Yardstick

What yardstick should we use?

Or, the very question is: Can we use the performance of teaching as the criteria of promoting an academic staff?

For obvious reasons, no. To put it simply, the quality of teaching (or clinical care) could hardly be quantified. (Alas, by definition, quality could not be quantified.) Peer review and examination result are biased, and, if you wish to follow students’ opinion, let me ask you one question: What’s the difference between the Most Popular Actor Award and the Best Actor Award?

And, therefore, medical schools resolved to assessing the performance in research.

No, I'm not going to discuss the problem of impact factor or h-index. My friend VW discussed that not too long ago (see http://vwswong.blogspot.com/2011/09/citations.html). I shall also not discuss the problem of our new generation academic staff, who try to avoid teaching and clinical duty and spend their time on research. (Yes, these are serious problems, but we shall leave them aside for the moment.)

But, once research becomes the yardstick for promotion, funding agencies soon follow and use it as the criteria for resource allocation. At the end, research per se becomes a specialty.

And we enter the era of research professor.