Academic Analytics Information Request and Permission to Sue

Academics Analytics is excluding many types of scholarly accomplishments such as book chapters, private grant funding, and art curatorships that are critical to the academic community.

This has been used internationally and has not accurately evaluated productivity

I think this entire process of bean counting is ridiculous. It fosters use of least publishable units and discourages risk-taking in development of new ideas.

I believe that I need this information in order to initiate my own promotion process. Many of my activities appear not to be quantifiable by the methods used here (curating).

What is wrong with full transparency?

I have looked into this -- with actual examples from my own department -- and every single one I looked into was drastically under counted. Plus, AA does not count books over 5 years old, which, in a Humanities field, means that many of our most influential scholars' most important scholarship is not being registered at all.

It is unsettling to see that Rutgers spent so much money on a tool of such dubious quality and which, even if it were accurate, represents a doubling-down on exclusionary and antiquated modes of assessment. And the inexplicable lack of transparency as regards its use is frankly alarming.

This does not appear to be a sophisticated enough tool to support the weight the university is giving it.

Justice

I am curious how an academic institution can use secret data, data that cannot be challenged, to evaluate scholarship. The logical contradictions are endless.

I'm concerned that this system is being used to make decisions about tenure, promotion, merit raises etc. AND to allocate resources to departments. It does not accurately capture the productivity and contributions of faculty.

I'm jointly appointed in Law, Philosophy, and criminal justice, but for the purposes of signing this form, I consider myself part of Philosophy.

I requested this information and my request was denied. Why wouldn't the university want to give faculty access to this information? Without access, the accuracy of the information will always be in doubt--and it will ALWAYS be wrong in ways that harm the faculty. Why do I say this? AA isn't going to credit faculty with achievements they haven't earned; they can, however, be counted on to miss information that is stored places their search bots don't roam. To date, we have been provided with no credible explanation for why the university contracted with AA and we've been given no recourse to determine whether the information that is circulating about us is accurate.

I requested this information before and was told it was not available. The database is faulty and the university could use its money in academic related initiatives. We have a review process in place. This company does not really provide any assessment about the quality of the published scholarship it collects from public venues.

It is, to me, simply wrong to spend funds provided by students and raised by faculty to pay companies whose output is made available neither to students nor to faculty. This secretiveness by those who do not do research and do not teach is contrary to everything that universities stand for and has no place at Rutgers.

I requested this information from AA once before and was told it was not available..

right on

I was led to believe that my department would be exempt from the ranking process, due to the fact that there are only one or two other departments that cover the same geographic regions and languages in the United States, only to learn that a) it is not exempt and b) it is not even the only such department within its category at Rutgers! AA's ranking of AMESALL is based upon a complete lack of any information about my field (which they hope we will rectify by working as unpaid interns for them, freely furnishing them with information that they will then sell back to our employers) and the category into which they have placed us: "Language, Other." Needless to say, "Language, Other" covers quite a lot of sins, from "Romance Languages and Literatures" at Chicago to "Foreign Languages" at, well, a lot of other places, and any attempt to rank random departments representing disparate geographic regions, time periods, and languages is going to be meaningless.

We should have free access to whatever information the university is using to "evaluate" our productivity. I would like to know how such information is processed to attain a "score" -and I suspect others would as well.

At age 74, I am already close to retiring, so I am no longer involved in many career-building activities, although we just got a major research paper published. But, I still want to support our younger colleagues. Bill Ward