Why is the state of universities such an emotional issue for me?

It all about values!

Universities have changed dramatically over the course of my lifetime. Australian universities are receiving increasing media attention due to failures in management and governance. But there is a lot more to the story, particularly at the grassroots level, of the everyday experience of students and faculty. It is all about the four M's: management, marketing, metrics, and money. Learning, understanding, and discovering things for their own sake is alien and marginalised. I have stopped writing posts about this. So why come back to it?

I am often struck how emotional this issue is for me and how hard it is to sometimes talk about it, particularly with those with a different view from me. Writing blog posts (e.g. this one) about it has been a somewhat constructive outlet, rather than exploding in anger at an overpaid and unqualified "manager" or one of their many multiplying minions.

A few weeks ago, I listened to three public lectures by the Australian historian Peter Harrison. [He is my former UQ colleague. We are now both Emeritus. I benefited from excellent seminars he ran at UQ, some of which I blogged about].

The lectures helped me understand what has happened to universities and also why it is a sensitive subject for me. Briefly, it is all about values and virtues.

The lectures are nicely summarised by Peter in the short article, 

How our universities became disenchanted: Secularisation, bureaucracy and the erosion of value

Reading the article rather than this blog post is recommended. I won't try and summarise it, but rather highlight a few points and then make some peripheral commentary.

I agree with Peter's descriptions of the problems we see on the surface (bureaucracy, metrics, and management features significantly). His lectures are a much deeper analysis of underlying cultural changes and shifting worldviews that have occurred over centuries, leading universities to evolve into their current mangled form.

A few things to clarify to avoid potential misunderstanding of Peter's arguments.

Secularisation is defined broadly. It does not just refer to the decline in the public influence of Christianity in the Western world. It is also about Greek philosophy, particularly Aristotle, and the associated emphasis on virtues and transcendence. Peter states:

"The intrinsic motivations of teachers, researchers and scholars can be understood in terms of virtues or duties. According to virtue ethics, the “good” of an activity is related to the way it leads to a cultivation and expression of particular virtues. These, in turn, are related to a particular conception of natural human ends or goals. (Aristotle’s understanding of human nature, which informs virtue ethics, proposes that human beings are naturally oriented towards knowledge, and that they are fulfilled as persons to the extent that they pursue those goals and develop the requisite intellectual virtues.)"

The virtue ethics of Aristotle [and Alisdair MacIntyre] conflicts with competing ethical visions, including duty-oriented (deontological) ethics, consequentialist ethics, and particularly utilitarianism. This led to a shift away from intrinsic goods to what things are "good for", i.e., what practical outcomes they produce. For example, is scientific research "good" and have "value" because it cultivates curiousity, awe, and wonder, or because it will lead to technology that will stimulate economic growth?

Peter draws significantly on Max Weber's ideas about secularisation, institutions, and authority. Weber argued that a natural consequence of secularisation was disenchantment (the loss of magic in the world). This is not simply "people believe in science rather than magic". Disenchantment is a loss of a sense of awe, wonder, and mystery.

Now, a few peripheral responses to the lectures.

Is secularisation the dominant force that has created these problems for universities? In question time, Peter was asked whether capitalism was more important. i.e., universities are treated as businesses and students as customers? He agreed that capitalism is a factor but also pointed out how Weber emphasised that capitalism was connected to the secularising effects of the Protestant Reformation.

 I think that two other factors to consider are egalitarianism and opportunism. These flow from universities being "victims" of their own success. Similar issues may also be relevant to private schools, hospitals, and charities. They have often been founded by people of "charisma" [in the sense used by Weber] motivated by virtue ethics. Founders were not concerned with power, status, or money. What they were doing had intrinsic value to them and was "virtuous". In the early stages, these institutions attracted people with similar ideals. The associated energy, creativity, and common vision led to "success." Students learnt things, patients got healed, and poverty was alleviated. But, this success attracted attention and  the institution then had power, money, status, and influence.

The opportunists then move in. They are attracted to the potential to share in the power, money, status, and influence. The institution then takes on a life of its own, and the ideals and virtue ethics of the founders are squeezed out. In some sense, opportunism might be argued to be a consequence of secularisation. 

[Aside: two old posts considered a similar evolution, motivated by a classic article about the development of businesses.]

One indicator of the "success" of universities is how their graduates join the elite and hold significant influence in society. [Aside: ignoring the problem of distinguishing correlation and causality. Do universities actually train students well or just select those who will succeed anyway?]  Before (around) 1960, (mostly) only the children of the elite got to attend university. Demands arose that more people should have access to this privilege. This led to "massification" and an explosion in the number of students, courses, and institutions. This continues today, globally. Associated with this was more bureaucracy. Furthermore, the "iron triangle" of cost, access, and quality presents a challenge for this egalitarianism. If access increases, so does cost and quality decreases, unless you spend even more. It is wonderful that universities have become more diverse and accessible. On the other hand, I fear that for every underprivileged student admitted whose mind is expanded and life enriched, many more rich, lazy, and entitled students suck the life out of the system.

Metrics are pseudo-rational

Peter rightly discussed how the proliferation of the use of metrics to measure value is problematic, and reflects the "rationalisation" associated with bureaucracy (described by Weber). Even if one embraces the idea that "rational" and "objective" assessment is desirable, my observation is that in practice, metrics are invariably used in an irrational way. For example, managers look at the impact factor of journals, but are blissfully oblivious to the fact that the citation distribution for any journal is so broad and with a long tail that the mean number is meaningless. The underlying problem is that too many of the people doing assessments suffer from some mixture of busyness, intellectual laziness, and arrogance. Too many managers are power hungry and want to make the decisions themselves, and don't trust faculty who actually may understand the intellectual merits and weaknesses of the work being assessed.

The problems are just as great for the sciences as the humanities

On the surface, the humanities are doing worse than the sciences. For example, if you look at declining student numbers, threats of job cuts, political criticism, and status within the university. This is because science is associated with technology which is associated with jobs and economic growth. However, if you look at pure science that is driven by curiousity, awe, and wonder, then one should be concerned. There is an aversion to attacking difficult and risky problems, particularly those that require long-term investment or have been around for a while. The emphasis is on low-lying fruit and the latest fashion. Almost all physics and chemistry research is framed in terms of potential applications, not fundamental understanding. Sometimes I feel some of my colleagues are doing engineering not physics. In a similar vein, biochemists frame research in terms of biomedical applications, not the beauty and wonders of how biological systems work. 

Are universities destined for bureaucratic self-destruction?

Provocatively, Peter considered the potential implications of the arguments of historian and anthropologist Joseph Tainter concerning the collapse of complex societies. On the technical side, this reminded me of a famous result in ecology by Robert May, that as the complexity of a system (the number of components and interactions) increases, it can become unstable.

I don't think universities as institutions will collapse. They are too integrated into the fabric of modern capitalism. What may collapse is the production of well-educated (in the Renaissance sense) graduates and research that is beautiful, original, and awe-inspiring. This leads naturally into the following question.

Is the age of great discoveries over?

Peter briefly raised this issue. On the one hand, we are victims of our own success. It is amazing how much we now know and understand. Hence, it is harder to discover truly new and amazing things. On the other hand, because of emergence we should expect surprises.

There is hope on the margins

Peter did not just lament the current situation but made some concrete suggestions for addressing the problems, even though we are trapped in Weber's "iron cage" of bureaucracy.

• Re-balancing the structures of authority
• Finding a place for values discourse in the universities
• Develop ways of resolving differences with a sense of the rationality of Alisdair MacIntyre in mind

On the first, I note the encouraging work of the ANU Governance Project.

Peter also encouraged people to work on the margins. I also think that this is where the most significant scholarship and stimulus for reform will happen. A nice example is the story that Malcolm Gladwell tells in a podcast episode, The Obscure Virus Club.

2025 Nobel Prize in Physics: Macroscopic quantum effects

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis received the prize  “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

The work was published in three papers in PRL in 1984 and 1985. The New York Times has a nice discussion of the award, including comments from Clarke, Martinis, Tony Leggett, and Steve Girvin.

There is some rich, subtle, and beautiful physics here. As a theorist, I comment on the conceptual and theoretical side, but don't want to minimise that doing the experiments was a technical breakthrough.

The experiments were directly stimulated by Tony Leggett, who, beginning in the late 70s, championed the idea that Josephson junctions and SQIDs could be used to test whether quantum mechanics was valid at the macroscopic level. Many in the quantum foundations community were sceptical. Leggett and Amir Caldeira, performed some beautiful, concrete, realistic calculations of the effect of decoherence and dissipation on quantum tunneling in SQUIDs. The results suggested that macroscopic tunneling should be observable.

Aside: Leggett rightly received a Nobel in 2003 for his work on the theory of superfluid 3He. Nevertheless, I believe his work on quantum foundations is even more significant.

Subtle point 1. What do we mean by a macroscopic quantum state?

It is commonly said that superconductors and superfluids are in a macroscopic quantum state. Signatures are the quantisation of magnetic flux in a superconducting cylinder and how the current through a Josephson junction oscillates as a function of the magnetic flux through the junction. I discuss this in the chapter on Quantum Matter in my Very Short Introduction.

Leggett argued that these experiments are explained by the Josephson equations, which treat the phase of the superconducting order parameter as a classical variable. For example, in a SQUID, it satisfies a classical dynamical equation. 

If the state is truly quantum, then the phase variable should be quantised.

Aside: a nice microscopic derivation, starting from BCS theory and using path integrals, of the effective action to describe the quantum dynamics was given in 1982 by Vinay Ambegaokar, Ulrich Eckern, Gerd Schön

Subtle point 2. There are different signatures of quantum theory: energy level quantisation, tunnelling, coherence (interference), and entanglement.

In 1984-5, Clarke, DeVoret, and Martinis observed the first two. Macroscopic quantum coherence is harder to detect and was only observed in 2000. 

In a nice autobiographical article

Matchmaking Between Condensed Matter and Quantum Foundations, and Other Stories: My Six Decades in Physics

Leggett commented in 2020,

Because of the strong prejudice in the quantum foundations community that it would never be possible to demonstrate characteristically quantum-mechanical effects at the macroscopic level, this assertion made us [Leggett and Garg, 1985] the target of repeated critical comments over the next few years. Fortunately, our experimental colleagues were more open-minded, and several groups started working toward a meaningful experiment along the lines we had suggested, resulting in the first demonstrations (29, 30) of MQC [Macroscopic Quantum Coherence] in rf SQUIDs (by then rechristened flux qubits) at the turn of the century. However, it would not be until 2016 that an experiment along the lines we had suggested (actually using a rather simpler protocol than our original one) was carried out (31) and, to my mind, definitively refuted macrorealism at that level.  

I find it rather amusing that nowadays the younger generation of experimentalists in the superconducting qubit area blithely writes papers with words like “artificial atom” in their titles, apparently unconscious of how controversial that claim once was.

Two final comments on the sociology side.

Superconductivity and superfluidity have now been the basis for Nobel Prizes in six years and four years, respectively.

The most widely cited of the three PRLs that were the basis of the Prize is the one on quantum tunnelling with about 500 citations on Google Scholar. (In contrast, Devoret has more than 20 other papers that are more widely cited). From 1986 to 1992 it was cited about a dozen times per year. Between 1993 and 2001 is was only cited a total of 30 times. Since, 2001 is has been cited about 20 times per year.

This is just one more example of how citation rates are a poor measure of the significance of work and a predictor of future success.

What Americans might want to know about getting a job in an Australian university

Universities and scientific research in the USA are facing a dire future. Understandably, some scientists are considering leaving the USA. I have had a few enquiries about Australia. This makes sense, as Australia is a stable English-speaking country with similarities in education, culture, democracy, and economics. At least compared to most other possible destinations. Nevertheless, there are important differences between Australia and the USA to be aware of, particularly when it comes down to how universities function (and dis-function!) and how they hire people. 

A few people have asked me for advice. Below are some comparisons. Why should you believe me? I spent eleven years in the US (1983-1994) and visited at least once a year until 2018. On the other hand, there are some reasons to take what I say with a grain of salt. I have never been a faculty member in a US university. I retired four years ago from a faculty position in Australia. I actually haven't sat on a committee for almost ten years :). Hopefully, this post will prompt other readers to weigh in with other perspectives.

There are discussions in Australia about trying to attract senior people from the USA to come here. Whether that will come to anything substantial remains to be seen.

The best place to look for advertised positions is on Seek. 

Postdocs

This is where the news is best. Young people in the USA can apply for regular postdoc positions. Most are attached to specific grants and so involve working on a specific project. 

Ph.D. students

Most of the positions go to Australian citizens who get there own scholarship (fellowship) from the government. These are not tied to a grant or a supervisor (advisor) There are a few positions for international students, but not many. Usually they go to applicants with a Masters degree and publications.

Ph.D's are funded for 3 to 3.5 years. There is no required course work. Australian students have done a 4-year undergraduate degree and no Masters. This means tackling highly technical projects in theory is not realistic, except for exceptional students.

Faculty hiring is adhoc 

There is no hiring cycle. Positions tend to be advertised at random times depending on local politics, whims and bureaucracy. Universities and Schools (departments) claim they have strategic plans, but given fluctuations in funding, management, and government policy positions appear and disappear at random. Typically, the Dean (and their lackies), not the department, control the selection process, particularly for senior appointments. The emphasis is on metrics. Letters of reference are sometimes not even called for before short listing. Some hiring is done purely from online interviews and seminars.

Bias towards insiders 

People already in the Australian system know how to navigate it best. They may also already have a grant from the Australian Research Council and have done some teaching and (positive) student evaluations. They are known quantities to the managers and so a safer bet than outsiders. If you want to get a junior faculty position here (a lectureship) your chances may be better if you first come as a postdoc. However, there are exceptions...

Current funding crunches

Unfortunately, I fear the faculty market may be quite cool for the next few years. Many universities are actually trying to sack (fire) people due to funding shortfalls. These budget crises are due to post-covid, mismanagement, and the government trying to reduce international student numbers (due to the politics of a housing and cost-of-living crisis).

Australian Research Council

This is pretty much the sole source of funding in physics and chemistry. This is quite different to the USA where there were (pre-Trump) numerous funding agencies (NSF, DOE, DOD, ...).  They are currently reviewing and redesigning all their programs and so we will have to wait to see how this may impact the prospects of scientific refugees from the USA. (They used to have quite good Fellowship schemes for all career stages that were an excellent avenue for foreigners to come here). Some of my colleagues recommend following ARC Tracker on social media to be informed about the latest at ARC.

Thirty years ago, I came back to Australia from the USA. I had a wonderful stint doing science, largely because of generous ARC funding. Unfortunately, the system has declined. But I am sure it is better than being the USA right now.

There are many more things I could write about. Some have featured in previous rants about metrics and managerialism. Things to be aware of before accepting a job include faculty having little voice or power, student absenteeism, corrupt governance, and there is no real tenure or sabbaticals.

Lamenting the disintegration of elite USA universities

Elite universities in the USA have nurtured and enhanced my whole academic life. In 1983, I moved to the USA as an international student, commenced a Ph.D. at Princeton, and then worked at Northwestern and Ohio State. After I returned to Australia in 1994, I visited the USA every year for several weeks for conferences, collaborations, and university visits. Much of my research was shaped by ideas I got from those trips. This blog started through the influence of I2CAM, a wonderful institution funded by the NSF. My movement into chemical physics was facilitated by attending workshops at the Telluride Science Center. I deeply appreciate my colleagues (and their institutions) for their stimulation, support, interest, encouragement, and hospitality. 

My trips to the USA only ended with COVID-19, retirement, family health issues, and my new general aversion to international travel. Currently I would be too scared to travel to the USA, based on what I read in the Travel Section of The Sydney Morning Herald.

Most importantly, what I have learned and done has been built largely on intellectual foundations laid by people in these elite universities.  Other parts of the world have played a role too, but my focus here is the USA due to current political events leading to the impending disintegration of these universities.

I readily acknowledge that these universities have flaws and need reform. On this blog, I occasionally discussed issues, such as the obsession with money, metrics, management, and marketing. Teaching undergraduates and robust scholarship has sometimes become subsidiary. I have critiqued some of the flaky science published in luxury journals by groups from these universities.

Nevertheless, if something is broken you do not fix it by smashing it. Consider a beautiful ancient vase with a large crack. You do not restore the vase by smashing it and hiring your teenage cousin to make a new one.

Reading about what is happening raises multiple questions. What is really happening? Why is it happening? How significant is it? What might it lead to? How should individuals and institutions respond? 

Today when I was on the UQ campus it was serene and the challenges my colleagues are facing, as formidable and important as they are, seem trifling compared to what I imagine is happening on Ivy campuses right now. In passing, I mention that Australia is not completely immune to what is happening in the USA. Universities here that receive some research grant funding from the USA government have had it paused or cancelled.

I can't imagine what it would be like to be an international student at Princeton right now.

On the one hand, I do not feel qualified to comment on what is happening as I am so distant. On the other hand, I do want to try and express some solidarity with and appreciation of institutions and colleagues that have blessed me and the world. I make a few general observations. This is my advice, for what it is worth, to my younger self.

Protect your mental health. You and your colleagues and your institutional are encountering an existential crisis, perhaps like none encountered before. Don't live in denial. But also don't let this consume you and destroy you as a person or a community. Limit your intake of news and how much you think about it and discuss it. Practise the basics: exercise; eat, drink, and sleep well; get help sooner than later; limit screen time; rest.

Expect the unexpected. Expect more surprises, pain, uncertainty, instability, intra-institutional conflict, and disappointments. 

Get the big picture. This is about a lot more than federal funding for universities. There are broader issues about what a university is actually for. What do you want to preserve and protect? What are you willing to compromise on? Beyond the university, many significant issues are at stake concerning politics, democracy, economics, pluralism, culture, and the law. This is an opportunity, albeit a scary one, to think about and learn about these issues.

Make the effort to have conversations across the divides. Try to  have civil and respectful discussions with people with different perspectives on how individuals and institutions should respond to the current situation. Talk to colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. Talk to those with different political perspectives, both inside and outside the university.

Read widely. History is instructive but not determinative. I recommend two very short books that I think are relevant and helpful.

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder.

The Power of the Powerless, by Vaclav Havel, first published in 1978 in the context of living in communist totalitarian Czechoslovakia. I have a Penguin Vintage edition which includes a beautiful introduction by Timothy Snyder, written in 2018, for a 40th Anniversary edition. 

I thank Charles Ringma for bringing both books to my attention.

What do you think? I would love to hear from people in US universities who are living through this.

Elite imitation and flailing universities

The mission of universities is thinking: teaching students to think and enabling scholars to think about the world we live in. Yet, it is debatable whether most universities in the world achieve these goals. Arguably, things are getting worse. Universities are flailing. Why?

Most universities desperately want to be elite. They want to be like Harvard, Caltech, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, ...

But non-elite universities do not have the necessary resources to be elite. Yet they are controlled by elites (management on high salaries, faculty educated at elite universities) who want to be elite and so settle for elite imitation.

"A flailing university is what happens when the principal cannot control its agents. The flailing university cannot implement its own plans and may have its plans actively subverted when its agents work at cross-purposes. The non-elite university flails because it is simultaneously too large and too small: too large because the non-elite university attempts to legislate and regulate every aspect of the work of faculty and students and too small because it lacks the resources and personnel to achieve its ambitions. 

To explain the mismatch between the non-elite universities' ambitions and their abilities, consider the premature demands by elites in non-elite universities for goals, policies, curricula, infrastructure, and outcomes more appropriate to an elite university. 

In order to satisfy external actors (government, business, parents, ...) non-elite universities often take on tasks that overwhelm institutional capacity, leading to premature load bearing. As these authors put it, “By starting off with unrealistic expectations of the range, complexity, scale, and speed with which organizational capability can be built, external actors set both themselves and (more importantly) the students and researchers that they are attempting to assist to fail”. 

The expectations of external actors are only one source of imitation, however. Who people read, listen to, admire, learn from, and wish to emulate is also key. Another factor driving inappropriate imitation is that the elites in non-elite universities—senior management and high-profile faculty—are closely connected with business elites and elite universities, usually more closely than they are to the students and faculty at their own university. As a result, this elite initiates and supports policies that appear to it to be normal even though such policies may have little relevance to the student and faculty as a whole and may be wildly at odds with the university capacity. This kind of mimicry of what appear to be the best elite university policies and practices is not necessarily ill intentioned. It is simply one by-product of the background within which the elites operates. University managers engage with business elites and managers at other non-elite universities."

I actually did not write most of the text above, I just took the text from the first two pages of the article below and replaced some words (e.g. Indian state with non-elite university, Indian citizens with students and faculty). 

Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State 

Shruti Rajagopalan, Alexander T. Tabarrok

I came across the article after listening to a podcast episode that interviews the two authors, recommended by my son.

I also recommend Shutri's own podcast, Ideas of India, including a recent episode, Where did development economics go wrong?

Previously, I have discussed similar issues from the angle of the strategic importance for nation building of non-elite institutions within a country, and how science curricula should focus more on basic skills.

What do you think? Are universities like a flailing state? Is the problem elite imitation?

If organisations are emergent can they be managed?

 Any organisation is composed of many interacting parts. For example, a university is not just composed of staff and students, but also includes collaborators, donors, employers, suppliers, parents, graduates, and trustees. Their interactions with one another are influenced by structures, such as buildings, committees, and government policy. Furthermore, a university exists in a context: political, economic, historical, and cultural. What emerges from the interactions of all these components may be new states, for good or for ill. Like all emergent phenomena these states are hard to predict. For example, what will lead to high-quality education or a diverse student body? Can desirable outcomes be managed? What is the role of leadership in large organisations? Are there some universal principles of management that are useful for a wide range of organisations, whether corporations, NGOs, universities, or government departments?

Researching, teaching, and writing about "Organisational Development" and "management" is a massive industry; from Business schools in universities to a multitude of popular books for sale in airports. A fascinating paper is

The Dialogic Mindset: Leading Emergent Change in a Complex World by Gervase Bushe and Robert Marshak.

It questions the paradigm of the "visionary leader", "command and control", and the "performance mindset" that focuses on instrumental and measurable goal setting and achievement.

To understand the limitations of this management paradigm I find it helpful to reflect on the history and context of how it emerged (!) in the USA after World War II. After the war, veterans who returned to civilian life had experienced a particular leadership and organisational culture of the military: hierarchy, authority, process, discipline, solidarity, male, mono-cultural, ...  And, it worked in the context of war!

Many war veterans, both junior and senior, took this approach and mentality into industry, and it worked well in the American post-war economic boom of assembly-line-based large-scale manufacturing. The automotive industry, centred around Detroit, was representative. Arguably, the success was based on efficiency not innovation, limited competition in a simple market, and a homogeneous workforce. Two important figures who emerged from this Detroit era were Peter Drucker and Robert McNamara. Drucker did a seminal two-year study of General Motors, during WWII, that started his trajectory towards becoming the doyen of management studies. McNamara took his strategic planning experience in the war, and applied it successfully at Ford for 15 years, rising to become President of Ford in 1960. He then became Secretary of Defense for JFK and used the same management approach for the USA's involvement in the Vietnam war. This was an unmitigated disaster, but that did not stop him from using a similar approach when President of the World Bank.

Back to Bushe and Marshak and today's world. They claim that

The “visionary leader” narrative and performance mindset that predominate in theories and practices of “Change Leadership” are no longer effective in an environment of multi-dimensional diversity marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

The prevailing narrative of leadership is based on the assumption that great leaders must [be strategic thinkers], have a vision, and the ability to lead followers to that vision. Leaders, followers, and commentators alike assume that being a visionary is indispensable to organizational leadership.

... a leading voice supporting an alternative paradigm is Heifetz’s (1998) leadership model that indirectly challenges the heroic, visionary orthodoxy. He divides the decision situations leaders face into technical problems, which can be defined and solved through a top-down imposition of technical rationality; and adaptive challenges, which can only be “solved” through the voluntary engagement of the people who will have to change what they do and how they think. 

In Heifetz’s alternative narrative of leadership, adaptive leaders identify challenges but instead of providing solutions, they encourage employees and other stakeholders to propose and act on their own solutions.

 A nice example is how employees shaped strategy at the New York Public Library. 

The problem with the standard narrative is that it overlooks that organisations are emergent entities where cause-effect relations are not understood and outcomes are hard to predict. This challenge is exacerbated today by the fact that any organisation is not an isolated entity but is immersed in a complex and rapidly changing environment. This puts a premium on innovation and adaptability. 

Future posts will explore what this might mean in practice. Can self-organising processes and emergence achieve desired outcomes by "changing the conversation"?

Will there be big new discoveries in condensed matter physics?

 There are two aspects to this question concerning the future of condensed matter physics. First, are there big things to be discovered? If yes, will they be discovered?

I believe the first answer is yes for two reasons. First, the past hundred years have given us a continual stream of discoveries, many of them unexpected. Every time that things get a little boring, pretty soon there is something exciting and new. Second, condensed matter physics is all about emergent phenomena in materials. Emergent phenomena are extremely hard to anticipate or predict. Because of the combinatorics of chemistry, the list of possible materials to study is endless. CMP presents an endless frontier to explore. However, just because such a frontier exists does not mean that it will be explored. Successful explorers require courage, creativity, resources, time, and freedom.

I am concerned that the wild frontiers of condensed matter may not be explored. It is worth reflecting on who were some of the pioneers of CMP and the character of their institutional environments.  Consider Kammerlingh Onnes, Landau, Kapitsa, Anderson, de Gennes, and Leggett. Some common elements of the context (institutional, historical, political) in which they made their discoveries were time, stability, job security, mental space, and intellectual freedom. For example, Anderson spent almost three decades at Bell Labs in its heyday. Thanks to the monopoly of Bell in providing telephone services in the USA, the parent company had a very secure and stable income, providing it the ability to provide substantial financial and institutional support for basic research.

These pioneers played a long game. They had the freedom to fail, to choose research topics, and to change directions. They did not follow fashion and were fiercely independent thinkers. Andrew Zangwill highlights this about Anderson in his biography. They largely had the resources they needed and did not have to worry or fight for funding. Their daily life was very different from that of a researcher today. Their mental space was not filled with an endless stream of distractions such as emails, grant proposals, conferences, reporting, reviewing, committees, metrics, ... Most of their time and mental energy was simply focused on curiosity-driven research. 

Today, there is intense competition for funding, institutional status, and career benefits associated with obtaining it, and a pressure to produce in the short term "outputs" (papers) and "impact" (citations) and "national benefit" (technological, commercial, security, and social). This naturally leads to researchers working on "safe" projects in fashionable areas that they are confident will produce results in the short term.

I hope that I am wrong. But, I fear that great discoveries may be missed.

Is this an enlightened use of metrics?

Alternative title: An exciting alternative career for Ph.Ds in condensed matter theory!

There is a fascinating long article in The New York Times Magazine
How Data (and Some Breathtaking Soccer) Brought Liverpool to the Cusp of Glory 
The club is finishing a phenomenal season — thanks in part to an unrivaled reliance on analytics.

This is in the tradition of Moneyball. Most of the data analytics team at Liverpool have physics Ph.Ds. It is led by Ian Graham who completed a Ph.D. on polymer theory at Cambridge.

On the one hand, I loved the article because my son and I are big Liverpool fans. We watch all the games, some in the middle of the night. On the other hand, I was a bit surprised that I liked the article since I am a strong critic of the use of metrics in most contexts, especially in the evaluation of scientists and institutions. However, I came to realise that, in many ways, what Liverpool is doing is not the blind use of metrics but rather using data as just one factor in making decisions.
Here are some of the reasons why this is so different from what now happens in universities.

1. The football manager (Jurgen Klopp, who has played and managed) is making the decisions, not someone who has never played or has had limited success with playing and managing (a board member or owner).

2. The data is just one factor in hiring decisions. For example, Klopp often spends a whole day with a possible new player to see what their personal chemistry is. Furthermore, he has watched them play (the equivalent of actually reading the papers of a scientist?).

3. A single metric (cf. goals scored, h-index, impact factor) is not being used to make a decision on who to recruit. Rather, many metrics are being used, to develop a complete picture. Furthermore, a major emphasis of the Moneyball approach is finding ``diamonds in the rough'', i.e. players who have unseen potential, because their unique gifts are being overlooked (because they are currently undervalued because they score poorly with conventional metrics) or they would be a potent combination with other current plays. The latter was a decision is recruiting Salah; the data suggested he would be a particularly powerful partner to Firmino. On the former, the article discusses in detail the analysis that led to Liverpool recruiting the Ghanian midfield,  Naby Keita.

Keita’s pass completion rate tends to be lower than that of some other elite midfielders. Graham’s figures, however, showed that Keita often tried passes that, if completed, would get the ball to a teammate in a position where he had a better than average chance of scoring. What scouts saw when they watched Keita was a versatile midfielder. What Graham saw on his laptop was a phenomenon. Here was someone continually working to move the ball into more advantageous positions, something even an attentive spectator probably wouldn’t notice unless told to look for it. Beginning in 2016, Graham recommended that Liverpool try to get him.

What might be an analogue of this approach in science?
A person who does not attract a lot of attention but has a record of writing papers that stimulate or are foundational to significant papers of better-known scientists?
A person who does very good science even though they have few resources?
A person who is particularly good at putting together collaborations?

Other suggestions?

Management lessons not learned from the discovery of graphene

Don't follow the pack!

I just read the Random Walk to Graphene, by Andre Geim. It is the lecture he gave when receiving the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics. I should have read it long ago but was motivated to read it now because the following sentence features in Joseph Martin's "purloined letter'' argument about why condensed matter physics lacks status.

Graphene has literally been before our eyes and under our noses for many centuries but was never recognized for what it really is.

I learned some nice science from the lecture. Foremost, it is a great story of scientific creativity, perseverance, and serendipity. However, I want to mention a few things that highlight how the story strongly conflicts with most views about how science is currently "managed" and people operate.

Geim starts by recounting his Ph.D. and early postdoc years. His Ph.D papers were cited twice, by co-authors.

The subject was dead a decade before I even started my Ph.D. However, every cloud has its silver lining and what I uniquely learned from that experience was that I should never torture research students by offering them “zombie” projects.

Several years later he worked on a new topic as a staff scientist in Russia.

This experience taught me an important lesson that introducing a new experimental system is generally more rewarding than trying to find new phenomena within crowded areas.

He notes that when after a six-month visiting postdoc in Nottingham he entered the Western postdoc market with an h-index of 1!

When he was in the Netherlands as a young faculty member in a high magnetic field lab he began to experiment in creative directions leading to investigations of "magnetic water" and the iconic experiment of the levitating frog for which he received an Ig Nobel Prize.

we saw balls of levitating water (Fig. 1). This was awesome. It took little time to realize that the physics behind this phenomenon was good old diamagnetism. It took much longer to adjust my intuition to the fact that the feeble magnetic response of water ($\sim$${10}^{}$${}^{}$${}^{}$), that is billions of times weaker than that of iron, was sufficient to compensate the Earth’s gravity. Many colleagues, including those who worked with high magnetic fields all their lives, were flabbergasted, and some of them even argued that this was a hoax.... 

The levitation experience was both interesting and addictive. It taught me the important lesson that poking in directions far away from my immediate area of expertise could lead to interesting results, even if the initial ideas were extremely basic. This in turn influenced my research style, as I started making similar exploratory detours that somehow acquired the name “Friday night experiments.” The term is of course inaccurate. No serious work can be accomplished in just one night. It usually requires many months of lateral thinking and digging through irrelevant literature without any clear idea in sight. 

The story of the discovery of graphene using cellotape [Scotch tape, sticky tape] was more complicated, circuitous, and involved a lot more hard work than I realised.

There were two dozen or so [friday night] experiments over a period of approximately 15 years and, as expected, most of them failed miserably. But there were three hits, the levitation, gecko tape, and graphene. 

The story of the first publication is interesting. It took nine months to get the paper into Science.

First, we submitted the manuscript to Nature. It was rejected and, when further information requested by referees was added, rejected again. According to one referee, our report did “not constitute a sufficient scientific advance.” Science referees were more generous (or more knowledgeable?), and the presentation was better polished by that time. In hindsight, I should have saved the time and nerves by submitting to a second-tier journal, even though we all felt that the results were groundbreaking.

This is consistent with my belief that there is not a lot of correlation between great discoveries and publication in luxury journals.

So what should we learn from this story?
First, we should all be a little more adventurous and take some risks and explore new areas. Previously, I have argued successful researchers should move onto new hard problems. 
A lot of this relates to diminishing returns and opportunity costs.
Yet, unfortunately, there are now significant institutional and cultural pressures against this. However, I think senior faculty have a responsibility to buck these trends.

Second, funding agencies and university management really need to learn from this story of graphene. It really goes against metrics, KPIs, short term goals, making people "accountable" for extremely well-defined timetables and research outcomes, and forcing/hiring people to work on the latest hot topic.

Graphene is cool! And I am sure that there is a lot that remains to be discovered about graphene. However, I find it disturbing that so many people have flocked to the field. A few years ago I met a faculty member from Manchester and they said they were on the out because they were not working on graphene and there was a lot of pressure for people to be working on it.

There is another side to the story that I am not sure what to make of which has an Australian connection. When Alan Gilbert was vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne he tried to build a parallel private for-profit institution, Melbourne University Private. This turned out to be a massive failure, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2004 Gilbert moved to Manchester as Vice Chancellor. Of course, his main goal was to lift Manchester in the global rankings.
The Wikipedia page about Gilbert states,

According to the university's strategic plan^[8] (largely a copy of his [Gilbert's] earlier and now abandoned Melbourne Agenda (2002)^[9]) the university aims to have five Nobel Laureates on its staff by 2015, at least two of whom will have full-time appointments, and three of which it is intended to secure by 2007. During Gilbert's tenure as vice chancellor, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, was appointed the head of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at Manchester, and Sir John Sulston was appointed to a chair in the Faculty of Life Sciences. After Gilbert's death Andre Geimand Konstantin Novoselov, both of whom were appointed before Gilbert moved to Manchester, were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010.

From the little I know about Gilbert it is very hard for me to see how he would have supported Geim's approach to doing science, particularly given that there were not well-defined immediate benefits to the corporate sector.

A case for (and against) multi-dimensional measures

I am a vocal critic of the use of metrics to evaluate individuals, single scientific papers, journals, sub-fields, institutions, ....
However, my problem is really one of abuse. I don't think metrics are totally meaningless or useless. Rather, it is the mindless use of metrics, with a disregard for their limitations, that is a problem.

This post is not about metrics, jobs, and funding. I have probably already written too many posts on that. Rather, I want to give two examples where I have found some multi-dimensional metrics helpful, when considering issues relating to public policy and development, particularly in the Majority World.

The case is that of the HDI (Human Development Index). Prior to its introduction people tended to use GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as a measure of how a country was performing and where it ranked in the world. In contrast, the HDI is a composite metric, factoring in income per capita, life expectancy, and education. The map below gives a sense of how the HDI varies around the world.

There is a lot one can learn from just the map.  Sub-saharan Africa is the worst as a region. Even though India now has a middle class of several hundred million people, it is still comparable to some African countries.

Whenever I need to know something about a country, I look at the HDI. The fact that Australia often ranks in the top 3 tells me what a privileged environment I live in. Unfortunately, too many Australians really don't know or appreciate this.

I recently met a medical doctor from Niger [which I knew nothing about it]. He told me that Niger is ranked 182 out of 182 countries! This quickly gave me a sense of some of the challenges he faces.

Obviously, like any metric it has limitations. For example, some people prefer the IHDI (Inequality-adjusted HDI). The USA ranks 25th on the HDI.

The second example of a multi-dimensional metric concerns broader issues than human development, that is "human flourishing". This often means quite different things to different people. Last year there was a nice paper in PNAS that argues why this is important for both public policy, but also research in medicine and social sciences.

On the promotion of human flourishing 
Tyler J. VanderWeele

The abstract gives an excellent summary.

Many empirical studies throughout the social and biomedical sciences focus only on very narrow outcomes such as income, or a single specific disease state, or a measure of positive effect. Human well-being or flourishing, however, consists in a much broader range of states and outcomes, certainly including mental and physical health, but also encompassing happiness and life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and close social relationships. The empirical literature from longitudinal, experimental, and quasi-experimental studies is reviewed in an attempt to identify major determinants of human flourishing, broadly conceived. Measures of human flourishing are proposed. Discussion is given to the implications of a broader conception of human flourishing, and of the research reviewed, for policy, and for future research in the biomedical and social sciences.

Broadly, when trying to describe and understand complex systems one should search for some measures of the properties of the system. Given the systems are complex one may need several measures. These will never be complete or perfect. But, provided one uses them with the appropriate caution this is a good thing.

Metrics and mental health

I never thought I would write a post linking the two issues in the title.

I have been working on my talk on mental health for the School of Maths and Physics colloquium on friday. Here is the current version of my slides. I welcome any comments.

In my preparation I have become aware of a few more resources. A recent issue of Nature includes several articles, including:

An Editorial, What to do to improve postgraduate mental health.
Four researchers write from their own experience, How to handle the dark days of depression.
There is also A collection of resources.

On the one hand, it is wonderful that Nature is highlighting the issue. On the other hand, it would be nice if they reflected how Nature Publishing Group might actually be part of the problem, as they mindlessly promote metrics and their journals. It is a case of corporate "well-washing."

The link between metrics and mental health is brought out in a report to the Higher Education Funding Council for England: The Metric Tide, Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management, July 2015. The preface states:

Too often, poorly designed evaluation criteria are dominating minds, distorting behaviour and determining careers. At their worst, metrics can contribute to what Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, calls a “new barbarity” in our universities. 

The tragic case of Stefan Grimm, whose suicide in September 2014 led Imperial College to launch a review of its use of performance metrics, is a jolting reminder that what’s at stake in these debates is more than just the design of effective management systems. 

Metrics hold real power: they are constitutive of values, identities and livelihoods. 

Metric madness outside the university

Universities are going off the rails because of the blind use of metrics. Unfortunately, this reflects what is also happening in wider society, due to the rise of neoliberalism.
Australia has recently been rocked by scandals involving large banks, leading to the resignation of CEO's, Board chairs, lawyers, ...

This stimulated the following column, by Ross Gittins, the Economics Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. It is worth reading in full, but I reproduce a few choice extracts.
Banks' misbehaviour shows power of KPIs

... though the financial services industry must surely be the most egregious instance of the misuse of performance indicators and performance pay, let’s not forget “metrics” is one of the great curses of modern times.
It’s about computers, of course. They’ve made it much easier and cheaper to measure, record and look up the various dimensions of a big organisation’s performance, as well as generating far more measurable data about many dimensions of that performance. 

Which gave someone the bright idea that all this measurement could be used as an easy and simple way to manage big organisations and motivate people to improve their performance. Setting people targets for particular aspects of their performance does that. And attaching the achievement of those targets to monetary rewards hyper-charges them. Hence all the slogans about “what gets measured gets done” and “anything that can be measured can be improved”. 

Thus have metrics been used to attempt to improve the performance of almost all the major institutions in our lives: not just big businesses, but primary, secondary and higher education, medicine and hospitals, policing, the public service – the Tax Office and Centrelink, for instance. Trouble is, whenever we discover new and exciting ways of minimising mental effort, we run a great risk that, while we’re giving our brains a breather, the show will run off the rails in some unexpected way. .... 

I’ve long harboured doubts about the metric mania, but it’s all laid out in a new book, The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Muller, a history professor at the Catholic University of America, in Washington DC....

Physicists are not the only ones with hubris!

Physicists are notorious for thinking they can revolutionise other fields. The results are often embarrassing. Previously, I considered how to (not) break into a new field. One of the basic points ito remember is that there is a lot of nuance, a lot of rich history, and a lot of very smart hard-working people associated with any worthwhile intellectual endeavour.

In 2015 Steven Weinberg published To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science. In the book he belittles all the nuance that historians of science bring to the subject. One review was entitled, Why Scientists Shouldn’t Write History.

The Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has a new book out, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The book spans cognitive science, history, philosophy, economics, and politics.... It is receiving a lot of attention in the popular press.
My UQ history colleague, Peter Harrison has a robust critique, The Enlightenment of Steven Pinker.  I learnt a lot about the subtleties of the "Enlightenment" from reading it.

A spicy scientific scandal

I am often on the lookout for interesting molecules and solids which involve short hydrogen bonds, particularly biomolecules where this bond may play a key role in functionality. Such bonds are of interest from a physics point of view because then the quantum motion of the proton matters.
Consequently, the following paper (published in October 2016) caught my attention.

Proton Probability Distribution in the O···H···O Low-Barrier Hydrogen Bond: A Combined Solid-State NMR and Quantum Chemical Computational Study of Dibenzoylmethane and Curcumin Xianqi Kong, Andreas Brinkmann Victor Terskikh, Roderick E. Wasylishen, Guy M. Bernard∥, Zhuang Duan∥, Qichao Wu∥, and Gang Wu

The authors state their motivation.

Curcumin was selected in our study, in part because it is being touted as a wonder drug and is of intense interest to the pharmaceutical and medical community.31−33

This sounds quite exciting. Could low barrier hydrogen bonds be important in curing cancer?
Curcumin is a major ingredient of tumeric, the yellow spice, which features heavily in Asian cooking.
This got me Googling and it turns out the claims of a "wonder drug" are dubious.

Experimental studies of curcumin turn out to be particularly problematic, as explained in a blog post
Curcumin will waste your time by Derek Lowe. It is worth reading because it highlights the need for replication studies and publication of null results.

But it gets worse. References 31 and 32 have the same last author, Bharat Aggarwal, who it turns out has been the major proponent of the "wonder drug". In 2015 he "retired" from the University of Texas, following allegations of scientific fraud. By August 2106, eighteen published papers by him had been withdrawn.

To illustrate the problem of metrics, in 2016 Aggarwal had an h-index of 160, and in 2015, Thomson Reuters (ISI Web of Science) listed him among the World's Most Influential Scientific Minds.

I should stress that none of this invalidates the results of the hydrogen bonding paper that got me on this trail.

Which single verb describes the mission of universities?

Think!

Research is all about thinking about the world we live in; whether it is genetics, cosmology, literature, engineering, or economics, ...
Reality is stratified and one observes different phenomena in different systems. As a result, one needs to think in distinct ways in order to develop concepts, laws, and methodologies for each stratum. 
Note that thinking is central to experiments: thinking how to design the experiment and apparatus, and how to analyse the data produced and relate it to theory.
This is why we have disciplines. Each discipline involves a disciplined way of thinking.

Teaching is all about helping students learn how to think.
For specific disciplines, it involves learning how to think in a particular way.
Thinking like a condensed matter physicist is an art to learn.
Similarly, thinking like an economist is a unique way of thinking.

If this is the mission of modern universities are they successful?
On one level they have been incredibly successful.
Almost all the disciplines and knowledge we have were created in universities.
These ways of thinking have been incredibly productive and revealed things we might never have anticipated or dreamed of. Whether it is the genetic code, quantum field theory, game theory, or studies of ancient histories and cultures, ....

Furthermore, universities have really taught many students to think critically and creatively, not just about academic matters. University graduates have used their thinking skills in constructive ways, whether in inventions, starting companies, journalism, politics, philanthropy, ...
It should be acknowledged that this education does not just occur in the classroom but in informal contexts and involvement in student clubs and societies.

However, when you consider the resources that have been expended globally, both in teaching and research, you have to wonder whether universities are now failing at their mission.
This is reflected in a sparsity of critical thinking on many levels and in many contexts.

In the Majority World, universities try to mimic Western ones, at the superficial level of structures and curriculum. However, largely they focus on rote learning and not questioning teachers. This tragedy is captured with humour in my favourite Bollywood movie scene. Not only are students not taught how to think, they are actually taught not to think at all!

Yet, Elite universities now have a lot to answer for. The administration has become decoupled from the faculty and so we have metric madness and mindless marketing. Many of the statements or decision making processes (e.g. ignoring uncertainties, listing journal impact factors to 4 significant figures or cherry picking data to enhance the "ranking" of an institution) would be not be allowed in a freshman tutorial or lab.
Yet faculty are not without fault. Critical analysis will be avoided if publishing in a luxury journal is on the horizon. Then there is the hype of faculty about their latest research, whether in grant applications or public relations.

There are countless other ideas about what the mission of the university should be: training graduates for high paying jobs, wealth creation, enhancing national security, elite sports, industrial research, creating good citizens, ...

Many of these alternative missions are debatable, but regardless, they should be subordinate to the thinking mission.

Key to the thinking mission is academic freedom. Faculty and students need to be free to think what they want about what they want (within certain civil and resource constraints). Political interference and commercial interests inhibit such thinking.
It is interesting that Terry Eagleton, considers that the primary mission of universities is to critique society.

I thank Vinoth Ramachandra for teaching me this basic but crucial idea.

Quantity swamps quality

Every now and then I have to review a lot of CVs. What is increasingly striking is the sheer quantity of "line items": papers, grants, citations, talks, seminars, Ph.Ds supervised, public outreach activities, referee activities, committee service, conference organisation, .....
Sometimes teaching, particularly of undergraduates, is almost an afterthought.

One concern is the difficulty of evaluating the quality of this hyperactivity.
This is why metrics are so seductive, particularly to the non-expert.
But even if you want to give some weight to numbers of papers, journal "quality", total research funding, ... I think they are quite hard to interpret.
In some research areas,  papers often have ten authors, and so it is very difficult to know an individual's contribution, even if they are first or last author. I increasingly encounter statements such as "Since I became a faculty member ten years ago I have attracted $7M of external funding". This sounds very impressive. However, once you look at the details you find a mix of grants with long lists of CIs, such as infrastructure grants. Again it is not clear whether the individual was really that central to many of the grants.

Another concern, is I am skeptical that these "highly productive" people have the time, energy, and focus needed to think deeply, work on challenging and ambitious projects, and produce much that is scientifically significant. Quantity crowds out quality.

Finally, it worries me that for many of these people the "system" seems to be "working" for them, i.e. they are getting jobs, promoted, funded, ...

Now I do concede that in some cases I do not have the expertise to fully appreciate the significance or value of what people are doing. However, I fear that is the exception, not the rule.

If my concerns are legitimate, what is the way forward?
If assessing, it is very important to have people involved who have the necessary expertise to critically and fairly evaluate the quality of people's individual scientific contributions. This means asking for and reading letters of reference, and actually reading some of their papers. Neither is infallible but it is a lot better than bean counting.

It is possible for individual fields to preserve a culture of quality taking precedence over quality. For example, in pure mathematics and economics, you will find that "publication rates" can be almost an order of magnitude lower than in physics and chemistry.

On the practical side, you might also consider editing and shortening your own CV so the signal to noise ratio is higher.

Finally, I hope you will personally resist uncritically following this rush to mediocrity.

Is my concern legitimate? If so, what are the ways forward?

A radical procedure for evaluating applicants: read one of their papers!

Like most faculty I have to evaluate the scientific "performance" and "potential" of applicants for jobs, promotion, prizes, and grants. This is a difficult task because we are often asked to evaluate people who we don't know, are unfamiliar with their work in our (somewhat related) field of expertise, or are working in completely different fields we know nothing about. For example, I have been on a committee where I had the ridiculous task of evaluating people in fields such as veterinary medicine, geography, and agriculture! This is one reason why metrics are so seductive and deceptive.

Here I want to focus on evaluating applicants who work in an area that is close enough to my own expertise, according to the following criteria. I can read one of their papers and make a reasonably informed assessment of its value, significance, and validity. This is important because it is easy to loose sight of the fact that there is only ONE measure that really matters: the ability of a person to produce valuable scientific knowledge. All the metrics, invited talks, grants, hype, slickly presented grant applications, enthralling presentations, .... are not what really matters.  They are not research accomplishments. This measure can only be assessed from the actual content of papers.

I am embarrassed to admit that I am finally trying to work harder at ``practising what I preach.'' When I need to assess a credible application I try to identify just one paper that the applicant identifies as significant or for a grant application a paper that is central to the proposed project. I then look at this paper and then go back to the (copious) paperwork of the submitted application. You might think that this takes more time. But, actually it may save time because it can be so definitive to my view (positive, neutral, or negative) that I have to read and agonise less about my assessment.

I have always done this before when assessing applicants for postdocs to work directly with me, but much more irregularly for other situations.

Ideally, this should not be necessary. Rather, a good applicant would be someone whose papers we have already read because we wanted to. However, that is not the world we live in. 

Is this a reasonable approach? Do you do something like this? Any other recommended approaches?

Perverse incentives in academia

According to Wikipedia, "A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable result which is contrary to the interests of the incentive makers. Perverse incentives are a type of negative unintended consequence."

There is an excellent (but depressing) article
Academic Research in the 21st Century: Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition
Edwards Marc A. and Roy Siddhartha

I learnt of the article via a blog post summarising it, Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse.

Incidentally, Edwards is a water quality expert who was influential in exposing the Flint Water crisis.

The article is particularly helpful because it cites a lot of literature concerning the problems. It contains the following provocative table. I also like the emphasis on ethical behaviour and altruism.

It is easy to feel helpless. However, the least action you can take is to stop looking at metrics when reviewing grants, job applicants, and tenure cases. Actually read some of the papers and evaluate the quality of the science. If you don't have the expertise then you should not be making the decision or  should seek expert review.

Important distinctions in the debate about journals

My post, "Do we need more journals?" generated a lot of comments, showing that the associated issues are something people have strong opinions about.

I think it important to consider some distinct questions that the community needs to debate.

What research fields, topics, and projects should we work on?

When is a specific research result worth communicating to the relevant research community?

Who should be co-authors of that communication?

What is the best method of communicating that result to the community?

How should the "performance" and "potential" of individuals, departments, and institutions be evaluated?

A major problem for science is that over the past two decades the dominant answer to the last question (metrics such as Journal "Impact" Factors and citations) is determining the answer to the other questions. This issue has been nicely discussed by Carl Caves.
The tail is wagging the dog.

People flock to "hot" topics that can produce quick papers, may attract a lot of citations, and are beloved by the editors of luxury journals. Results are often obtained and analysed in a rush, not checked adequately, and presented in the "best" possible light with a bias towards exotic explanations. Co-authors are sometimes determined by career issues and the prospect of increasing the probability of publication in a luxury journal, rather than by scientific contribution.

Finally, there is a meta-question that is in the background. The question is actually more important but harder to answer.
How are the answers to the last question being driven by broader moral and political issues?
Examples include the rise of the neoliberal management class, treatment of employees, democracy in the workplace, inequality, post-truth, the value of status and "success", economic instrumentalism, ...