Links
Archives
Sunday, January 23, 2005
|
TIMOTHY BURKE TAKES A STRONG STAND
ON SCHOLARLY OVERPRODUCTION "The drive to scholarly overproduction which now reaches even the least selective institutions and touches every corner and niche of academia is a key underlying source of the degradation of the entire scholarly enterprise. It produces repetition. It encourages obscurantism. It generates knowledge that has no declared purpose or passion behind it, not even the purpose of anti-purpose, of knowledge undertaken for knowledge’s sake. It fills the academic day with a tremendous excess of peer review and distractions. It makes it increasingly hard to know anything, because to increase one’s knowledge requires every more demanding heuristics for ignoring the tremendous outflow of material from the academy. It forces overspecialization as a strategy for controlling the domains to which one is responsible as a scholar and teacher. You can’t blame anyone in particular for this. Everyone is doing the simple thing, the required thing, when they publish the same chapter from an upcoming manuscript in six different journals, when they go out on the conference circuit, when they churn out iterations of the same project in five different manuscripts over ten years. None of that takes conscious effort: it’s just being swept along by an irresistible tide. It’s the result of a rigged market: it’s as if some gigantic institutional machinery has placed an order for scholarship by the truckload regardless of whether it’s wanted or needed. It’s like the world’s worst Five-Year Plan ever: a mountain of gaskets without any machines to place them in. You could try to contest this if you wanted to measure academic productivity by looking to the importance or significance of particular scholarly work. But even that inevitably will lead to some ghastly results, whether you use a citation index or Google Scholar. So my simple suggestion is this: stop. Administrations and faculties need to stop caring how much someone writes or publishes or says, or even how important what they’ve published is according to some measurable or quantifiable metric. Not only because trying to measure productivity in terms of scholarship destroys scholarship, but because it detracts from the truly important kind of productivity in an academic institution. What really matters is this: how different are your students when they graduate from what they would have been had they not attended your institution, and how clearly can you attribute that difference to the things that you actively do in your classrooms and your institution as a whole? What, in short, did you teach them that they would not have otherwise known? How did you change them as people in a way that has some positive connection to their later lives? That can be about income. It can be about happiness or satisfaction. It can be about civic or political contribution to their communities. It can be about competence. It can be about imagination. Not all these things can be quantified, but all of them can or ought to be made as concrete as possible. Many colleges and universities, public and private, have gotten lazy about this essential task. They’ve relied on evidence of the income gap, and on hazy assumptions about the interior impact of a college education on character, personality, and ability. We fall back on profiles of our accomplished alumni and so implicitly claim credit for their being what they now are—but our collective ability to account clearly for such particular results in terms of particular things we do is often far weaker than we let on. Truthfully, alumni for most colleges and universities do that job for their alma mater better than the alma mater can do for itself. I can tell you what difference I think going to Wesleyan made for me, but if I were going to be skeptical about my own recollections, I might wonder if I would be attributing to a coherent institutional design the accident of my encounter with particular individual professors and a certain amount of auto-didactic effort which was made easier by the ambiance of the general environment and associated resources. Hanging around with a bunch of smart peers and smart teachers in a materially bountiful environment might help most people to form and sharpen their intellects and skills, but I’m not entirely sure that most colleges and universities are entitled to strongly claim that the good results of that process systematically derive from the careful design of their four-year programs. Reading Walter Kirn’s “Lost in the Meritocracy” in this month’s Atlantic Monthly [for UD's take on this article, see UD, January 21, below], describing how in his years at Princeton he and his friends shammed their way through classes and began to have the terrible suspicion that the professors and administrators were shamming right along with them, my doubts redoubled. It’s the only productivity that matters, however we try to measure or account for it. What do we do by design that we can reasonably say produces a positive, identifiable difference in the lives of our students and our wider community? Scholarship enters that question somewhere, but hardly at all in the ghastly spew of excess publication that contemporary academia demands." |