More Inclusive Scholarship Begins With Active Experimentation – Letters - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"Today’s hyper-competitive environment makes it easy to forget that academe wasn’t always organized around measuring and rewarding merit. In fact, the simple idea that merit could be assessed from publications, and that scholarship should be published at all, was, as Andrew Piper and Chad Wellmon have recently described in “How the Academic Elite Reproduces Itself” (The Chronicle Review, October 8), a 19th-century invention that ultimately transformed the academy and accelerated discovery across fields. Despite the modern obsession with counts, rankings, and metrics, today’s system is clearly better than the old system of patronage and lineage alone."