis or legislative contributions, keynotes and other invited talks, plenaries and panels, workshops and discussions, media interviews and podcasts, videos and other digital content, museum and gallery exhibitions, and so on.
Promoting the knowledge ecosystem
Our higher education landscape is made of roughly a dozen different types of universities (in distinct locations, with unique visions, and diverse sets of capacities and priorities). There are more than fifteen thousand professors in dozens of different disciplines and hundreds of specializations within them. But if we look at the policies for the recruitment and promotion of professors, universities are imposing one rigid template of demands, which are neither adapted enough to fit the diverse institutional profiles and missions nor flexible enough to allow the many institutes, disciplines, units, and specializations within them to report adequately how their professors contribute knowledge for internal operation, to their respective disciplines, and in service of the community and nation that pay their bills. Because such policies are often copied over from the oldest institution, Tribhuvan University, most of the newer, more distinct universities are seldom advancing their distinct institutional missions – even though it should be far easier for them to use more mission-aligned policies than it is for TU.
Ways to be productive this week
Especially in the developing world, including Nepal, national and often university policies for the recognition and reward of professors’ scholarly work allocate most of the credit for knowledge production and contribution to one particular form: the journal article. Those policies further reserve the largest chunk of reward to articles in international journals, of a certain rank, in particular indexes and lists maintained by private entities and often anonymous groups on the other side of the world. They allocate relatively little credit to equally academically rigorous and socially relevant/impactful articles in national/local journals, often actively removing many other knowledge products that are required to run the universities and serve the society.
The logic behind the above practice is truly irresponsible, as I have written many times in this column before. Briefly, if all professors are given the most credit for making international contributions, where are developing countries going to turn for knowledge production, sharing, and application for addressing national needs? Who is going to be inspired to go study the unique and difficult mountains of Nepal? Who is going to make the research output accessible to local people who do not understand English? Who is going to write for the public, advise the ministry of infrastructures, prepare future engineers, sit on public safety boards, and so on?
Setting artificial value in any marketplace (of goods or ideas) can corrupt the system, create perverse incentives, harm the people involved, and prevent the system from serving broader society. To build on the farming analogy, emerging university policies are doing the opposite of promoting crops that grow well in the local soil, also discouraging farmers from cultivating most crops for which there is market demand/need and even creating new demands for all kinds of unhealthy foods.
Misaligned incentives are dangerous for any institution or society. Here is a quote widely attributed to the actor and investor Charlie Munger: “Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” Those who created and updated policies in the past tried to address emerging challenges, often with great insight and caution. But one thing has become institutionally counterproductive and socially misaligned over time: the attempt to control dishonesty by putting more and more weight on international, high-ranking, certain-list journals.
The knowledge contributions that scholars make to their disciplines (e.g., to the global community of physicists if you are a physicist) is only one distinct kind of contribution. If a university is meeting its internal need to produce, share, and apply knowledge to run itself well (and if those who do so are given enough incentive), and if that university is responding impressively to the demands of new knowledge that their nation/society expects (such as when there are no other mountain road engineers in other universities in the country), then it is wonderful when professors at that university can “also” contribute to their respective global communities/ disciplines. But universities must not fail to view knowledge as an ecosystem where local and national contributions are the foundations on which global knowledge contribution can and should be built.
Reversing regressive policies
A closer analytical look at a sampling of recruitment and promotion policies shows that recent updates have made the policies increasingly rigid, mainly in the name of improving rigor and curbing dishonesty. The consequences are already showing. For example, fast-tracked research professors may be producing more articles in Q1 international journals, but because they see no incentive for excellence in teaching, they’re not supporting the next generation of excellent researchers. In fact, many of these researchers are quickly attracted to apply for leadership positions because a similar provision for leadership selection is helping these researchers outcompete scholars who have broader and stronger profiles of academic leadership, as well as excellent teaching and service records.
As someone who has led an internal study of educational quality and assisted the accreditation process for my university here in New York, and as a senate leader who more recently helped update our own tenure and promotion policies, I was sad to see how rigid recruitment and promotion policies of Nepali universities have become. I am alarmed by more recent updates to those policies by moving in the wrong direction of even more rigidity, as well by the planned implementation of a unified testing and licensure system. Imagine that in the farming village, everyone is tested and licensed for rice farming, even when half of the villages in the country specialize in many other crops and contribute little rice to the national food market. Such a farming license would be laughable; in higher education, it will make it difficult to hire specialists, address department and university-specific needs, and diversify the excellence of faculty output.
If the current trajectory holds, the harms done by the rigidity, misalignment of incentives, and even perverse incentives in some areas will last a generation. Current national leaders seem to be sensitive to unintended consequences of misguided policies, as I had the opportunity to hear at a national gathering of university leaders last month. I was also heartened by illustrative stories told by university leaders who are keenly aware of the structural gaps and unintended loopholes in current policies. Some universities have started conducting policy review, and a diverse group of independent scholars have provided them with resources from one plus year of research and discussion they have done. But the Ministry of Education and other national policy leaders must also make sure that all universities are able to recognize and reward all of the productive work done by all of their professors – and not just a few.
It is wrong to knowingly tell the majority of professors (or farmers) that they will be paid far less than their neighbors just to satisfy the interests of some entities across the world. Does the need to push the global ranking of Midwestern University require that university’s policymakers to give no credit to the nursing professor in Surkhet for producing an urgently needed, locally adapted nursing handbook to heal people across Karnali? Does a dean’s desire to see Kathmandu University professors’ citation index go up on Google Scholar justify their decision to deny promotion to an indigenous study scholar who has uplifted Tamang communities across several districts while only publishing in local journals? The excuse that donors want higher citation and ranking is unacceptable: even the supposed “bad guys” are human enough to like it when they read about the lives saved in Karnali and communities thriving in Bagmati in the self-study report of those universities in Nepal.
Transcending excuses
It is time for national and institutional policymakers to stop making excuses, to look the public right in the eyes and articulate what each university’s comprehensive visions and distinct contributions are, to be fair to every professor who honestly does productive work. In fact, with the spreading abuse of large-language-model AI tools, it is time that policymakers replace their focus on quantity, shadow measures, and simplistic thinking with the hard work of recognizing and rewarding as many kinds of institutionally valuable and socially impactful contributions as possible. International contribution of scholarship should be an extension of addressing the knowledge needs of future generations of students and our society at large.
It would be a shame if today’s policy updates help a minority of professors keep getting promoted and reach top admin positions, if universities continue to reward those who maximize article production in high-ranking international journals (including by using AI to cut corners). We will have no one to blame if our universities keep failing to adequately reward the majority of their professors, including those who gather data from across the Himalayas, who share knowledge in diverse forms and venues, who apply knowledge through community initiatives and advice for local and national governments, and who invest a lot more time to mentor and prepare future scholars across the disciplines. Indeed, such policies would be an indicator of a backward society where knowledge doesn’t make much difference for the broader public.
The author is a professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Email: shyam.sharma@stonybrook.edu
