Selecting people with “hats”, frequent assessments, and “one size fits all” evaluation...
Don't let "obstructive pressure" drag young researchers
[Although the science and technology evaluation system has been improving in recent years, there are still some unreasonable evaluation indicators for how to scientifically evaluate and evaluate a certain person, especially young people, when it comes to grassroots units.
I hope not to focus too much energy on "masters" and "top talents", and more attention should be paid to the vast number of scientific and technological workers, especially the tens of thousands of young scientific and technological workers who do not have any "hats." .
]
Produced by Deep Eye Studio
Written by: our reporter Wang Yanbin
Planning: Lin Lijun
When I saw Wu Shuang, his hair lost a lot.
Facing a reporter from the Science and Technology Daily he was familiar with, he smiled helplessly, "When the pressure is greatest, I can't sleep well all night long."
Wu Shuang is a PhD and team leader from a scientific research institution in a certain eastern province.
His research field involves agriculture, and he has to face the fierce competition of "more monks and less porridge" when striving for projects at all levels; at the same time, his team of four or five people needs to complete the 500,000 yuan of technology transformation and service assessment indicators every year.
It is not easy for agricultural enterprises to make money, and it is even harder for them to pay.
This means that this money is not easy to make.
What is even more difficult is that if the task cannot be completed at the end of the year, the team's salary can only get 80%, and bonuses are even more out of the question.
This year's government work report clearly stated that it is necessary to effectively reduce the unreasonable burden of scientific researchers so that they can settle down and devote themselves to scientific exploration.
In this context, the experiences of young researchers have commonalities in each case, and Yuan Yaxiang, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, can see in his eyes.
During the National Two Sessions this year, the appeal of Academician Yuan Yaxiang, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, resonated a lot: "Although the science and technology evaluation system has been improving over the years, when it comes to grassroots units, how to scientifically evaluate and evaluate someone, especially young people, There are still some unreasonable evaluation indicators." His suggestion is: I hope that leaders of all departments and all levels will not focus too much on "masters" and "top talents", and should pay more attention to the broad masses. Science and technology workers, especially the thousands of young science and technology workers who don’t have any "hats."
A reporter from Science and Technology Daily also found in actual interviews that the reforms are showing results in the current top-level design and policy promotion.
However, in some places, bottlenecks that hinder the growth of young researchers still exist more or less, and it is urgent to deepen reform efforts to solve practical problems.
Hot "hats": Who is sending "hats"?
How to use "hats"?
A pair of couplets posted at the entrance of the laboratory spoke to Wang Yuan's heart.
The upper link is: "Going out early and going back late to do the experiment non-stop just hoping that the data is available", and the lower link is: "I want to win the bid next year after working hard day and night to write a paper."
The couplet accurately aimed at reality.
This outstanding Ph.D. who has been employed by a research institute in Shandong for less than three years lamented: Taking projects and writing papers is stressful and grueling.
Wang Yuan’s experience echoed the appeal of Academician Yuan Yaxiang—there are few titles for young people, and many departments’ projects restrict titles or require foundations, but the latter takes time to accumulate and contradictions arise.
Shi Changhui, a researcher and deputy director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Social Development of the China Academy of Science and Technology Development Strategy, has an in-depth observation of the "hat culture".
"First of all, a'hat' is an honor." In an interview with reporters, Shi Changhui said: "Hat" is a common practice in many countries, such as academicians, in many countries.
It is reasonable for scientific research management institutions and scientific research institutions to use "hats" to evaluate and select scientific researchers.
"'Hat' is a simplified mechanism to deal with the complexity of evaluating scientific research personnel.'Hat' is reviewed by experts. If the review mechanism is fair and reasonable,'taking people with hats' has a positive meaning." But Shi Changhui thinks, who is How to send a "hat" and how to send a "hat", these questions are very important.
In Shi Changhui's view, there are all kinds of "hats" in Western countries.
Most of them are issued independently by colleges and universities, and the issuance (evaluation) standards of different universities and different "hats" are different, which is conducive to the diversification of talents; but in some places in my country, the issuing agencies and evaluation standards of "hats" are too single. For example, the simplification of the criteria for evaluation and selection of regional talent plans can easily produce the homogeneity of talents, which is not conducive to the diversification of scientific and technological talents and the innovation ecosystem.
Looking around the country, scramble for "hat" talent is becoming a trend.
In Shi Changhui's view, this involves the use of "hats."
He said that the "hat" was given too many privileges in the process of using it, and it even evolved into an unimpeded pass in the academic circle.
When applying for various projects, the "hat" is regarded with admiration, making it easier to pass the review; in the evaluation of disciplines and institutions, the "hat" becomes a good tool for adding points.
In addition, “hat” talents have more opportunities to participate in talent project review, subject and institution evaluation, and have more power to allocate academic resources.
In many cases, the "hat" of alienation restricts the growth of young people.
To get rid of alienated things and strip away bad factors has become the central goal of pushing reforms.
Young people under great pressure: "challenging pressure" can be tolerated, "obstructive pressure" cannot be tolerated
The 38-year-old Wu Shuang’s experience is not alone.
A reporter from the Science and Technology Daily found that, on the one hand, young people under heavy pressure are suffering from hardships, and they are better off; on the other hand, the "unexpected" pressure polishes their tempers.
To this kind of "unexpected" pressure, Xue Yongwu, vice chairman of the China Talent Science Professional Committee and professor of Ocean University of China, summed it up as an objective "double pressure."
"There are defects in the assessment, scientific research evaluation and employment mechanisms of some units." Xue Yongwu told the reporter of Science and Technology Daily that in many cases, various quantitative indicators of scientific research assessment have become important disciplines that restrict the innovative thinking of scientific researchers. Many scientific researchers are not for innovation. Innovation is to "innovate" in response to the assessment indicators, which fundamentally distorts the nature of assessment.
At the same time, he mentioned the pressure on young people such as family housing and children's education.
"Many young researchers have the old and the young, and they need to support their families and pursue research careers. But they are distracted, physically and mentally exhausted, and objectively tend to lead to professional slack."
In response to this "professional slack", Shi Changhui and his colleagues have done a questionnaire survey.
His research team conducted four surveys on the job burnout status of scientific researchers across the country in 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2020. The "job burnout" index of young researchers showed an overall trend of rising first and then balancing, specifically 2010. The year was low, and there was a significant increase in 2015, after which it entered a relatively stable state.
"In the past ten years, there have been more and more young researchers in our country, and their level is getting higher and higher. This is a good thing, but they are facing increasingly fierce competition in project application and title evaluation, and increasing pressure has led to job burnout. It has risen. Around 2015, the central government initiated a large-scale reform of the science and technology system. It should be said that the reform effect is obvious, and it has played a hedging effect on the increase in the job burnout of scientific researchers.” Shi Changhui said.
In psychology, work pressure can be divided into challenging pressure and obstructive pressure according to its nature and effect.
The former is a pressure that is beneficial to employees' work performance and career development, such as job responsibility, reasonable assessment, etc., while the latter is a pressure that is unfavorable to employees' goal achievement and career development, such as relationship, administration, bureaucracy, etc. Wait.
Shi Changhui said: "Scientific research pressure is inevitable. What we can do is to reduce the obstructive pressure and increase the challenging pressure."
In recent years, the state has issued many good policies for scientific researchers, especially young researchers, to convey the central government’s determination to eliminate ills.
In 2018, after the state promulgated the "Opinions on Deepening the Reform of Project Review, Talent Evaluation, and Institutional Evaluation", the Ministry of Science and Technology and other relevant departments jointly issued a special action to "Break the Four Virtues".
After "breaking the Four Virtues", some people are worried: How to ensure the fairness and justice of scientific research evaluation?
Will human factors emerge?
Another worry is that in "breaking the four weirs", some places have misunderstood the deviation and gone to extremes. Breaking the "wei" has become a non-"wei", multi-dimensional and more quantified. Is it going to the other extreme?
What to stand after "breaking the four weirs": expecting the "golden rule" to come to fruition, but also to be wary of "the leader has the final say"
To summarize, Wu Shuang’s pressure stems from two major sources.
First of all, the unit "recruited son-in-law and forgot his son."
Externally hired "cap" experts directly honor their treatment; however, internally cultivated young researchers to become experts of the corresponding level, and the documents have not been published; secondly, the pressure of assessment has increased unabated.
The unit has requirements for various achievements (papers, patents, projects, awards), and horizontal money-making requirements (transformation of achievements).
This requirement went from 20,000 yuan per person three years ago to 30,000 yuan per person two years ago. Last year, it directly soared to 100,000 yuan per person per year.
"The current evaluation system for young researchers is a double-edged sword." Xue Yongwu believes that from a good point of view, in recent years, various scientific research institutions have paid attention to the quantitative evaluation of research results, and the organization and personnel departments are determining various types of research results. The title of talent is mainly based on the research results published by scientific researchers.
Although there are unreasonable factors in these quantitative evaluations, the research results are after all an important reference basis for evaluation.
"The downside is that in the quantitative evaluation process, more emphasis is placed on quantity. In terms of evaluation and talent appointment, more emphasis is placed on'manifest talents', and the lack of understanding and attention to'potential talents', namely Too much emphasis on the results, and not too much emphasis on the growth process of young researchers." Xue Yongwu said.
How to crack the simple, mechanical quantitative evaluation?
A good method is to use qualitative evaluation instead, that is, peer review.
Not long ago, in an article describing how the Chinese Academy of Sciences “breaks the four wei” published in the "Proceedings of the Chinese Academy of Sciences", Li Xiaoxuan, a researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology Strategy Consulting of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and others will Qualitative evaluation is regarded as the only feasible method to “break the four wei”, and it is even regarded as the “golden rule of scientific research evaluation” for basic research.
Shi Changhui very much agrees with the views of Li Xiaoxuan and others.
"Why did my country not directly adopt peer review in scientific and technological evaluation in accordance with the golden rule, but still use the'four only' quantitative evaluation?" In the article, Li Xiaoxuan asked this question.
He believes that effective peer review requires three prerequisites: that is, there must be good and competent peers, which requires a large number of high-level experts; a good scientific culture, and a strong relationship and relationship are necessary. If you can’t make a real and effective evaluation, a small circle must not say hello; there must be good evaluation objects, and the scarce evaluation resources must first be invested in high-level and potential evaluation objects.
"Only when the three conditions are met, will peer evaluation be good." Shi Changhui said.
The country now advocates the "breaking of the four uniques", and various localities have introduced detailed policies, but there have also been some implementation problems.
For example, in the original "only papers", now there are units that "do not read papers at all."
Shi Changhui believes that if you do not read the paper at all, the peer review mechanism is not yet mature, and it is easy to go to extremes. From "not reading the paper" to "the leader has the final say", this is worthy of vigilance.
Young people’s essay view: essays are not omnipotent, no essay is absolutely impossible
How to treat papers?
This is a topic that young researchers cannot avoid when they grow up.
Shi Changhui once went to a western university to investigate and found that among its thousands of faculty members, the number of papers published every year was very small.
"This means that many teachers may rarely do research. Where does the research ability of teaching and research staff improve?"
He believes that the quantitative evaluation of the paper is both reasonable and unreasonable.
For example, in recent years, the country has promoted the "representative" evaluation system, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China has also made the reform requirement of "filling in no more than five representative works" for the declaration of self-funded projects.
Shi Changhui emphasized that masterpieces cannot be one size fits all.
"Different universities, at different stages of development, have different requirements for papers."
Regarding the thesis, Yang Wei, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, once had a very incisive exposition.
Taking American universities as an example, he stated that “they are the influence factors of the number of papers in third-rate schools, and the influencing factors of the number of papers in second-rate schools. First-class schools do not require paper publication, and top universities place great emphasis on teaching.
He believes that when the teachers of a school have not formed good research habits, the school requires teachers to publish papers from the management, and publish academic papers in journals recognized by international peers, which can form an overall driving force. From a perspective, more papers are published, which means that teachers spend more time doing research.
Therefore, if a third-rate university wants to be promoted, it must require teachers and students to publish more papers.
By analogy, in first-class universities, teachers are not required to publish a lot of articles, but only to do research in a more relaxed environment, and the teachers develop freely under the drive of curiosity.
Therefore, the development stage and level of each school are different, and the content emphasized in the published papers is also different.
Respecting the law of scientific research and the law of talent growth are the core viewpoints of the interviewed experts.
"A steed can be adventurous, but a field of strength is not as good as an ox; a strong car can carry a heavy load, and a river is not as good as a boat." This sentence points to the different characteristics of young researchers, especially talented and geeks.
Shi Changhui thought of General Secretary Xi Jinping's important speech at the forum on cyber security and informatization in 2016.
The general secretary said: "Many talents in the Internet field are geeks and geniuses. They often don't follow the usual routines and have a lot of fantastic ideas."
How to let the wizards and geeks show their talents?
The central government requires that one core be grasped: there must be a special policy for special talents, no full blame is required, no seniority ranking, and no ruler.
What is gratifying is that in reality, there are not many cases where such special talents are treated specially.
Shi Changhui's investigation learned that there are researchers at Xi'an Jiaotong University who do scientific instruments and equipment. They have neither papers nor projects, but the unit believes that they have done a good job and firmly supported them. In the end, they lived up to expectations and achieved a major breakthrough.
Respecting the law of talent growth also requires establishing an environment that tolerates the growth of wizards and geeks.
For this, many places are working hard, but how to form a big climate requires everyone to work together.
Support the horse and send it off: To correctly understand the spirit of the central government, we must not only adjust measures to local conditions, but also pay close attention to implementation
Young scientists are under great pressure. This is a consensus.
Young people have just entered society and they are indeed under a lot of pressure, including the pressure of life, the pressure of difficulty in applying for technological resources, and so on.
The pressure of young researchers has always been under the eyes of the relevant state departments.
On two levels, relevant ministries and commissions have been doing promotion work.
On the objective level of young people’s growth, top-level design and system orientation provide some good conditions for young scientists and scientists to concentrate on scientific research and produce early results; from a subjective level, personal efforts are indispensable.
Today's great scientists have come from young people. After passing through these hurdles back then, young people should face it with a positive attitude, take the initiative, and be modest to learn.
To help young people grow up, the General Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the General Office of the State Council issued the "Guiding Opinions on Promoting the Reform of the Talent Evaluation Mechanism by Classification" in 2018, proposing to scientifically set the talent evaluation cycle and follow the law of growth and development of young researchers.
Xue Yongwu believes that, on the one hand, the evaluation cycle should be set up scientifically and reasonably to overcome the tendency of evaluation and evaluation to be too frequent; on the other hand, process evaluation and result evaluation, short-term evaluation and long-term evaluation should be combined to highlight the medium and long-term goal orientation and appropriately extend The evaluation cycle for basic research talents, young talents, etc. encourages continuous research and long-term accumulation.
From the perspective of talent development, attention should be paid to the discovery of potential talents, and attention should be paid to transforming potential talents into obvious talents in a timely manner.
Shi Changhui believes that from the perspective of the unit, the obstructive pressure should be reduced as much as possible, and the challenging pressure should be appropriately increased. For example, a long-term employment system with higher assessment requirements and a decent income is a good attempt.
No matter how good the policy is, implementation is the key.
As Li Xiaoming, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and a professor of the Department of Computer Science at Peking University, said in an interview with the media during the two sessions this year: “After we put forward a good idea, how to implement it into specific work is really an arduous process. This requires the grassroots. The functional department understands it well and implements it carefully, bit by bit."
(At the request of the interviewee, Wu Shuang and Wang Yuan in the text are pseudonyms.)