In light of recent rumblings on bias in academia, Fabian Tassano has some not unrelated thoughts.
Imagine the following scenario. A bunch of intelligent people get together and create — using funding that is more or less unconditional — a system for generating intellectual output. However, this output does not have to pass any particular test except whether a majority of system insiders agree it is worthy. So the members of the system are entirely insulated from assessment other than their own. Like any social group, they create a hierarchy of rank, in which some are allowed to progress to the top of the ladder depending on criteria which the group as a whole decides on. What is the likely outcome? And what happens if there also starts to be an ideology which places pressure on them to produce results which fit with, rather than go against, that ideology?
David,
I think that, lacking some external check (such as that provided by the service’s consumers) the drivers of patronage and system-maintenance will override.
That means that the org.’s mission will devolve to boosting individuals’ careers and expanding the bureaucracy’s “prestige” (usually a function of its budget) – neither of which derives from the group’s functionality or efficacy.
In the end, such an organization winds up fluffing feather pillows for its members’ own heads, and producing nothing of any use to anyone outside the org.
Incestuous? Maybe…but “masturbatory” is the adjective I’d use.
I also liked this, quoted in the piece: “Accessibility is not the key to academic advancement.” And hence we arrive at “disciplines” that are pretentious, irrelevant and staggeringly tedious, and very often little more than rickety vehicles for self-congratulation and/or political exposition.
I sometimes wonder how I might fare if I were a student now. I usually end up picturing some kind of Columbine situation. Or possibly Waco.
David
Employment in the U.S. Postal service should cover any location or act you wish to commit.
I’ll bear that in mind.
[ Note to self: Always smile and say “good morning” to the postman. Just in case. ]
Sounds like the perfect recipe for groupthink. The BBC, perhaps?
I have mixed views about this post. The Research Evaluation Framework (REF) is replacing the Research Assessment Exercise or RAE, which was used to assess research in the U.K. in around 2010. For many (although not all) subjects, the evaluation criteria for REF will be based on citation analysis. I work in a Library and Information Science department and have colleagues who work in this area. You could not think of a way that is more likely to distort the research outputs than this – citation clubs being but one example (groups of academics agree to cite each other and only each other in their papers). Tassano’s argument does go over the top however – believe me academics *do not* always agree with each other. I know from my own area (information retrieval) that academic research has had an impact on commercial search services, where test collections are used to evaluate document ranking schemes on a very large scale (Google spends a lot of money on this type of activity). I do accept that some fields will be more adversely affected in the way Tassano suggests, particularly where ideology plays an important part.
“Tassano’s argument does go over the top however – believe me academics *do not* always agree with each other.”
Can’t see that I said they did. I simply suggested that it’s not in insiders’ interests to draw attention to the most serious shortcomings of their own system. And that therefore fundamental criticisms of academia or of an entire subject – rather than mere internal disagreements over detail – are rare.
Nor did I argue, as implied by Andy’s penultimate sentence, that academic research has had no usable benefits. I was talking about theory (in all subject areas), and the counterexample given by him sounds fairly applied to me.
It’s relatively easy to identify ideology in humanities subjects, because it’s usually supportive of left wing politics. But ‘ideology’ in a broader sense – preferred paradigms and frameworks, challenging which is discouraged – is likely to exist even in ‘hard’ subjects such as physics or biology, when they are run under what is effectively a closed-shop collectivist system.
If you think it is bad in the sciences, you should take a look at education (if you can stomach it).
Here we have an intellectual institution funded almost entirely by the very system, State-run compulsory Public Schooling and its supporters, that it studies. No wonder there are relatively few substantive critiques of the system itself.
(A system, by the way, that not only denies every US Citizen the right choose what to learn, but even denies every Citizens, by sole virtue of one’s age, the right to empty even empty one’s bladder without asking permission from a State authority.)
My experience is that the entire discussion is one in which every argument is ultimately referenced to itself. And any data that might cast doubt on a particular practice, statistical significance for instance, is simply ignored by the entire discipline.
But lots of papers are indeed published.
I’m normally a cynic, but this post tests my limits 🙂
The academic machine may contain inefficiency, fraud, pride, egos and more but I don’t think you can deny good original research comes out of. Some of it extremely practical, some of it revolutionary.
Of course nepotism and back-scratching occur – name a community where this doesn’t happen.
Better still, give some constructive suggestions to improve the system. (For example, double blind peer review)