The incentive systems that drive academic research underlie nearly every story we write: publication counts for promotion, pressure to produce positive results, hitting certain metrics, and so on. Critics have long called for change in these systems, but support for such change is hard to come by.
Several organizations are now putting more than $1 million toward reimagining hiring, promotion and tenure at U.S. universities. The program, called the Modernizing Academic Appointment and Advancement (MA3) Challenge, is seeking proposals for “bold, creative strategies to develop academic reward systems that foster a collaborative, responsive, and transparent research environment.”
Organized by the Open Research Community Accelerator (ORCA), the program will offer grants at two funding levels — $50,000 or $250,000 — over two years. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Dana Foundation, Rita Allen Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation have provided the funding, which totals $1.5 million.
To learn more about the program, we reached out to Greg Tananbaum, ORCA’s executive director, and Caitlin Schleicher, its director of community and partnerships. Their responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.
Retraction Watch: Scientific research in this country is facing unprecedented pressures. How did the MA3 Challenge come into existence?
Tananbaum: A consistent refrain – from rank-and-file scholars, department chairs, academic leaders, policymakers, and other interest holders – has been, “Nothing will really change until you tackle academic hiring and promotion.”
After many years and hundreds of consultations, it was clear to us that modernizing academic assessment and advancement was essential to enabling a more open, collaborative, inclusive, efficient, evidence-driven, and trustworthy research environment. So we began building a creative coalition to do just that. With backing from several philanthropies and in conjunction with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Aspen Institute, we designed and launched the MA3 Challenge.
Retraction Watch: What are the specific issues within review, promotion and tenure systems that need critical attention?
Tananbaum: Academic assessment and advancement systems at U.S. institutions often work against their own public missions. Instead of rewarding research that addresses real-world problems or broadens access, they still rely heavily on publications in brand-name journals, citation counts, and grant dollars. Community-engaged scholarship, though valuable, is usually dismissed as “service” and carries little weight in reviews.
This model disadvantages faculty who prioritize societal impact, mentorship, and a host of other values-based activities and outcomes. As a consequence, many researchers see this work as something of a career risk. To get hired, to get promoted, to get tenure, they need to adhere to a system that is significantly misaligned with their interests.
So it’s this dual misalignment – between institutional missions and credit/reward systems, and between why researchers get into this work in the first place and what it typically takes to move up the career ladder – that needs critical attention.
The goal is to catalyze a cultural shift within academic institutions toward fostering an inclusive, collaborative, and transparent research environment. If we want the activities that advance a more collaborative, responsive, and transparent research environment to propagate at scale, we need to reward them properly.
Retraction Watch: Lots of people – including us – have been talking about changing the incentive structure for decades, with minimal movement. How do you think this project could move the needle?
Schleicher: There are several reasons incentive structures tend to be slow to change. First, it’s often easier and less time-consuming for institutions to focus on traditional outputs and metrics. Second, many institutions and disciplines have long-standing norms around what counts as excellence and impact, which can be difficult to shift. Third, shared governance structures can make decision-making complex, and there’s often a ‘chicken-and-egg’ dynamic over who should lead reform: faculty, who hold the authority over academic standards, or administrators, who need to signal and support change. Finally, reforms must compete with other institutional priorities, which can slow momentum. Taken together, these factors create a challenging environment for changing incentive structures.
We’re hoping this funding opportunity will stimulate real reform in several ways. First, we require that awardees spend no more than 50% of their time and budget on planning activities, including research, surveys, and discussions. We are prioritizing implementation-forward activities that will result in explicit changes in academic hiring and review, promotion, and tenure policies and practices.
Second, funding will support dedicated capacity for individuals at the institution to take on this institutional change work. Next, the projects will have a relatively narrow two-year timeline. This will spur participating institutions to be rigorous and focused in their approaches, as well as begin to provide case studies for other institutions engaging in their own modernization efforts. Finally, ORCA will be overseeing a community of practice for the cohort of awardees in the spring. This community is designed to accelerate learning, troubleshoot barriers and ensure that emerging insights can be efficiently disseminated to one another the broader higher education community.
Retraction Watch: What sort of buy-in are you requiring from the institutions to ensure the proposals have support?
Schleicher: To be eligible for this opportunity, we have asked that institutions have their academic administrators – provosts, vice provosts, deans, and/or department chairs, depending on the tier for which they are applying – serve as the principal investigator. If a proposal does not include an administrator responsible for faculty success and advancement in the PI position, we ask that applicants provide a letter of support from a member of the executive leadership team indicating the proposal team has support for this work.
Retraction Watch: What outcomes are you hoping for from the two-year projects?
Tananbaum: We envision two key outcomes. At a local level, we expect that participants will have developed and tested innovative changes to their academic assessment and advancement programs. To the extent that these reforms are impactful, we hope that they will become part of the fabric of these departments and institutions, creating clearer alignment between missions and reward structures.
Second, we believe these projects, synthesized through the MA3 community of practice, will provide replicable roadmaps for change in how research is conducted, evaluated and shared. We know that many departments and institutions are conceptually aligned with these modernization efforts. But figuring out what that looks like in practice has proven difficult. The MA3 Challenge will demonstrate what is possible. It is our belief that the awardees will generate strategies that can be adapted and adopted across the higher education landscape.
Retraction Watch: What happens after that? Are the funders committed to supporting further work or implementation of the projects that bear out?
Tananbaum: We believe there is a robust appetite for this modernization effort. While we are at the earliest stages of what promises to be a long journey, we believe that demonstrating what’s possible here will lead to additional experimentation and implementation.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on X or Bluesky, like us on Facebook, follow us on LinkedIn, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].