I didn't realize there was such a big push for this in the States. And it's not new. Here is a paper from 2012 that I found helpful in detailing the precarious funding situation of American state schools.

"Privatizing American public higher education: racing down a slippery slope," published in Journal of Case Studies in Education.

A short summary from the abstract:

"As two recessions withered state budgets in the first decade of the 21st century, the public funding vise closed to a precipitous level, leading some states and their universities to consider the benefits of divesting the institutions of their state affiliation. With fewer colleges and universities to support, the states would be able to remove, at least partially, one strain on their budgets. The institutions, thus disconnected from the states, would have greater freedom from oversight and constraints on fundraising."

Without removing the cost-barrier to attending university, I wonder if this shift away from the institution as a gatekeeper could ever really be complete.

This demand strikes me as terribly frustrating. When does the effort put into proving the worth of your work to funders — collecting and interpreting data about your impact — start to eat too much into time that could be spent actually doing the work?

It seems that altmetrics might be at risk of rewarding high engagement just for engagement's sake. Does a quantitative measure of views/tweets/citations assume that more attention means the work is valuable and productive?

I'm really curious about the demographic of each of these platforms are considered. (i.e. Social media sites like Twitter are more frequented by people outside the academic community, while metrics from citation/reference tools more likely indicate researcher engagement.)

What type of engagement is more valuable to RPT processes? Is there a desired balance between non-academic and academic uptake?

I was waiting for the discussion to expand beyond a male/female binary. I am curious about how issues around gender non-conforming people fit into the legal framework the authors are hoping to co-construct.

I'm curious about whether state legal systems would call for these types of precedents to be codified somewhere and about how they might deal with the potential orality of some of these resources.

'Process pluralism' as defined in a UC Irvine paper:

"The idea of process pluralism, derived from the more general fields of conflict resolution and ‘alternative dispute resolution’ in legal contexts, is an essential part of transitional justice, where multiple processes may occur simultaneously or in sequence over time (e.g. truth and reconciliation processes, with or without amnesty, prosecutions, lustration and/or more local legal and communitarian processes), depending on both individual and collective preferences and resources"

This feels like an important acknowledgement — that it is not a novel idea to apply Indigenous practises to respond to issues concerning Indigenous people.

What are some other forms of public academic work that are or should be rewarded in the RPT process?

There is so much public work that is expected of researchers, but is unpaid. Where do things like public speaking on panels, talking to media, presenting at conferences, or sitting on boards and committees factor in to the review of an academic?

Sheila Jasanoff on her work:

"That book introduced and developed the concept of “regulatory science” as a distinct domain of scientific production, accountable to epistemic as well as normative demands in ways that help explain why it is vulnerable to challenge from both science and politics."

https://sheilajasanoff.org/research/expertise-and-regulatory-science/

I like the idea here of closing the sometimes huge divide between policymakers and the people with lived experiences of how policy plays out on the ground.

This term reads as slightly pejorative of local knowledge to me, contradictory to the statement of its value below.

OED: Adjective. Childishly silly and immature.

I'm surprised at how much I liked this very moody analysis of shit. I read and reread this part. To carry further Frankfurt's metaphor, is bullshit where truth and substance go to die?

Where do we draw the line between figurative language and untruth? When does the line blur in a deceptive way that could become problematic?

This piece I found quotes Nietzche on the consequences of lies as being of more concern than being lied to:

"What men avoid by excluding the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud. Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception."

Frankfurt acknowledges that Wittgenstein's reaction is extreme, but what is the general level of comfort for those of us who are not sticklers like Wittgenstein? Do we scale our tolerance for lies or misrepresentations according to the weight of their consequences?

In light of the following conclusion that bullshit can indeed be carefully contrived, I wonder if the connotations of the word itself undermine the insidious nature of the deception described in the paragraph below. Is 'bullshit' the right word to call due attention to malignant public falsehoods?