Why Rutgers professors dislike system that tracks their work

[Tango Two]

Productivity has always been an important aspect of any college professors' performance.
How many books they write, how often they are cited in articles, how much grant money they win — it's all part of the discussion about what makes a good college professor, said David Hughes, president of Rutgers' faculty union.
But when Rutgers' New Brunswick campus began paying a company to track those statistics and generate productivity scores for each professor, Hughes said he thinks the university took its emphasis on data a step too far.


http://www.nj.com/education/2016/02/rutgers_professors_academic_analytics.html

 

[jcg878]

Students should be concerned if their professors are evaluated primarily by a system like that, since the professor who puts no effort into his/her class to squeak out another publication or grant application is rewarded. The most published colleague in our department has teaching evaluations that are in the lowest 5% of the entire university - he'd do very well by this system. Quality of teaching is very difficult to evaluate and obviously not objective, but a system like that ignores it.

That being said, I think there is room for a metric of scholarly productivity. Its utility depends on how universities use it.