During the recent decades, performance measurement has been introduced into the Western
universities. As a part of this development, in more recent years, more and more detailed,
and usually quantitative performance criteria have been introduced into academia. Earlier
studies indicate that individual scholars tend to experience dilemmas caused either explicitly
or implicitly by the universities’ internal PM systems. These dilemmas further cause
perverse outcomes that potentially have severe effects for individual scholars, universities,
science, and even the society as a whole. While earlier studies hint on the existence of
dilemmas in the context of university PM and have reported certain perverse outcomes
caused by PM, in this paper we go further and take them into our explicit focus. In the study
we focus on the academic staff (faculty) – holding titles such as researchers, lecturers,
associate professors and professors – in natural sciences, social science and humanities. We
apply a large longitudinal qualitative data collected from three multi-disciplinary Finnish
universities in 2010 (n. 966 informants) and 2015 (n. 672 informants). Our tentative analysis
of the data has revealed a myriad of different kinds of dilemmas which PM in universities
cause. Many of the dilemmas also contain ethical dimensions which make them particularly
challenging for those scholars harboring a traditional academic ethos. Moreover, the
dilemmas entail a wide range of perverse outcomes caused by PM. At this point of the
analysis, the perverse outcomes have been constructed as rather wide general categories. In
the tentative analysis we have identified the following four general categories as the perverse
outcomes of PM: i) neglecting quality in academic work, ii) lowering research ambition, iii)
neglecting the relevance of science, and iv) ethically questionable behavior.