Excellence R Us: University Research and the Fetishisation of Excellence
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> 1. In keeping with our argument, and following in an extensive tradition of subverting traditional scarce markers of prestige, the authors have adopted a redistributive approach to the order of their names in the byline. As an international collaboration of uniformly nice people (cf. Moran, Hoover, and Bestiale 2016; Hoover, Posch, and Bestiale 1987; Hoover et al. 1988; see Tartamelia 2014 for an explanation), lacking access to a croquet field (cf. Hassell and May 1974), and not identifying any excellent pun to be made from ordering our names (cf. Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow 1948; Lord, de Vader, and Alliger 1986), we elected to assign index numbers based on alphabetical ordering by surname and to randomise these using an online tool. For the avoidance of doubt, while several of the authors have pets none of them are included as authors (cf. Matzinger and Mirkwood 1978). None of us are approaching a tenure decision (cf. Roderick and Gillespie 1998). And none of us are fictional entities who generate their papers algorithmically using SciGen (see Labbé 2010 for the contrasting case of Ike Antkare nevertheless greatly outranked all of the authors on several formal measures of excellence before he [it?] was outed).
People ask me if I learned anything in grad school.
If you're the boss of any enterprise, and you want to make things good ('excellent') the first time, you only have your instincts and experience to go on.
So, it's a different subject altogether.
This actually gets at what the paper describes as the problem with defining what "excellence" means. (I read about half the paper.) Everyone defines it differently, so excellence basically just means that it's judged well by whoever is doing the judging.
There's no solving it. And yet we all know that differences in quality are real. This is not an argument I want to engage in.
My question was, did the GP learn anything from being told 'not good enough, do it again'? They imply not, but I bet they did.
I've learned lots of things that way. Grant proposals, job applications, asking someone out on a date: lots of things you try out and don't get feedback beyond 'nope'.
The really frustrating thing is when your lab is doing something that another lab is doing better because you're trying to get into what looks like a really interesting and useful area. Then you have to justify why you're the worst in the world at Y but still deserve funding vs a lab that's #1 in the world at X.
...which more often than not leads to copious amounts of bullshit.
One of the tenets we are taught as a Blue Angel is the ability to admit when we've made a mistake, or have not "achieved perfection." This is done in the form of "Safeties." Each debrief is started by an around the room tally of "safeties", starting with the Boss and working down to the supply officer in order. For example when it was my turn I might say "I'll take a safety for late hits on the Low Break Cross and Fortus and an additional safety for an early hit on the Delta Roll. I'll also pay $5 for not shaving before I went downstairs for a coffee and I'll pay $5 for a zipper. I'll fix it tomorrow, Glad to Be Here." This is essentially telling the Team that I made mistakes on 3 maneuvers and also recognize I violated policy by being in public unshaven and for having a zipper on my flight suit unzipped. Since the latter two are policy violations, they cost me $5. The essence of my mistakes is not important, that will come out during the meat of the tape review during the debrief, but the fact that I recognized them and owned up to them IS important.
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/confessions-of-a-us-navy-bl...
In this paper, "excellence" is specifically defined as a "Boundary Object."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_object, "In sociology, a boundary object is information, such as specimens, field notes, and maps, used in different ways by different communities. Boundary objects are plastic, interpreted differently across communities but with enough immutable content to maintain integrity."
Someone asked what we were putting first before, and what we should be putting second in future.
While I don't disagree, the paper falls flat to me because:
1) Journals are usually judging by first "interest to the broader academic community" and then "technical accuracy" not "excellence".
2) There wasn't any new data presented. Citations to prior work, but even then it was just an argument of statements not fact.
That's one person's opinion: one that I happen to agree with. Yet the faux- objectivity in the style and language of this paper ironically apes usage of the term; exactly in the manner they purport to condemn.
You did not come close to proving that "excellence" is pernicious. So don't write like this is science. It is just (in my opinion) a sound and interesting opinion
In human words, much of academia now talks about "excellence" to mean "extremely horribly steep competition for jobs", which amounts to pretending that the Best of the Best of the Best individual academic laborers can and should produce the Best of the Best of the Best research results out of some shining individual genius rather than because they had a good way to check whether theories are right or wrong before they published and their reviewers could also check and other researchers could also replicate the results.
In even more human words, "excellence" has become the academic equivalent of "success". It denotes that society's reward mechanisms have rewarded you a lot, without specifying anything at all that you actually needed to do to deserve all that rewarding.
Sure, but the point is that almost all science consists of plowing fields, not racing. If you only hire racehorses, you're leaving the fields unplanted by the workhorses.
Aaaaand agricultural metaphors get inaccurate very quickly, but oh well.
stupid, boring, useful idealizations of reality.
Let's not forget the one feature that makes it powerful and molded our current society.
The article is in "academic-ese" and that's deliberate, if understandably irritating to a more general audience. We're targeting a specific audience, and we'll have a shorter and snappier version as well for the final version. As people here know well, the pitch has to be shaped to fit the audience and here we trying to change (a specific kind of) researchers' minds.