Pointosis

The Disease of Our Time

Poles have a wonderful neologism that we need in English, too: punktoza, which we could translate as pointosis, or the pathological condition of relying too much on acquiring points within some arbitrarily established scale of accomplishments. European university professors are painfully familiar with this disease, because it has deeply distorted academic life. An excellent article in the magazine Polityka this week explored the many problems faced by the higher education sector in Poland, and a massive infection of pointosis is near the top of the list. Both state funding for universities and the salaries of individual professors are based on complex formulas, giving the system a veneer of objectivity. For example, publishing an article in an academic journal is rewarded according to a table that assigns prestige to every title. You can look up your favorites by clicking here. Appearing in internationally renowned outlets like The Journal of Modern History would earn you an impressive 200 points, area studies periodicals like Slavic Review garner 140 points, and even the most prestigious Polish-language publications like Kwartalnik Historyczny convey only 100 points. Less selective and/or more specialized journals get the least recognition, like The Journal of the History of Sexuality (70 points), The Journal of European Economic History (40 points), or Comparative Legal History (20 points). Scholars also earn points by attending conferences, even more if they give a formal presentation, and yet more if their talk is printed in the conference proceedings. These formulas are reassessed and revised periodically. The right-wing government that was in power before 2023 ensured that publications in even the most obscure Catholic periodicals got the maximum points, while downgrading topics and fields that they did not approve of.

The intricacies of quantifying academic output are magnified at the institutional level. The base formula alone is dizzying:

I’m not even going to clarify what each of these variables signify—the point is the complexity of the algorithm itself. And this is just the simplified version, with each letter representing the sum of many contributing factors. Suffice it to say that it includes things like variable points for different types of students and faculty, with (for example) foreign faculty giving an institution five times more points than domestic faculty.

This system arose to address a real problem. Polish academia has long been plagued with clientelism and favoritism. People with the right connections could (and to an extent still can) get promoted even with weak scholarship, and anyone lacking those personal ties faces insurmountable barriers. Professors all too frequently had parents who were also professors. Sadly, the cure may have been worse than the disease. Now my Polish colleagues are forced to write articles even if they don’t have anything in particular to say, and to spin each research project into multiple publications. The point system for academic articles was a response to the earlier proliferation of junk journals that would accept anything for a fee, which led to a flood of worthless publications. Those still exist, but increasingly scholars are pressured to appear in legitimate journals, which are in turn bombarded with submissions. One study showed a one-third jump between 2025 and 2026 alone. The spread of AI “writing” has exacerbated this problem by many magnitudes, but that concern is itself the result of the pressure that scholars are under to publish as much as possible.

Of course, the phrase “publish or perish” has existed for a very long time, but behind that warning was the assumption that such writing would be evaluated by one’s colleagues. Most American universities have so far avoided the worst symptoms of the pointosis epidemic. At my institution, new hires and promotions are considered holistically, and scholars with one pathbreaking book and a few excellent articles are respected just as much (probably more) than those with a longer but less impactful record. The lack of any mandate to quantify the unquantifiable allows us to make case-by-case, contextualized assessments.

At the root of the problem is a desire to make the subjective seem objective. Systems based on trust and decentralization are often plagued by injustices, prejudices, and corruption. To solve that problem, we’ve tried over the past century or so to replace individual judgment with quantifiable measurements. In the domain of public policy, we have introduced cost-benefit analyses for state investment and regulation. In education, we’ve created ever-more-complex systems of high-stakes examinations to separate the worthy from the unworthy, and forced instructors to separate the students worthy of an A- from those who only merit a B+. In the economy, we’ve come to trust market valuations as if they were genuine measures of value. These all give us certainty and clarity, and they do indeed reduce corruption somewhat. But not all that much, because everyone quickly learns how to navigate these systems, discovering the points of ambiguity where the algorithms can be bent to achieve a desired outcome. Policymakers then adjust the systems, making them more complicated and adding more surveillance. It is a never-ending process, because too many aspects of life involve judgments that simply cannot be assigned points.

For example, consider the procedures for awarding prizes and grants, or for admitting students into competitive university programs. A selection committee might have a rubric in which they assign a certain number of points for things like originality, depth of research, engagement with existing scholarship, etc. I’ve been on many such committees over the years, and while I recognize the practical utility of using rubrics to organize one’s thoughts, I’m under no illusion that these represent anything other than subjective judgments. For any such competition, there are going to be a handful of applications that can be discarded for one reason or another, but there are invariably many more that are all excellent. The task of the selection committee, then, is to differentiate between various types of excellence. The standards for doing so are inevitably vague, not because of a lack of rigorous assessment but because of the nature of what is being assessed. Losers in these competitions feel like they have been personally rejected. I know all to well what it feels like to get an email beginning with “we are sorry to inform you that….” But behind the scenes, selections committee aren’t necessarily rejecting anyone—they are simply forced to pick only one winner, among the many that could have won. If the competition were repeated with a different jury, someone else might have received the prize or the admissions spot. This isn’t a problem to be solved with more rigorous procedures; instead, it reflects the indeterminacy of the entire undertaking.

Culturally, we are drawn to stories in which heroes defeat villains. Intellectually, we admire scientists who are able to determine the right answer to a question, and discard mistaken hypotheses. Morally, we appreciate clear divisions between virtue and vice. As the ongoing World Cup tournament demonstrates, everyone enjoys competitions in which we can unambiguously determine winners and losers. Those preferences serve us poorly, however, when it comes to judging individuals or making public policy. Life is not a football game, and we shouldn’t be trying to figure out who deserves the trophy. Policymaking is not a math problem, and there will never be one solution that works in every context.

As I said, the problems that these systems were designed to address were real. The only thing worse than pointosis is patronage. Instead of tossing out bureaucratic systems of assessment, we need to build systems that recognize when something can be quantified, and when it cannot. To imply that an article in Slavic Review is precisely 30% less valuable than an article in The Journal of Modern History is laughable. That’s not an objective assessment; it’s a silly overgeneralization hiding behind a number. Instead of algorithms, we need trust in expertise and decentralized structures of authority, monitored by unobtrusive but nonetheless genuine oversight. Historians should judge the work of other historians, and biologists should judge the work of other biologists, using whatever standards each community considers appropriate. Higher bodies should review these decisions to make sure that procedures are in place to avoid nepotism and other forms of corruption, but they should not overrule qualitative assessments.

Such systems are never perfect, because they are human. But that’s the point. Combined with respect for decentralized communities of expertise, we also need to recognize that the outcomes of such procedures are not and cannot be definitive determinations of merit. Ultimately, pointosis is inevitable within high-stakes meritocracies, so we need to get beyond the ideology of meritocracy itself, and acknowledge that humanity isn’t separated into winners and losers, the worthy and the unworthy. We neither can nor should eliminate incentives and competition, and we can’t protect people from disappointments and triumphs. But we can strive for a world in which consequences are far less existential than they are now. Once we do that, we will create the security needed to set aside the false pretense of quantification.