THERE IS A POSITIONAL ARMS RACE.

In higher education, the dominant strategy for ambitious academics is to cheat.

To survive professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut corners or even commit misconduct to get there.

To measure this claim, Dr. [Ferric C.] Fang [editor of Infection and Immunity] and Dr. [Arturo] Casadevall [also an editor] looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor, the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate.

The highest “retraction index” in the study went to one of the world’s leading medical journals, The New England Journal of Medicine. In a statement for this article, it questioned the study’s methodology, noting that it considered only papers with abstracts, which are included in a small fraction of studies published in each issue. “Because our denominator was low, the index was high,” the statement said.

Monica M. Bradford, executive editor of the journal Science, suggested that the extra attention high-impact journals get might be part of the reason for their higher rate of retraction. “Papers making the most dramatic advances will be subject to the most scrutiny,” she said.

Dr. Fang says that may well be true, but adds that it cuts both ways — that the scramble to publish in high-impact journals may be leading to more and more errors. Each year, every laboratory produces a new crop of Ph.D.’s, who must compete for a small number of jobs, and the competition is getting fiercer. In 1973, more than half of biologists had a tenure-track job within six years of getting a Ph.D. By 2006 the figure was down to 15 percent.

Academic publication is subject to confirmation biases and to data mining, which can lead to error that must be corrected.

The push for academic prestige is taking a toll on new faculty, Casting Out Nines's Robert Talbert asserts.

I’ve heard many stories of faculty colleagues who routinely spend 90+ hours a week doing work, and seeing spouses and family only for an hour or so a day at the dinner table before disappearing to grade or work in the lab until 2 AM. And these stories are not from people in R1 universities — quite often they’re working in small liberal arts colleges and regional universities. It seems not to depend on the size or type of the institution.

Small liberal arts colleges can actually be some of the worst offenders in this. In some places, faculty quality gets implicitly tied to the degree to which one sacrifices freedom and time — faculty who volunteer to teach 16+ credits a semester and stay on campus doing review sessions until 11pm are seen as “more caring” than those faculty who don’t. And as I discovered last year during my job search, there’s a shocking mission creep among SLAC’s toward a more research-intensive focus among new faculty, with some positions advertising for people with strong research backgrounds in specialized technical areas with the expectation of conducting large-scale undergraduate research on top of a 4/4 teaching load. A colleague recently said to me that small liberal arts colleges can eat productive people alive, and I’m beginning to believe it.

At some point, if this continues, two things are going to happen.

First, faculty are simply going to burn out and be of no use either in the classroom or in research, or else they’ll just walk away from the profession, and the only people left to teach those courses will be people who are either professionally or emotionally incapable of doing a good job. Or they’ll be staffed by careerists who have made an art of strategically making pedagogical choices that are better for the professor than they are for the students while making students happy enough in the moment not to notice.

Second, the Ph.D. pipeline will dry up as smart young people with the desire to work in higher ed will realize that it will boil down to a choice between their career and the rest of their lives, and choose the latter.

Perhaps the small colleges seek to improve their position, or perhaps those hard-working professors do.  As long as it's fun, or opportunities to improve one's position, ambitious people will work.  A Times Higher Education report cautions that the academic vocation is reverting to vows of poverty and chastity, but without the reward on earth as it is in Heaven.

[University College Dublin's Kathleen] Lynch believes that "the carelessness of education" (and a consequent distortion of research agendas) has its origins in a "classical Cartesian" determination to keep emotion out of scholarly work, and in "positivist norms" based on "the separation between fact and value", but thinks the trend is being greatly intensified by the "new managerialism". Today's "idealized worker", as a result, is "one that is available 24/7 without ties or responsibilities that will hinder her or his productive capacities. She or he is unencumbered and on-call, even if not 'at work'."

One could almost expand this into a kind of conspiracy theory. Think, for example, of a remote rural American campus where there are few other attractions to prevent people from working all their waking hours. While universities have monastic origins, it is neither realistic nor legal to create a higher education institution employing only celibate men. Yet the next best thing to an academic without any emotional or sexual ties to "distract" them is someone whose partner or spouse lives thousands of miles away and who is either childless or has managed to subcontract all her, or more likely his, "care work" to others. Many universities are de facto staffed by such people.

No conspiracy is required if ambitious people are willing to do the work, deferring gratification or finding other outlets for their leisure time. The article suggests that higher education will face a staffing problem, if holding any kind of an academic job involves too much sacrifice of a private life.