“Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hypercompetition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship

‘Capacity for what? Capacity for whom?’ A decolonial deconstruction of research capacity development practices in the Global South and a proposal for a value-centred approach

Whilst North to South knowledge transfer patterns have been extensively problematised by Southern and decolonial perspectives, there is very little reflection on the practice of research capacity development (RCD), still strongly focused on technoscientific solutionism, yet largely uncritical of its underlying normative directions and power asymmetries. Without making transparent these normative and epistemological dimensions, RCD practices will continue to perpetuate approaches that are likely to be narrow, technocratic and unreflexive of colonial legacies, thus failing to achieve the aims of RCD, namely, the equitable and development-oriented production of knowledge in low- and middle-income societies. Informed by the authors’ direct experience of RCD approaches and combining insights from decolonial works and other perspectives from the margins with Science and Technology Studies, the paper undertakes a normative and epistemological deconstruction of RCD mainstream practice. Highlighting asymmetries of power and material resources in knowledge production, the paper’s decolonial lens seeks to aid the planning, implementation and evaluation of RCD interventions. Principles of cognitive justice and epistemic pluralism, accessibility enabled by systems thinking and sustainability grounded on localisation are suggested as the building blocks for more reflexive and equitable policies that promote research capacity for the purpose of creating social value and not solely for the sake of perpetuating technoscience

Carreira e contexto institucional no sistema de ensino superior brasileiro Career and institutional context in Brazil's higher education system

Este trabalho faz um estudo da evolução da relação entre titulação e carreira institucional, entre 1992 e 2003, nas instituições de ensino superior brasileiras, usando para isso dados coletados em dois surveys representativos da profissão acadêmica no Brasil. Os resultados obtidos foram surpreendentes porque apontam para uma desorganização crescente da estrutura da carreira nas instituições de ensino superior brasileiras e um enfraquecimento na associação entre titulação e carreira. O estudo apresenta ainda um exercício de análise multivariada para verificar quais dimensões são relevantes para explicar a ascensão do professor a diferentes degraus da carreira. O resultado dessa análise corrobora a hipótese de que a carreira oferecida pelas instituições de ensino superior brasileiras esteja, pouco a pouco, perdendo sua capacidade de discriminar e recompensar o desempenho acadêmico, já que o principal referencial a partir da qual ela foi construída - a titulação - tendeu, na última década, a se homogeneizar.<br>This work studies the development of the relationship between academic title and institutional career between 1992 and 2003, in Brazil' s higher education institutions, based on data collected in two surveys that are representative of the academic profession in Brazil. Results obtained were surprising because they point to an increasing disorganization of career structure in Brazilian higher education institutions and a decrease in the association between title and career. The study also presents a multivariate analysis exercise to see which dimensions are relevant to explain the rise of professors to distinct career levels. Results corroborate the hypothesis that the career offered by Brazilian higher education institutions is gradually losing its ability to discriminate and reward academic performance, since the main reference on which it has been built - academic title - tended to homogenize in the last decade