The Hall of Fame.

Everything in the world follows some rules – the items move according to classical mechanics and optimize some trajectory according to some cost function. Apples follow gravity and fall down from the trees straight towards the ground. The electric current, too, flows from high towards low electric potential, always along the shortest possible trajectory.

People also construct their own cost functions and adjust their behaviour according to the rules present in their environment.

Why Do Academic Incentives Push People Apart?

I have spent excessive amounts of time thinking about the mechanisms that drive people against each other in science. PIs are simply not motivated enough to make their students happy. Indeed, they do not have enough incentives to spend their time and energy on even thinking about this topic.

What pays off in academia the most for your survival is maximizing the number of papers and grants that you get. This happens without regard to the associated human factor.

You simply cannot put your success as a supervisor or a mentor into your CV. According to Van Dalen and Henkens (2012), a worldwide survey of academics found that the large majority experience this publish-or-perish pressure as high. These costs are real: they affect policy engagement and knowledge sharing, yet they rarely show up in any evaluation.

Since success in any of the above cannot influence your future funding opportunities or the positions you take, it is prioritized so low. Almost no one ever actually finds time for this in practice. 

I believe that people are good by nature, but they also have a natural survival instinct. They will always prioritize actions that facilitate their survival, and there is no point in blaming them for this.

If you wish people to orient themselves towards a new quality, anything other than publications and grants, you need to change the rules. Taking action in this direction will help these people achieve their highest priority, which is, again, survival.

Furthermore, I believe that positive, ‘American-style’ motivation works best. Silence is enough of a punishment. Being overlooked is painful enough to motivate people to do their best, especially if they are naturally ambitious. 

What If Universities Ranked Their Best Supervisors?

Let us make a mind experiment. What would happen if every university announced a yearly ranking of, say, ten best supervisors? Such a ranking could be based on the students’ and PhD students’ anonymous evaluations.

To my mind, this little rule would launch the whole avalanche of good events. So, what would happen first would be a brand new possibility for someone who has always been a good supervisor. They could put this statement officially as a badge of honour in their CV, and indicate this achievement in grant writing and applications for positions.

This move would motivate good supervisors to be even better at what they are doing. They would finally have a sense of acknowledgement for their, otherwise ignored, efforts.

Could Grant Agencies Reward Good Mentorship?

Secondly, I genuinely believe that grant writing agencies have an interest in giving money to the right people. This often means ‘people who publish the most,’ but that is not the only criterion.

I bet that many board members in the major grant-writing agencies would happily credit grants to such people. These are people who might publish a little less than others. At the same time, these people have an ability to create a good, healthy atmosphere at the workplace, and mentor other people well./p>

Especially given that many of the granting agency representatives ARE former frustrated and depressed PhD students who were bullied by their supervisors. According to Levecque and colleagues (2017), roughly one in three PhD students is at risk of a common psychiatric disorder. Supervisor leadership style is one of the strongest predictors of this risk.

The issue is that granting agencies have no idea how to tell who is a good mentor and who is not. According to Eby et al. (2008), mentoring reliably improves protégés’ career and psychological outcomes, so the stakes are real.

This is mostly because they do not know the applicants personally. If universities released official white lists, granting agencies could much more easily take the quality of mentorship into account.

I believe in the good intentions of the granting agencies. I trust they would make good use of information about who the applicants actually are. This includes knowing how well they treat other people, especially students. 

Why Does the Job Market Reward Transparency?

Thirdly, how do you choose a job as a good software developer? Would you rather choose Google or a small startup? Most people compare salaries and take them into account while choosing a job.

If they feel competent and competitive enough, they will attempt to get a job in a company that offers the best money. In many countries like the Netherlands, all the salaries in science are standardized. Therefore, most students would prefer to choose a job in which they can develop the most.

But how to choose a good supervisor, especially if you come from abroad, and you simply do not know this particular environment? I know a lot of good students who come from other countries and then regret their choice of a supervisor. This is mostly because they have no prior information about the quality of supervision, so they end up making a random choice. 

Next to that, if the white lists are revealed, good supervisors would get more good applicants. According to Ghosh and Reio (2013), mentors themselves also report greater job satisfaction and career success. They would get applicants coming from overseas.

This would be yet one more benefit of becoming officially listed as a good mentor. This would also motivate other, worse supervisors to improve.

It would not matter whether they have a natural motivation to be good to students, or whether this is just a self-oriented action calculated to get better students and produce more papers. I think that you cannot really change people’s personalities, but you can still influence their choices. Only the outcome matters. 

Is a Hall of Fame Worth Setting Up?

Lastly, creating such a list costs the university absolutely nothing. Honestly speaking, I did not find one downside of such a white list so far.

To my mind, everyone would only gain from this. So, is any institution willing to set up such a new hall of fame? :)