Associate professor

I just realised that I never announced on this blog that I presented my (new and improved) research vision to the assessment committee for a second time - and that the assessment committee agreed that I should be appointed associate professor as of 1 November 2014.

So there you go: as of 1 November 2014 I am in the position of associate professor.

(Fireworks, music, ticker tape.)

I would have liked to say that my trip to Australia inspired the main research focus I put into my research vision: to develop computational models of coastal and marine resource use, drawing on experiences from other economics subdisciplines such as macroeconomics. But honestly, it's the other way around: I went there to learn more about computational models because I believe they can be useful. But it was good to talk to my peers in the field and realise that it's actually not so bad an idea. You can find the vision document here, and the presentation here.

I still feel more or less the same about the tenure track system as I did last time: it's a good concept although its application in Wageningen University has its teething problems.

As for any advice I can give other people on the tenure track, I'm not sure whether my advice is worth anything but I can at least give you my opinion:

• Expose your ideas to your peers. We don't have a mentor system in Wageningen (we should!!), neither do we have many staff who have been through the tenure track themselves. So the next best thing is to go out, talk to other academic researchers, and try to learn from them as much as you can. Have a beer with them at a conference. Try to arrange a sabbatical at their university. Try to get them to your own university for a seminar or a PhD defence. Send them your written research vision and ask them what they think.
• Set your own goals. Yes I know you have 18 criteria to meet (I kid you not), but first and foremost you must decide which direction you want to go - and then go there within whatever limits are set by the official criteria.

For what it's worth.

Tenure, sort of

OK, it's official now: after a working life of about 15 years I will finally have my indefinite contract at Wageningen University. So while teaching (a lot), publishing (less than I should/want to), attracting research funding (more than I dared dream of), and presenting and writing my research vision to the advisory committee, I must have done enough right to convince the committee that the university should keep me. The committee will reconvene in about a year, however, to decide whether I'm good enough to be appointed associate professor.

So yes, I'm happy that I can continue with what I am doing, and that I can further develop my line of research here. I like Wageningen University, although I admit that the only other universities I have ever worked at were Tilburg University, where I did a post-doc from 2006 to 2008, and UC Santa Barbara, where I have spent a sabbatical in 2010. The environmental economics tradition in Tilburg is much more theoretical and monodisciplinary than the one in Wageningen. Admittedly, they publish more in the top journals like JEEM, ERE, or REE than we do, and I think we should have the same ambition. On the other hand, the tradition in Wageningen is more problem-oriented, more involved in developing countries, and more interdisciplinary. I feel the Wageningen approach suits me better.

How do I feel about the whole tenure track system? A lot of people complained before, during, and after its introduction. And yes, I'm one of them, but I'm convinced it's better than my university's old system. The elementary particle of Wageningen University's institutional structure is the chair group, which comprises a scientific discipline or subdiscipline such as aquatic ecology, environmental systems analysis, or environmental and resource economics. The head of a chair group is the chair holder, and in the old days the chair holder was mostly the professor of the chair group. There were some personal professors, but mostly these positions were created by the management, after which a suitable person was recruited. In other words, staff smart and ambitious enough to become a professor had to wait for the chair holder to leave, and hence mostly left before the chair holder did. I'm sure there was a way of getting rid of truly disastrous professors, but mediocre professors could remain unchallenged for their entire career because the smarter staff went elsewhere. The old system was a recipe for stagnation and intellectual laziness.

At least tenure track offers the staff that would have left under the old system a path towards professorship inside Wageningen University. This raises the question how many professors a university can pay, and this question has been asked repeatedly. I don't know how the university expects to pay for all these people, but my experience in Tilburg, which at the time employed about three professors in environmental and resource economics (besides a host of others in microeconomics, experimental economics, and what not), is that tenure track can develop the organisation into a healthy market for ideas. As far as I could see the professors in Tilburg seemed colleagues rather than rivals, although I guess there must have been some form of competition for funding and the brightest students. They exchanged ideas, read and commented on each other's papers, and wrote papers together. (The Dutch language has a great word for this: conculega, a portmanteau of the Dutch words for competitor and colleague.) I think that is a much healthier situation than the little monarchies we have had so far in Wageningen.

So if I think tenure track is an improvement, what do I complain about? Partly the way it is implemented; partly the typical problems you always run into when you introduce a new system; partly the logical disadvantages of tenure track. Wageningen University tenure track staff is expected to meet 18 different benchmarks, including teaching load, teaching evaluation scores, funding, publications, and PhD supervision. Originally these benchmarks were set by natural scientists and applied to social science, but this has been corrected, up to a point. A lot of criteria are unclear; some information we get is self-contradictory. This all shows that the organisation is still learning from its experiences, and I'm sure they'll get it right someday. Nevertheless, it makes you feel like a cross between a front soldier and a guinea pig. More fundamentally, publish-or-perish has enhanced the risk of academic fraud and created a boom in predatory open-access publishers. We will have to be more vigilant with respect to plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication of data. (I'm tempted to refer again to Tilburg here, but I won't: first, Diederik Stapel wasn't at the Economics Department; second, his fraud has taken place on such a massive scale and over such a long time that I don't believe publish-or-perish was the main reason.)

Fingers crossed now

I presented my research vision to the "Severe Assessment Committee", i.e. the ladies and gentleman who decide on my position at Wageningen University, last Tuesday. Due to the timing of my contract their decision is a bit more complex than it would otherwise be. Usually they decide whether a candidate gets tenure as an associate professor, but in my case they need to decide whether I can become an associate in one year's time. It's a long story.

Anyway, I think the presentation and the discussion went well. You can find my slides here, in case you're interested.

Fingers crossed now.

More thoughts on Stapel, Smeesters, and scientific fraud in general

Whenever there is a new case of scientific fraud the question pops up: does publish or perish force scientists to lie about their results? What makes this question all the more relevant is the fact that many universities employ their academic staff (including me) under some form of tenure track. Here the publish or perish is translated into a principle of up or out: either you keep increasing your education evaluation scores, publication list, Hirsch Index, project acquisition, and so forth, or you're out of a job. Needless to say it gives quite an incentive to cook the books.

The first thing to realize here is that neither Stapel nor Smeesters are good examples of such a mechanism. Both had tenure, and Stapel has been making up data for the entire length of his career.

The second thing to realize, however, is that there are many forms of scientific misconduct, not all of which are outright fraud. Stapel is an extreme example of blatant fraud as he fabricated complete datasets. But there are more ways of behaving badly in science:

• Skip observations that don't support your hypothesis. This is what Smeesters is being accused of.
• Copy text or ideas without citing the source.
• The mirror of that: support a claim with a reference to a source that does not provide such justification.
• Leave out details of the research method that would have put your results in a different light.
• Run lots and lots of regressions on any combination of variables. You are bound to find a statistically significant relation between one or more variables somewhere. Present it as something you intended to investigate in the first place. (Be aware that "statistically significant at 5%" means "the probability that this relation is due to random fluctuations is 5%", meaning that 1 in 20 of such "statistically significant" relations are really just a coincidence.)
• Include the name of some big shot who hardly contributed to the paper but will make your paper look important. The big shot has yet another publication and you can bask in his glory.
• When you do an anonymous peer review, tell the authors to cite some of your papers, especially the ones that improve your Hirsch Index if they are cited once more.
• When you do an anonymous peer review, reject the paper if it presents results that you present in a paper that you just submitted to another journal. After all, you want to be the first to present the idea!
• Or even worse than that: reject the paper (or a proposal) and submit the idea yourself. (Admittedly, given the huge time lag in publications you wouldn't have a high chance of success.)

Note how difficult it is to identify bad intentions behind some of these, and that the line between good scientific practice and scientific misconduct can be surprisingly thin:

• You can have very good reasons to skip an observation (protest bids in contingent valuation surveys are one). This is Smeesters's defence.
• You may have always thought that author X said Y in article Z, but actually you were confused with another article.
• Nobody ever includes those details of the method in their papers, so why should you?
• You're a PhD student and you don't want to let your professor down by not including him as an author - he is your supervisor, after all.
• The paper you are reviewing would be incomplete without that reference, whether you wrote it or not.

It is easy to say that there are no such things as small sins and big sins: thou shalt not sin, period. But for most people it just doesn't work that way: they wouldn't mind crossing the speed limit by 10 km per h but object to crossing it by 100 km per h. And crossing the speed limit by 20 km per h may make you feel slightly worse about yourself, but when you are in a hurry it becomes easier to silence that guilty feeling.

So yes, I do believe the principles of publish or perish and up or out increase the incidence of scientific misconduct, but not in the way we read about it in the news. The cases you read about in the news are poor examples of such pressures. These are the sensational ones, the blatant fabrication of data by prestigious professors with big egos. The main damage is in the everyday nitty-gritty of science, and most of it may never be detected. Does that make it less bad? No, it may actually be worse because we don't see, let alone quantify, the damage.

So is tenure track bad? Well, to paraphrase Churchill, it is the worst system except for all the other ones. The alternative we had in The Netherlands, where you had to wait for the current professor to die or retire before you could become one, has stifled scientific progress and chased a lot of talent out of the country. I believe the solution lies not in abandoning tenure track, but rather in the way we publish our results - but I'll leave that for another post.