An anecdote on the power of setting your own metrics of success

Tl;dr: hey friends, my advice (about ethical use of images in science) is in a book! And it's a GREAT book, you should get a copy.

Click the screenshot to hop over and get your copy of Jen’s great book!

I got some amazing news recently [1]: a series of advice articles I wrote years ago has been featured (twice!) in a book by the exceptional science communicator/artist Jen Christiansen. Building Science Graphics came out in 2022, and I’ve recommended it ever since [2], but somehow never noticed the shout-out!

Jen is a senior graphics editor at Scientific American, where she does what I’ve tried to do throughout my career: elegantly and beautifully merge art, science, and writing. When it comes to science visualization, if Jen recommends it, you should do it.

And, she highlighted my advice about how to ethically integrate other people’s images into your work as a scientist! I’m absolutely delighted to be mentioned in this context.

And also…

I’m kinda fascinated by what this says about the impact of my work.

I’m a non-tenure-track faculty member at a research-active, land grant university in the Mountain West. There is nothing in my job description about art or visuals of any kind, and there hasn’t been in years. If you know my work, you probably think of me for science communication, scholarly writing, and organizational change/leadership. This won’t show up on my h-index; it’s not going to be noticed by ORCID.

So, who could possibly care about a citation for a blog series I wrote in 2017?!? Maybe I could add it to the Media Coverage section of my CV? Realistically, this kind of side project, or ‘featured by’ tanget, would not “count” in my annual reviews or next promotion packet.

But, the shout-outs in Jen’s book are pretty much the ultimate affirmation of my work. To understand why I think so, we need to take a quick run through the reality of how we gauge success in academia.

Self-determinism seems like a great idea in academia

As academics, we know we’re supposed to publish a lot, get big grants, teach and mentor the next generation, and contribute (through service, admin, etc.) to our departments, institutions, and professional fields. It’s an impossible to-do list, but there’s a lot of freedom with a list that long, and there’s a lot of wiggle room within each of those categories. This framework offers each academic the potential to shape our careers in ways that meaningfully further human knowledge, improve people’s lives and learning experiences, and connect us to a vast network of people working towards the same ends.

A fair, self-determined, deeply meaningful life connected to other people working in similar ways is quite alluring. That allure persists despite the comparatively low compensation, the commonly excessive workweeks, and the endless beauracracy of academia.

But that’s not what actually happens in academia

In practice, the flexibility+purpose that attracts so many of us to academia usually plays out as people being scrutinized for number of publications, the prestige of the publication outlets, and grant funding acquired. This narrowing of what “counts” manifests at every hiring and review stage, affecting prospective grad students, postdocs, new faculty, and staff, and dominating all review, retention, and promotion processes.

Whether you’re a career academic, or more like me—joined a university’s faculty after a career in the nonprofit sector—these limited metrics for success tend to feel pretty rigid.

The result is a deeply stressful, and too-often devastating, compression of what “success” can be. This narrowed focus compells compromising and prioritizing that can even lead to moral injury [3]. Nearly every faculty member I know feels their work, it’s potential and true impacts, and the way they spend their time, are not fairly evaluated, compensated, or celebrated. They also mostly feel like they would like to do better at the aspects of our jobs that are deprioritized by this academic prestige paradigm.

We do this to ourselves

That disconnect is rough. But, there’s a reality we have to face: as faculty, we determine how we evaluate people for their potential and skill sets, at all career stages. We largely set the criteria for our own mutual assessment, too. So, if anything is going to change, we have to do it.

The crux of the issue is that nearly every faculty member I know disagrees with the narrowness of this prestige paradigm. But, I’ve met very few who seem willing to spend their time and risk their professional capital to advocate and work for a change of policy in their own departments and institutions.

I’ve pondered (and railed and cajoled about) this inertia since I was first exposed to people with careers in higher ed (~2008; not just as an undergrad myself). The longer I’m in academia, the more certain I am that we’re actually causing the inertia in the first place. Faculty, at least in science, can work their whole careers without ever having non-academic training. That means, the scope of what is typical (let alone what seems possible) to most academics is fully contained in the operational norms of the institutions where they study and work.

These operational habits reinforce a sense of learned helplessness and risk aversion. Most bureaucratic processes suck up a lot of time and effort, only to end up as an un-used report collecting dust on an administrator’s shelf. Truly, why would anyone keep participating in processes that never lead to change? And, the work of an academic is to critique and persist through being critiqued. The work needed to make policy or systemic change in an institution is guaranteed to expose you to sustained critique. Furthermore, a lot of systems change work is perceived as “service"—that vast category of unpromotable tasks that someone should do, no one will ever get promoted for, and a lot of people get criticized for spending time on.

Depending on your career stage, these calculations might not feel worth it, or trying for change might not even be an option (e.g., contingent personnel, students, pre-tenure faculty). In essence, academics in STEM are typically trained to avoid doing the exact work we need to do to make academia better for us all [4]. 

The fix requires self-efficacy and curiosity

The few attempts at academic change we do make—via a “blue ribbon panel,” “grand challenges initiative,” president’s “advisory committee,” or token seed grants—too frequently are mere bandaids or whitewash. And, academics are, by definition, smart. Eventually, even if you care, you get to a point where it seems like change is impossible, trying is pointless. While our administrators may not deliberately be conditioning us into learned helplessness, the end result looks mighty similar.

If what we’re doing isn’t working, we need to look for alternative examples. These abound beyond academia, and our colleagues in the humanities, arts, and social sciences have studied them for years. But, again, STEM academics aren’t usually exposed to these ideas. We don’t systemically encourage students to cross-train in those fields. We mostly don’t collaborate with people in other parts of campus, let alone in those sectors beyond academia. So, most academics remain isolated from the many alternative ways in which governance, impact, and success are conceived and achieved beyond higher ed.

To reimagine success, and to believe that we can articulate meaningful and equitable metrics for what “counts,” we have to first believe that change is possible, and that our efforts to contribute to it will make a difference [5]. To restore our sense of self-efficacy, we must look beyond the prestige paradigm that has dulled it. Fortunately, examples abound. The world is full of people who know how to improve their communities through collective action that accounts for what everyone needs and cares about. For example, we can look to co-housing, coproduced public services, collectivist cultures and movements, and reciprocal management structures and cultures.

We need to seek out these examples (in and beyond STEM), studying and contributing to them, teaching them, and fundamentally learning how these approaches work.

In other words, we need to use our academically honed ability for inquiry and learning to seek out, experience, and understand alternative models of governance and assessment that achieve aspects of what we think academia should be. Then, we can work to successfully reframe our expectations of ourselves and others, because we have fueled our imagination with ideas from other sectors [6].  

Yes, a shout-out to an old side project matters

Here’s the thing. Loads of academic publications these days are never cited. As a researcher, you can work your whole life on something that fascinates you. Something that could make a real difference in the world. And still, basically no one might ever hear of it or benefit from it.

If they do, it might be long after you’ve retired or expired.

It’s like a tree falling in the woods. If there’s no noise, no witness, was there ever a tree? [7] 

So, it’s pretty much priceless to find out that my work is both useful and valued beyond the narrow realm of my scholarly peers. It’s especially affirming because I spent almost a decade trying to “make it” in science illustration and journalism. I never fully made a living that way, and I never became a sci-art influencer, though I shared a lot of thoughts and resources about art and science. To be honest, I always felt slightly on the periphery of that network.

It’s the height of irony (using polite words here), then, that the same work of mine that is valued outside academia can be valueless within the academic prestige paradigm. I’m by no means the first person to assert that this paradigm is past it’s use-by date.

And, complaining doesn’t change things.

What does changing our metrics of success look like in practice?

I spent most of my career working in community nonprofits that were scrambling to stay funded. They were either growing up or trying not to go out of business. And, they were all working to improve major issues in their communities. I also grew up in a cultural environment wildly different from the places I’ve lived. My childhood was o far removed from academia that I didn’t consider academia a viable job option until 2015.

So, I’ve had some experience with change. And I am familiar with a lot of models for how to work through change, articulate what we want instead, and then facilitiate collective work to get there.

That’s where we start.

Here’s how you could perhaps get there.

1. Reconnect with/articulate what motivates you. Here are some of my favorite resources (and this one!), and/or you can work through the exercises in this paper of mine [8]. Knowing clearly why you care is key to trying. And trying (particularly over the long term) is necessary for learning to do organization leadership work.

2. Look for examples of organizations that work like you’d like your corner of academia to work. Accept that these organizations had to try before they could succeed. Read about historical examples, connect with contemporary ones. Learn about how they operate. Identify the aspects of their policies and procedures you could adopt in your lab and department. Get involved in at least one of these organizations, so you can practice making a difference, practice having your efforts for change pay off.

3. At the same time, look for professional development opportunities that connect you to ideas, methods, and resources outside the academy. Paired with step 2, you’re getting yourself on track for re-claiming your agency and sense of self-efficacy. Both are vital for believing you can make adifference. Without that conviction, you’ll never even try.

4. Build a coalition of folks in your department who also want to see success metrics [9] change. Recognize that this could take months and years. And, keep in mind: you don’t all need to agree on what the final policies should be. Right now, you’re just building a crew of folks who have done steps 1-3, so that you can believe, together, that change is worth trying for.

5. Stop complaining and start moving forward. Articulate the ideal version of how success would be evaluated in your department. Even if you’re the only one working on this right now, you can do the ground work. Make a list of all the work that you or people in your department do that you think should count for things like hiring, review, promotion, raises, awards, etc. Review tenure & promotion guidelines from other departments and borrow the most expansive aspects of them. Aim for ideal working conditions for everyone [10], regardless of rank, job security status, etc.

6. Don’t let any naysayers get in your way. This is a visioning stage, so operate like anything at all is possible. Focusing on the constricting metrics of the prestige paradigm doesn’t give us a whole lot of information about how to expand them. Put another way, it’s a lot harder to imagine how we measure Jen’s shout-out of my work, than it is to (a) affirm Jen’s shout-out is a meaningful metric and then (b) reverse engineer policies to uphold that.

What do self-determined metrics look like?'

How will I render the mention of an old blog series legible to colleagues and administrators who don’t see value in my publishing a book, let alone a blog? I will continue to tell them the metrics I have set for myself. I state these in my annual reviews, my promotion and retention reviews, and on my website.

And then, I use the wide variety of activities and outputs I co-create to demonstrate that I am meeting those self-defined goals.

But, this piece is already plenty long and plenty to think about. So, we’ll pick up with some examples of my self-determined metrics next time.

How about you?

Have you recently reflected on or articulated your values? What motivates you to do the work you do? How might changing metrics of success in your work place help you achieve the goals you have for your work?

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This post was first published on my blog at commnatural.com. © 2025, B.G. Merkle, all rights reserved.

[1] This was actually a second, marvelous coincidence. Turns out the person who told me about Jen mentioning my work in her book is the partner of one of my long-ago roommates!

[2] Clearly, I haven’t read it cover-to-cover, though I dip in and out for many great tools Jen included.

[3] According to the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University, “Moral injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.” While the MIP provides examples primarily drawn from military/combat experiences, the concept/phenomenon is also common in medical care settings and among teachers at all levels of the education system in the U.S. Moral injury is currently understood to encompass a spectrum including moral injury, moral distress, moral harm, and even moral trauma.

[4] I’m not saying anything new. As we analyzed in the “Use Your Power for Good” paper I co-led, people have been critiquing learning and teaching and research since Aristotle, then since universities were invented, and through activism and whole fields of research for at least a century.

[5] Certainly, humility is important. And change is a long-game. But we still have to believe it’s possible in order to summon any motivation to try.

[6] Note: I’m not advocating for the corporatization of higher ed; that’s a whole ‘nother issue and the infiltration of profit motives has further constrained our capacity to run academia like it should be.

[7] The answers are yes, and yes—sentience and reciprocity, carbon sequestration, nutrient cycling, habitat, beauty, wind and water buffering, etc., etc. But also, you know what I mean.

[8] If you don’t know where to start with values/motivation work (which is really just personal strategic planning!), you can invite me to lead a values workshop for you, your lab group, or your department. I’ve led trainings like this for university-level strategic planning and leadership groups, and embedded these processes in trainings on scholarly writing, scicomm, career development, and more.

[9] This same process works regardless of what other change you want to work for

[10] Like, if you don’t want to teach more than a 1-1 or a 2-1, extend that perk to everyone in your department, regardless of rank. If you get to apply for sabbatical, what about sabbaticals for staff, too!?