Abstract
Our procedures for creating excellent departments of psychology are based largely on selection—hiring and promoting the best people. I argue that these procedures have been successful, but I suggest the implementation of policies that I believe will further improve departments in the behavioral and brain sciences. I recommend that we institute more faculty development programs attached to incentives to guarantee continuing education and scholarly activities after the Ph.D. degree. I also argue that we would do a much better job if we more strongly stream our faculty into research, education, or service and not expect all faculty members to carry equal responsibility for each of these. Finally, I argue that more hiring should occur at advanced levels, where scholars have a proven track record of independent scholarship. Although these practices will be a challenge to implement, institutions do ossify over time and thus searching for ways to improve our departments should be a key element of faculty governance.
I argue in this article that although we have created excellent universities, our selection-based approach to talent and productivity is incomplete for creating the very best departments. For example, many of those who earn a Ph.D. degree never publish again. Furthermore, there is often a drop in research productivity after people are granted tenure. Although many continue to publish post-Ph.D. and post-tenure, a large number of scholars largely quit doing so. Furthermore, the majority of articles are cited very little. Thus, I invite readers to consider the following: Over time, even excellent organizations become complacent with the status quo that worked well in the past. The Kodak camera company is a sad example. My contention is that we psychologists are not immune to becoming accustomed to our ways and are very good at defending the current state of affairs. Thus, I ask readers to consider my suggestions with an open mind.
In my experience the departments that have adopted forms of my recommendations function better. If readers do not like my suggestions, I invite them to come up with their ideas of how to improve things. Few of us would contend that, like Dr. Pangloss, we are living in the best of all possible worlds. Thus, my challenge to readers is to ask what all organizational citizens should ask: Where can things be improved? My suggestions are directed at universities, research institutes, and educational organizations.
Our current approach to excellence in scholarship rests largely on hiring the right individuals. We spend enormous effort identifying those individuals who have the right talent and motivation, largely based on activities during their graduate student and early careers. These judgments are very cloudy because of confounding variables such as differences between the mentors of the young scholars. We know that our judgments are sometimes correct but also that they are frequently off base.
I suggest that we should believe psychologists when they tell us that skills and behavior can grow incrementally. Although we understand that skills are incremental and that entity theories are very incomplete (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995), we often seem to make faculty hiring and promotion decisions based on entity judgments of whether a person has the needed talent or not. Based on an incremental approach to mastery, we need to do more in terms of lifetime scholarly development, as well as institute greater incentives for the behaviors we value. Although most organizations have a few programs in place for faculty development and some incentives for quality scholarship and teaching, these often are rather minor in the overall scheme and have few enforcement mechanisms.
Beyond the Usual Suspects: Better Departmental Policies
Many psychologists stress the importance of situations in influencing behavior. And yet they often rely almost completely on personnel selection to achieve excellence in their organization.
Good selection is important, although hard to do well. Immense energy and time is spent selecting professors and students, and then they are turned loose to “do their own thing.” Experience shows that in lucky cases this works, but the data reveal that there are shortcomings in relying almost totally on the selection of personnel. We pass on a candidate who ends up being a star at another institution, or we hire someone who looks very promising but turns out to be disappointing. Like lay people, we trust our own human judgment, all the while warning people of the shortcomings of human judgment. Simonton (2016, this issue) describes how poor our predictions of future eminence are.
Shortcomings with the current system
One source of data on the low rates of scholarly productivity comes from the scholarship on the field of economics. The modal number of publications after the Ph.D. dissertation is zero (Conley & Onder, 2014), and there is yet a further decline as one moves away from the early post-Ph.D. bump (Rauber & Ursprung, 2005). Furthermore, there is a substantial further drop-off in publication after people receive tenure (Conley & Onder, 2014). The median faculty member in economics, even in prestigious departments, has very few top quality publications after 6 years post-Ph.D (Conley & Onder, 2014). One percent of economists account for 12% of quality-adjusted publications, and most produce only a small amount of research (Conley, Crucini, Driskill, & Onder, 2013).
These numbers from economics seem to generalize to psychology. Byrnes (2007) found that young professors in the very most prestigious departments published only about 1.5 articles a year in their first 7 years post-Ph.D. Phillips (2007) found that top faculty in the leading psychology departments in the country could expect their three most highly cited papers to be cited about 10 times per year. Moving away from just the most successful research departments, Thompson Reuters (2011) reported that the average psychology article published in 2000 was cited only about twice a year in the following decade. Perhaps not dismal, but certainly not stellar. Meho (2007), writing in Physics World, estimated that a shocking 90% of published research is never cited and in psychology a large number of published articles are rarely cited (White & White, 1977).
We spend much time hiring the right people but do not carefully implement systems designed to insure scholarly excellence. We can do more with our faculty to enhance their performance over the years. After all, we know that behavior is a function both of the person and the situation. In order to produce high-performance work systems, we need to coordinate selection with continuing education, performance appraisals, tracking of talent, and rewards and compensation for excellence.
Consider one of the most productive scholars in the field: the Editor of this journal, Robert Sternberg. He has over 1,500 publications and an h index of 161. In contrast, the publication records of the faculty at even the top ranked psychology departments pale in comparison. I do not mean to suggest that all should aspire to the astounding record of Professor Sternberg or even that this would be desirable. But simply put, it means that citation and publication rates hundreds of times those of the average faculty in the top departments are possible. Thus, one might ask whether improvements in research productivity are not only possible, but whether it is likely that there is much room for improvement!
Faculty continuing education
Most departments have some forms of continuing education for faculty, but these activities are often unsystematic and not incentivized. Scholars may attend conferences, but seeing old friends is often the major activity there. The talks we attend at conferences and colloquia focus on a single person’s latest research and do not educate us broadly about advances in various areas of psychology. Few faculty members actually take advanced courses to further their knowledge, and for many scholars, their skills in statistics grow very outmoded over time.
There are efforts at continuing education in terms of travel money to conferences, the publication of annual reviews that present updates of the field, and departmental colloquia. Yet, in many instances, our continuing education is haphazard and nobody insures that scholars do it. In fields such as clinical psychology, medicine, and law, systematic continuing coursework is required, and we might consider doing the same. As it is, scholars usually keep up with their narrow area, and to some extent their subdiscipline, but most do not understand the major advances across psychology.
We can learn from departmental colloquia, and yet, in my experience, many or most faculty members do not attend. I have been affiliated with a number of the best psychology departments in the USA, and my experience is that fewer than half of the faculty attend colloquia. Furthermore, most departments do not have the resources to offer systematic colloquia series on the most important advances. Imagine that each department or consortium of departments in an area had a speaker each month to talk about important advances in each subspecialty of psychology. The focus would not be on a single individual’s research, but instead on the most important advances in that area of psychology. All faculty would be expected or required to attend. This could not help but benefit scholarship and teaching.
Several reviewers of this article think that the current system of conferences and colloquia does a fine job of continuing education. And yet one of them asked me to explain “entity theories.” Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck’s research has been the focus of a White House conference, and President Obama has appealed to her work in his speeches on education. Asking for this explanation of “entity theories” speaks volumes about our continuing education programs.
Faculty incentives
Once we hire people, we turn them loose to teach and do research, largely unsupervised. Furthermore, incentives such as raises are barely based on actual performance in many instances. A large amount of the raise pool is devoted to standard raises for everyone, and then a chunk is giving to those with competing offers. The problem with competing offers is that they are not allocated in an even-handed way to the faculty in light of merit. Thus, those with friends in other departments, those in “hot” areas, and those willing to play the “competing offer game” get the largest raises.
Often only a small amount of the raise pool is systematically awarded for merit. However, I was at the University of Illinois for 35 years, and raises in psychology were largely based on a systematic rating of merit for research, teaching, and service. The Head’s committee of senior professors read the vitae and annual reports and rated each individual. I was impressed how this seemed to result in very little “deadwood” in the department. Other incentives are also possible, such as reductions in committee work and reductions in teaching for an excellent research record. Opportunities to mentor young faculty and share ideas is another way successful teachers could be incentivized, with rewards attached.
Faculty specialization
Virtually all departments use the model of “professors doing everything.” For decades it has been argued that to be a good teacher, one must be a good researcher and vice-versa, and therefore all faculty should do all activities. To ensure faculty governance, professors are also required to perform substantial university service. I believe more specialization is an alternative model that should be given a fair try. Specialization of activities has been one of the major forces in the advance of civilization, and there is no reason that scholarship would not also profit from it.
Some professors love research and are extremely productive. Over the years, the difference between the research stars and the other faculty grows huge. A small percentage of scientists are responsible for a vastly disproportional number of publications and citations. I examined three departments of psychology in the USA ranked in the top 60 research departments by the National Research Council. These departments, which are all familiar to me, all have active research faculty. Nevertheless, even taking years since degree into account, the distribution of citation counts was extremely positively skewed, with a few individuals producing many more publications and citation counts than the rest of the faculty, with most faculty producing moderate numbers, and a few producing very low numbers. In one department, the most cited psychologist had a higher citation count that the rest of the department combined! In all three departments, the most cited psychologist had a much greater citation count than the 10 least-cited scholars combined. At the same time, there was little evidence that the most productive scholars had substantially lower teaching loads, although the departments allowed for some course buyouts from teaching with grant money. Nonetheless, the least and most productive faculty in terms of scholarship appeared to teach similar amounts. Imagine that the most productive scholars in each department teach much less and that the lowest professors in terms of scholarly output teach more; the scholarly productivity and impact of the department would almost certainly increase dramatically.
This could not help but raise the overall scholarly output of departments. Allison and Stewart (1974) found, not surprisingly, that research productivity is strongly associated with the amount of time people spend on it, and I assume the same is true of teaching. Why not let these very productive individuals concentrate heavily on scholarship and research? Similarly, a few professors are spectacular teachers. And some seem to thrive on service and enjoy it, whereas others loathe it. Why burden the superstars in each domain with many activities from the other domains? Although a few departments now have tenured teaching tracks, this is still relatively rare.
Hiring of advanced individuals
Because hiring new Ph.D.’s produces such uncertain results, it would make sense for institutions to hire more scholars at the midcareer and senior levels. Virtually all organizations heavily emphasize hiring new Ph.D.’s. This has advantages such as having a department with various levels, with individuals who might be good at somewhat different tasks. However, it results in a lot of hiring of individuals who will publish only at a modest level and whose teaching and mentoring skills are adequate but not outstanding. If one truly wants to hire outstanding teachers or researchers, a department might look more frequently to hiring associate or full professors who have a proven track record that is independent of their graduate school mentors.
Hiring across universities will tend to move the most productive to institutions with the most resources for research, and this will benefit the field. Furthermore, there will be added incentives for better teaching and research if university psychologists can move more easily. Although a helpful way to obtain a higher salary is to receive competing offers from other universities, this is usually available to only a small percentage of highly accomplished individuals working in popular fields. My proposal would expand this option so that hiring talented individuals from other institutions becomes an even a greater source of talent for departments that can attract them.
The challenges of change
I do not mean to suggest that the changes I suggest will be easy; both institutions and individuals tend to resist change, especially if things are working tolerably well. I just ask readers to ask if we are in fact growing complacent and not fully considering how our institutions might be improved. Let me point out that we have faculty governance and thus should be able to improve the aspects of our departments that need improving. It might not always be easy, but change is rarely easy.
As a young man, I was trained to be the administrator of a psychiatric hospital by a man with amazing administrative talents. He taught me that many administrators view their job as putting the brakes on and making sure people follow the rules. Instead, he said, be an administrator who is a facilitator of the good ideas of those in the organization. Thus, I challenge readers to ask how their departments might be improved and then work to convince their colleagues to make these changes.
Conclusions
There are many forces that work against change in most organizations, and academia is no exception. I believe that structural changes such as allowing certain faculty to focus on research or teaching or administration, more continuing education, and more tangible rewards that are tied closely to performance metrics will improve the effectiveness of our scholarly institutions. Of course there will be challenges—there always are. But I ask scholars to consider that the laws of psychology apply to them. People tend to be comfortable with what they are used to and often follow the path of least effort; we are no different than others in this respect. It takes thought and effort to make improvements, and I ask you to join me in that task.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship or the publication of this article.