Why professors are writing crap that nobody reads
newsin.asia
newsin.asia
Recall in history how often we rediscover certain great theory or study of one or some underpaid scholars hundreds of years later? I believe it is reasonable to agree that we need keep funding to support a population of scholars whose contribution cannot be readily and accurately assessed. On the other hand, we also cannot afford to support every one who merely claim to be a scholar. So the question is how to keep the balance.
Shall we assume having professors writing articles that no one reads, is one mechanism to keep that balance? Even though the mechanism itself is far from ideal, but until something better prove itself, it is a futile argument.
The real solution to the problem is that we should find ways to get more people to read what these professors are writing! (Which will also have the side effect of improving the quality of any portion of it that truly is crap.)
Having read quite a lot of research papers over the years from relatively 'hard' subjects, I can't honestly say it's helped me in any way. The ones in computer science tend at least to be mostly free of logic errors or misleading descriptions, but venturing into other fields is a reality check: way too many papers are terrible even in supposedly respected journals.
The article points out a frequent problem of terrible papers: they cite other papers that don't actually say what the cited claim is saying. "Of those articles that are cited, only 20 percent have actually been read." If so few people are even reading the papers, is it any wonder nobody reads cited papers to check the citation is valid? This happens even in fairly important scientific and medical papers, so I can't imagine how bad it gets in religious or gender studies.
Sometimes, like in the case of Spinoza, research was done in someone's spare time while they worked a non-time consuming job (lens grinding). In other cases lecturers, such as Adam Smith, published very little and instead focussed on teaching.
Quite right. Research usually are the privileges of noble men who don't necessarily need to work for life. But historical reference does not necessarily mean the best. It may be more desirable to have a mechanism so more talents can afford to do research.
The state will have to play the role in funding individual research, since private institutions may want to keep knowledge to themselves as a competitive advantage, or otherwise would be unwilling to fund research e.g. in the humanities.
Really, academia is just an entirely parallel economy to the real one, but it's a closed loop planned economy in which the ultimate end goal of making technology people like is subverted to artificial targets like quantity of papers published.
The primary end goal of academic research should be to understand and find answers to interesting questions, not to build applications. The applications are a good secondary goal, but not the only one. You may or may not want to support that first goal, but that shouldn't distort the goal of academic research into just a technology factory.
Of course that doesn't mean a lot of research isn't crap. But you also have to remember that research that is novel, broadly interesting and high quality is a lot harder to do than yet another application.
I also agree that the quantity of papers published shouldn't be a target. I think almost everybody agrees on that.
(FWIW, I'm not in academia.)
No references to source data. Hard pass.
It focuses mostly on the humanities; I think the simple answer is that tenure, promotion, publishing, and hiring have settled into a negative equilibrium, but no individual has the power to alter the equilibrium, even when an individual recognizes the problems.
The original article has a few hyper-links to some sources (with varying degrees of credibility).
This is a sad truth and the consequence of a total mistaken development. Professors are forced to be marketers, money collectors and managers. One must not forget that the peer reviewers are also professors, who try to improve or strengthen their position through this role. So both the authors and the reviewers lose time, which is then lost in research or student support.
Normally we write in the hope that many will read and appreciate our output. At school many write, in the hope that just one will.
Most academic journals publish the former, not the latter. Academics are typically publishing research they think will push their fields forward some day or illuminate something as of yet misunderstood. These papers typically require lots of subject area knowledge about the current cutting edge research and landscape of very specialized fields--thus partly explaining the low readership.
I think it'd be a mistake to try to jam everything, especially theories or results for which the jury is still out, into wikipedia. The average person is not typically scientifically literate and has difficulties distinguishing between claims that have substantial evidence and history backing them and more recent claims that are still being researched.
Also, what's up with this article? It's quite insubstantial and has little to no content, let alone careful analysis of the situation. It's quite evident to me that it's biased garbage with an agenda of tricking poorly educated people into thinking modern higher-education is a waste of time and money (spoiler alert--it isn't, and without it we wouldn't even have many of the practical commercial developments (usually not associated w/ academia) we see today).
Is that the dream or is it the reality?
I think I've heard plenty of anecdotes to the contrary (or is it simply the self-derogatory way scholars talk amongst themselves)
Most research directions ... are useless, don't pan out, don't have the tools to actually achieve anything yet, won't ever get finance for necessary tooling, ... and fail. Useless is the least bad of these. Nevertheless, papers on these are important for a lot of reasons. And one in hundred research directions succeeds. And then there's tons of "refinement" papers.
First reason: you won't know which is which until you try. Second: researchers learn a lot even when exploring things that won't work (in fact this is often done as exercise). Third: these allow institutions, infrastructure, ... to exist, to be ready when there is something that does pan out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
If only a few of them that are important enough to help push humanity forward, then that is good enough.
However, I'm not sure I agree with the followup claim of this article: "One unfortunate effect of this specialization is that the subject matter of most articles make them inaccessible to the public, and even to the overwhelming majority of professors. ... increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves."
The evidence given that the work of professors is inaccessible to the public and also to other professors is the fact that one journal has published articles with the following three titles: "Dona Benta’s Rosary: Managing Ambiguity in a Brazilian Women’s Prayer Group", "Death and Demonization of a Bodhisattva: Guanyin’s Reformulation within Chinese Religion", and "Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women’s Disability in Rabbinic Marriage Law". The author thinks that it's obvious that nobody cares about these articles and that they're crap.
Here are the articles and parts of their abstracts:
- https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/84/3/776/1751... "This article describes the rituals and beliefs of an upper-class Catholic women's prayer group in a small city in southeast Brazil. My interest centers on why there is so little friction within the group when it would seem to have several potentially significant internal and external tensions. There are stark doctrinal differences between members: some have very liberal and even syncretic beliefs while others express very conservative, exclusive Catholic beliefs. At the same time, the group—despite certain unorthodox beliefs and practices—maintains close relations with representatives of the local Catholic Church and prays jointly on occasion with an evangelical group...."
- http://www.academia.edu/download/52637206/Meulenbeld_Death_a... "The Chinese goddess known as Guanyin may commonly be referred to with the Buddhist epithet of 'bodhisattva,' yet her many hagiographies contain only the most stereotypical references to anything that could be defined unambiguously as 'Buddhist.' Instead, the narrative of Guanyin that gains greatest popularity between the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries is one that describes the bodhisattva's last incarnation, as the unmarried Princess Miaoshan, within the parameters of indigenous Chinese religion—or, rather, its demonology. I argue that all of the many versions of Miaoshan's legend represent her deification into Guanyin as a process necessary for solving her spirit's demonical status that has arisen from the recurring violence done to her body by herself and her father...."
- https://www.academia.edu/download/39308303/2015_Brides_and_B... "... While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men's capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women's disability in primarily visual terms. ..."
All seem pretty interesting to me, and all seem very personally relevant to vast swaths of the general public - Catholics and more generally Christians who worship alongside people of varying levels of orthodoxy, Chinese Buddhists, and Jewish people who care about rabbinic marriage law, respectively. All seem like pretty easily accessible topics to anyone in the general public with an interest in religion.
I wonder to what extent the problem is that none of these three are interesting to the author, a former senior fellow at a Koch-affiliated think tank who received his doctorate in systematic theology at a Catholic university. Perhaps, to him, discussions about productive communities inviting syncretic variants of Catholicism are not worth being covered in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, let alone discussions of Buddhism or Judaism, let alone anything with the word "queering".
While all three might be considered niche by the author, at the very least they serve as historical records that untold future generations may use to better understand their past.
Meanwhile, the author has multiple peer-reviewed publications about John Henry Newman and fasting. Speaking as someone who worships at Anglican churches, has a copy of Apologia pro Vita Sua, and makes something of an attempt to follow Anglican traditions around fasting (the ones that would have been familiar to Newman), I can assure you (with some sadness) that there are nowhere near a hundred million people today who care about Anglican fasting practices in general, and that the tradition is almost certainly about to die out. (Perhaps it's unfair of me to pick on the author - but I think it's also unfair for the author to have picked on other academics in his field, when he could have said, "After spending years writing about Newman's fasting practices, I realized I'd have more impact on society by joining libertarian think tanks, and that's a problem for academia," and it would have been a much more convincing argument.)
Politics in academia is especially vicious.
"The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low"