Vol. 9 - Against Outreach
Academia's misguided obsession with outreach as a measure of performance excludes excellent researchers and hinders diversity in scientific evaluation.
Well, outreach is not really a problem. It is important, and fine. So, of course, academia turned it into a problem, by enshrining it as an indicator of performance.
I am just finishing a round of evaluations for a scientific society, where the end goal is an “excellency in research” award. And yet, a surprising number of assessment items were about outreach activities, in a very specific way: the one that takes time, possibly resources, certainly travel, and definitely social interactions.
We think we are measuring outreach, but what if we were measuring something else about the applicants there? What if we were measuring socio-economic background? Being a first-generation academic? Employment status? Neurodivergence? Family obligations? Medical status?
My point is not to criticize this specific scientific society (I was going to write this post anyways!). Nor is it to say “outreach is bad and no one should do it, or be rewarded when they do it”. But the more I look at the way we use these activities in evaluation, the more we define the Platonic ideal of a researcher, and this process is by definition impossible to reconcile with our lofty DEI ambitions.
The assumption that everyone can simply do outreach is hurtful. There's a reason I am not, for example, attending many conferences. It is not my lack of scientific productivity. It is not (only) my reluctance to inflate my carbon footprint. The reason I don't attend many conferences is that they always end up being traumatic for me.
And I realize what an immense privilege it is to be able to say it.
I do not want to come across as dismissive of outreach in any form. I genuinely think it is important (and I do it myself, in the shape that I can manage). Hell, I'd love to be able to do more of it.
But I can't.
And so can't many graduate students and post-docs and colleagues, and it has zero consequence on whether they are good researchers or not. If we want to give awards for outreach, fantastic. Let's do it. If we want to give awards for research, same thing! But conflating these two activities is detrimental to both, and more importantly, it is detrimental to excellent scientists who cannot take part in these activities.
All the talk going on currently about “inclusive excellence” is going to fail unless we realize that none of these things can be defined at the institutional scale. It is true that (institutionally) more diversity makes us better, and that inclusiveness is a requirement for excellence. But when we fail to translate this at the level of individual evaluation, and we keep using exclusionary standards, these institutional intentions turn from unhelpful to damaging.
And with all that said, stay tuned for Vol. 10 next week, for a discussion about what's going on in between time scales, and the entanglement between scales of time, organization, and space (as a community ecologist, I am legally required to write about this).