Dear chair, CvB, and programme management of the Recognition and Rewards programme, 

First of all, I’d like to thank all those involved in the making of this report. This baseline measurement provides an essential basis for further evaluation of the programme. 

The success of this programme is essential to enable the full realization of the potential of our talented staff. Consequently, the expectations are high. After all, we are speaking of the future of the careers of our staff and thereby also of the future of our institution. I therefore appreciate the care and caution with which the programme addresses possible action points. 

At the same time, the report also shows that staff see the programme stagnating. As shown in table 9, 64,6% see no change, 12% see to varying degrees negative changes, and 23,5% see to varying degrees positive changes. 

And so, taking into account account the necessary balance between being cautious but also being bold in enabling a better future for our institution, I’d like to offer three thoughts about what we need to do at this point of the R&R programme: 1) go back to the fundamental question of why this programme is needed, 2) change our perspective on what needs incentivizing, and 3) make clear institutional commitments. 

To begin with my first point, I think it’s time again to have a conversation about the core reason for this programme: what need is being addressed? From my point of view, the necessity for this programme stems from a skewed rewards structure in contemporary academia. The issue is systemic: Higher Education funding in a vast majority of countries is today not boosted by, but outright dependent on grant capturing. Consequently, institutions reward those who are able to capture as many research grants as possible. For various reasons, this structure is not beneficial to science as a whole: competitive research-grant-acquisition pressure does not incentivize excellence in education, open science, team science, and good leadership. Particularly now that the starters and stimulation grants are being scrapped by the ministry, the adverse effects of the winner-takes-all competitive research grant market will be exacerbated even further through the so-called Matthew effect: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. 

Against this backdrop, we can thus address one of the, to me at least, confusing sentiments expressed in the survey: the fear that the R&R programme could jeopardize the quality of research and education. I’m assuming this sentiment stems from the idea that measurable, hard numbers can provide more objective grounds for the evaluation of someone’s performance. How good of an educator someone is, for instance, can be quite subjective, and when we have quantified ways of measuring educational performance through student surveys, we have found that the implicit biases of students have a stronger impact than the actual quality of a teacher’s performance. But I think we should come back once more to the status quo. In fact, the opposite is true: precisely because of the current situation the quality of research and education is jeopardized. Think, for example, of the missing incentives to be a good team player, a good educator, a great line manager for a team, or my favorite example, the so-called reproducibility crisis in psychology: because we are not open with our data, or in some particularly bad examples, we “hack” our way into significant results because only those are being published and we need publications to be able to promote or capture grants, we have come to wrong conclusions about the human mind: the so-called power posing “mind hack”, where if you stand a certain way you will feel more confident, is based on research that cannot be declared correct in reproduction research. But because the field currently does not reward researchers who reproduce research to the similar extent as it rewards researchers who claim to have found original, mind-blowing evidence for novel ideas in the field, no one is incentivized to actually check the truth value of such grandiose, novel research. Changing that would actually lead to better science, something that the Open Science programme, for instance, could provide concrete solutions to. 

My second, perhaps most radical proposal, would be to abandon the idea of incentivizing individuals to do things that are best for their own career and the pockets of the faculties, through this easy trick: make everyone a professor. While the Young Academy focuses in their “Everyone Professor!” campaign more on the rights that come with the title (such as being actually credited with being the promoter of PhD students), I think we should reflect on the impact this different structure would have on what is considered important at our university. Rather than spending a lot of time thinking individually about promoting to the next fancy title by capturing a lot of money, chair groups (in this scenario consisting only of “professors”) could instead focus their efforts on prioritizing the needs of the department and their field as a whole. Improving the educational quality of a programme, working together on team science, making research and education as open as possible, and fostering good working relationships become automatically more important, if not central interests within chair groups, as the competitive aspect of promotions is taken out of the equation. 

While this would be my favorite, and by the way, most cost-effective approach, I can anticipate some resistance to this radical change. Therefore, allow me to make a third recommendation that is directed more to the current system and the programme as it exists today. That would be: institutional commitments. Faculties should at this point of the programme consider committing to diverse career paths in the form of adjusting their Strategic Personnel Plans (SPPs) to accommodate for those paths. If it is so crucial for the faculty to continue incentivizing grant capturing, then they should make compensatory arrangements. I’d like to show how this could work based on a hypothetical scenario. Say that a faculty needs researchers in the next five years to bring in about € 1,5M in grants. So far, this has been achieved by allowing the next five associate professors to be promoted to full professors if they bring in € 300K each (equaling € 1,5M for the faculty). In a compensated SPP, where there are two positions of full professors reserved for those who are excellent leaders or excellent open scientists, the other three, more ‘traditional’ promotions would then need to bring in € 500K each. This would be a budget neutral approach to commit to the alternative career paths, while also maintaining a degree of financial health. Paradoxically, this would also mean that on a national level, we should advocate for less, but larger grants, as a way of ensuring a diversification of career paths. The point of this third proposal, again, is to get concrete at this point in time, and do so explicitly through strategic decisions, preferably reflected in the SPPs. This would, in my opinion, address most of the concerns expressed in the survey, and at the very least, I hope to have provided for the hard working R&R team some usable input.