Academic Metrics

This group meets every second Wednesday at 3 PM EST/noon PST. This group is pursuing a shared research and action strategy to develop artist-driven assessment protocols in research university contexts that make legible and better promote the unique intellectual and creative contributions of arts- and design-based faculty, which are not well represented by current dominant models such as Academic Analytics.

Contact Maryrose Flanigan at flanigam@umich.edu for more information.

Summary: A2ru Academic Metrics Working Group Activities

The a2ru Academic metrics working group was established in 2024 to formalize collaborative activities of a2ru and the International Council of Fine Arts Deans (ICFAD) conversations and roundtables from 2020-2023. The working group, composed of academic leader representatives (e.g. deans, chairs, associate deans), from a2ru and beyond, is planning and executing a suite of activities to help faculty and academic leaders articulate and understand the impact of their arts activities for research, community engagement, and societal transformation. In data-driven environments, the arts on campus have historically been “data-poor”; the impact of the arts has been under articulated, under-quantified, and therefore under-resourced.

This suite of activities is designed to help the a2ru network and allies (e.g. ICFAD)  illustrate the significant impact of the research and practice of artists in higher education. Through a field scan of academic leadership of what is being captured (and how effectively) in terms of academic metrics, we are working to generate a landscape and gap analysis that will help faculty make their work visible for annual reviews, tenure and promotion; and more globally will help arts units to show impact and advocate for resources. We aim to produce a toolkit for senior academic leadership – especially those not familiar with artistic research and activities – to understand these activities, how to measure them, and how to leverage them to contribute to the university metrics and the resource allocation discourse. In parallel, we will be conducting a research project in collaboration with data scientists, with a larger faculty survey to authentically catalog awards, impact, exhibits, publications, performances, and other emergent forms of creative and collaborative scholarship to inform a better system of making these activities visible in a higher education context. This bottom-up effort will promote faculty engagement with a goal of exploring cross-institutional and finely-grained scholarly output patterns that may serve as a way of establishing flexible, trackable, and quantifiable impact metrics.