State-fostered Immaturity? Kant, Galileo, and the Grand Evaluator

Abstract

The chapter assesses the approach and methods of Italy’s National Evaluation Agency (ANVUR). The author sees the agency as an institutional “Grand Evaluator” restoring the academic world to a state of minority. One of the issues addressed relates to the quantitative scaling of the assessed quality of research, with awarded marks directly and proportionally determining shares of funding. The distortive effects on research resulting from “governing by numbers” are identified. These include the emergence of several malpractices (such as courtesy authorship, forced citations, and others), and the erosion of academic citizenship (a complex of practices which suffer from the pressure exerted by the increasing use of quantitative metrics of academic performance). Finally, the chapter discusses the unfavorable influence of mechanical evaluation on innovative, and, indeed, useful research.