As part of our second phase of work on the HuMetricsHSS initiative, and with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the HuMetricsHSS team has been building out a more robust full-day workshop intended to help institutions work through a values-based approach to scholarly evaluation. A driving principle of our work is that rather than valuing what we can measure, we should also measure what we value. We want to encourage different ways of thinking about how we measure scholarship and enrich the vocabulary to help faculty and staff tell a more textured story about the work they do. Over the coming months, we will be testing the workshop model across a variety of campuses with the intention of building out a workshop toolkit that others can deploy.
On January 16 and 17, 2020, the HuMetricsHSS team visited Duke University to offer the first of this new version of the workshop. We were joined by approximately 20 faculty, administrators, and staff representing a range of disciplines across the arts, humanities, and social sciences and within the libraries. Duke has recently spent quite some time re-evaluating standards of promotion, and as is often the case of any learning environment, we learned a great deal from our participants, even as we hope they learned from us.
In the coming weeks, our next stop will be the University of Iowa, with more Big Ten Academic Alliance schools to follow.