The recent news that a certain lawmaker demanded professors at flagship national universities submit "written explanations for not publishing papers" in a given year is not merely dismaying — it is alarming. Treating university professors like factory workers on a conveyor belt reflects both ignorance of the essence of scholarship and the extreme of shallow performance-ism. Pressuring researchers who expand the frontiers of humanity to mechanically produce results each year amounts to forcing them to mass-produce "fake knowledge" and "junk papers."
Academic research is a creative journey that demands a longer breath than a marathon. Andrew Wiles, who solved the 350-year-old problem "Fermat's Last Theorem," immersed himself in research in silence for seven years without publishing a single paper. Nobel laureate Peter Higgs likewise produced no further output for decades after his groundbreaking 1964 paper, and warned that his own discovery would have been impossible under today's performance-pressure culture. Had they been professors at a Korean national university, they might have severed the buds of great discovery under the pressure of politically demanded explanations.
Advanced countries have already moved beyond the trap of "counting publications." The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) warned in a 2024 statement that political interference in higher education had reached an "alarming level," criticizing that censoring specific research topics or pressuring for output fundamentally destroys the university's capacity to serve the public interest as a "venue for free inquiry."
Harvard and Stanford also thoroughly exclude the arithmetic formula of "how many papers one has written" from their tenure reviews. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) evaluates candidates solely on "high-impact contributions" that have changed the map of the field, without any minimum publication threshold, and verifies qualitative excellence through a "Comparand Exercise" that directly benchmarks candidates against world-class scholars. Stanford University treats as its most important measure whether a researcher possesses "Investigative Independence" — the ability of an individual researcher to set and lead an original research agenda — opening new horizons rather than merely reiterating existing knowledge.
By contrast, the quantitative pressure forced by our political circles is sickening academia. "Salami slicing," which breaks a single study into multiple papers, runs rampant, and researchers cling only to safe topics with predictable outcomes instead of challenging subjects with a high likelihood of failure. This is ultimately a self-harming act that erodes the international credibility of Korean academia.
Article 31, Paragraph 4 of our Constitution explicitly protects the autonomy of universities, and the Supreme Court has clarified that judgment on academic achievement is the domain of the expert community. Political circles must immediately stop acting as censors monitoring the publication counts of individual professors. Universities must not be objects of political control but the last bastion of the pursuit of truth.
