Tongji is therefore testing the opposite of academic security, whether scientific greatness can be produced by permanently exposing researchers to the possibility of professional decline. Yet fear is exceptionally effective at generating measurable activity and exceptionally poor at generating intellectual courage. Academics whose salaries, status and employment depend on recurrent assessments will rationally favour abundant publications, fashionable subjects, predictable results and projects capable of producing rapid indicators. They will be less willing to spend a decade pursuing a difficult idea, challenge an influential orthodoxy or undertake research whose importance might not become apparent within the next evaluation cycle. China may obtain more papers from such a system, but more papers are not necessarily more science and they are certainly not more genius.
Yet one of the strongest quasi-experimental studies of scientific incentives points decisively in the opposite direction. Azoulay et al. compared scientists appointed as Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators who received long-term support, freedom to change direction and explicit tolerance of early failure with similarly accomplished scientists operating under the NIH system of shorter review cycles, predefined deliverables and funding renewal less forgiving of failure. The HHMI investigators produced 55% more papers in the top 5% of the citation distribution and 97% more in the top 1%, while also moving into more novel lines of inquiry. The study demonstrated something directly relevant to Tongji’s experiment, when exceptional researchers are given time, autonomy and permission to fail, they do not become complacent, they become substantially more likely to produce exceptional science. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1756-2171.2011.00140.x
More worryingly, Tongji’s decision also directly undermines the vision I recently proposed in Civilizational Futures: Five Normative Imperatives for a Science-Based Civilization. Under the imperative to Liberate, I argued that humanity must stop wasting intelligence by creating environments in which caution is safer than intellectual risk. Under Know, I defended the systematic conquest of ignorance through institutions that preserve contradiction, uncertainty and dissent rather than suppressing them. And under Build, I argued that universities must be capable of funding research whose conclusions may belong to another generation. Tongji is moving in precisely the opposite direction. An academic who can be demoted, impoverished or dismissed at the next assessment according to criteria that have not even been defined, will be encouraged to protect a career rather than endanger it in pursuit of an uncertain truth. Six-year administrative horizons will displace scientific horizons that may require decades.
A science-based civilization cannot place researchers at the centre of humanity’s intellectual aspirations while simultaneously treating them as disposable production units under permanent managerial surveillance. Nor can it claim to admire discovery while rewarding primarily what can be counted before the next review. The most transformative ideas are often initially unfashionable, unproductive and apparently wrong; their survival depends on minds sufficiently secure to resist consensus and institutions sufficiently patient to tolerate failure. Tongji may believe that insecurity will eradicate complacency. In reality, it risks eradicating the independence, courage and long-term imagination from which scientific revolutions are born. Fear can manufacture obedience, frenetic publication and metric-compliant careers; it cannot manufacture genius. A civilization that terrorizes its intellectual explorers will not conquer ignorance; it will merely teach its brightest minds never to venture beyond the safety of the already known, where all scientific revolutions are born.
PS - Defending tenure does not mean defending academic impunity or turning it into lifelong welfare for academic cowards. Tenure exists to protect scholars who take intellectual risks, confront powerful interests, publicly defend inconvenient truths and speak when silence would be professionally safer. Academics who never question authority, defend persecuted colleagues, enter controversial debates or confront institutional wrongdoing do not need tenure, they have voluntarily embraced the obedience it was created to prevent. They demand protection for a freedom they refuse to exercise. Tenure should safeguard courage and intellectual independence not complacency, parasitism or carefully cultivated silence. As I have argued before, the rule should be simple: tenure, use it courageously or risk losing it.
