The Ax Is Laid to the Root of the Tree. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, December 19, 2011.
The Great Brain Robbery. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, January 26, 2012.
Cuts to Political Science Research Blamed on Politicians. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, August 5, 2013.
The Research Bust. By Mark Bauerlein. The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2011.
The Humanities and Common Sense. By Roger Berkowitz. NJBR, February 20, 2013.
Mead (The Ax):
From
the Chronicle of Higher Education
comes a story that should make every mediocre academic in this country shudder in fear. Mark Bauerlein has looked under
the hood of the “research” that professors in English literature conduct and he
has documented what many of us know but few want to think about: nobody reads
much of this stuff.
Nobody. Not even the other scholars in the field.
Much,
perhaps most, of the research that American university professors do could be
dumped into the ocean rather than published — and nobody, not even the other
professors, would notice. Looking at two
universities and what happened to the articles their literature professors
published in peer-reviewed journals, Bauerlein reports:
Of 13
research articles published by current SUNY-Buffalo professors in 2004, 11 of
them received zero to two citations, one had five, one 12. Of 23 articles by
Georgia professors in 2004, 16 received zero to two citations, four of them
three to six, one eight, one 11, and one 16.
Measuring
the impact of research by counting citations to some degree tends to overstate
the actual value of the research.
Scholars writing articles for peer-reviewed journals are expected to
show a thorough command of the research in the field; many articles are cited
less because they provide valuable help to a scholar writing something new than
because literature reviews complete with multiple citations are part of the
game. Many, and sometimes most of the
cited articles are more listed than used.
If no one even cites an article in literature reviews, then the tree has
truly fallen in a forest where nobody heard.
Bauerlein
responds to some possible objections to his depressing findings:
Research
makes professors better teachers and colleagues.
Agreed, but not at the current pace. We want teachers to be engaged in inquiry,
but we don’t need them to publish a book and six articles before we give them
tenure. We shouldn’t set a publication schedule that turns them into nervous,
isolated beings who end up regarding an inquisitive student in office hours as
an infringement. Let’s allow 10 years for a book, and let’s tenure people for
three strong essays. The rush to print makes them worse teachers and
colleagues.
So some
works get overlooked—so what? We need lots of research activity to produce
those few works of significance. Agreed, but how much, and at
what cost? If a professor who makes $75,000 a year spends five years on a book
on Charles Dickens (which sold 43 copies to individuals and 250 copies to
libraries, the library copies averaging only two checkouts in the six years
after its publication), the university paid $125,000 for its production. Certainly
that money could have gone toward a more effective appreciation of that
professor’s expertise and talent. We can no longer pretend, too, that studies
of Emily Dickinson are as needed today, after three decades have produced 2,007
items on the poet, as they were in 1965, when the previous three decades had
produced only 233.
The
real problem, and if the state and federal fiscal crunches go on for much
longer it will be upon us very soon, is that our society is less and less
willing and able to pay for research that nobody really wants or needs.
Our
universities today look a lot like the monasteries in the time of Henry VIII:
vulnerable targets for a hungry state.
State legislators are going to be wrestling with questions like whether
to cut the pensions of retired state workers, cut services for voters, or raise
taxes. In this atmosphere, the research
university model (in the humanities and, economics and management excepted, the
social sciences) may not long survive, at least in the public sector. (Highly endowed private universities may keep
the old model alive.)
Bauerlein,
who for all the radical implications of his work remains a fairly conservative
reformer looking to prune the hedge rather than burn the building,
underestimates the costs of “research”.
If college teachers were paid to teach rather than research, they would
also need to be trained less expensively.
We would need (and probably do need) many fewer Ph.D programs and
degrees than we now have.
Imagine
the (not unlikely) scenario in which more and more state universities shift to
a two and two model: almost all undergraduates spend two years in low cost
community colleges and then the best of them go on to two more years at a
university. It is hard to see why the
humanities departments in the community colleges would need to be staffed with
holders of Ph.D degrees — in part because it is overwhelmingly clear that most
students need basic skills in community colleges rather than advanced
courses. There might be a small “honors
college” with something like the traditional structure of a 20th century university
faculty, but demand for Ph.D’s would drop precipitously and the majority,
possibly a very large majority of existing doctoral programs would close their
doors. That would further diminish the
demand for Ph.D’s, and would lead to another round of cutbacks in doctoral
programs. In the end we might have a
small number of excellent programs, producing a relatively small number of top
scholars capable of doing important work — as opposed to large number of mediocre
scholars most of whom don’t produce anything that even their fellow specialists
and academic colleagues value.
This
would be a distressing thing for a number of people, but would our society
really suffer from the closure of dozens of mediocre programs turning out
intellectual drones who publish research that nobody, even the other drones,
really wants to follow?
Via Meadia thinks
that the republic might survive even this.
Bauerlein
is a cautious thinker; his research cuts the ground out from under the existing
US university model but he does his best to limit the damage. He is thinking about tweaks and incremental
reforms — though the confederacy of dunces that makes up the majority of every
academic field in the country will do its best to do him in even so.
From
the Via Meadia point of view, the
problem lies precisely in the statement that Bauerlein accepts: “Research makes
professors better teachers and colleagues”.
Wrong. What makes better teachers
and colleagues is a love of the beauty and truth found in a particular
discipline, and a deep personal commitment to follow that love and share it
with others. A professor who inspires
her students with a lifelong love of Shakespeare is infinitely preferable to
the industrious drone who publishes two unread and unreadable journal articles
a year, an equally pointless book every four years, and bores students to
tears. The first is an asset of the
first order; the second is a danger to literature and makes America stupider
and less cultured every year he grubs on.
In the
humanities and most of the social “sciences”, the Ph.D and peer review machine
as it now exists is a vastly expensive mediocrity factory. It makes education both more expensive and
less effective than it needs to be.
There are islands and even archipelagos of excellence in the sea of
sludge but we needn’t subsidize the sea to preserve them.
We need
college faculty who inspire as they teach: who infect their students with the
love of knowledge and give them the skills to pursue that love on their own
once they leave school. Our Shakespeare
teachers shouldn’t worry about making sure their students know the latest hot
craze in Shakespeare studies — but they should make sure that as many of their
students as possible become lifelong fans of the Swan of Avon. A deep grounding in the twists and turns of
contemporary literary theory may support that vocation — but it often does not,
and the resources of a college ought to go towards the promotion of the core
mission (leading students to fall in love with the life of the mind while
giving them a set of skills that enable them not only to pursue that love but
to function effectively in the adult world) not to subsidize academic hackery.
Worse,
our current system encourages students to think that if you really love a
subject, you should become a hack: a “serious” student of literature in our
perverted world is someone who scribbles unreadable and unread treatises about
minutiae rather than someone who takes that love into the public arena and encourages
new generations to love, revere and, who knows, expand the literary heritage
with which we are blessed.
Teachers
must be evangelists for knowledge. We
have a society that produces an ever growing torrent of unread “research” while
fewer and fewer people know or care anything about the cultural heritage that
the “research” ostensibly aims to examine.
This is idiocy and it is madness, and the expense can no longer be
borne. It will change.
There
is one ray of light in the Bauerlein study.
We can applaud the common good sense of a nation that would still rather
read Emily Dickinson than squint over peer reviewed articles about her. However few people read her today, even fewer
read the tedious pablum the hacks write about her. (I emphasize again that it isn’t all hackery; literary scholarship at its
best matters. It is the mediocrity and
worse in the field that needs no encouragement.)
It is a
good sign, not a bad one, that most of this research goes unread. As long as
most Americans continue resolutely to ignore this tripe, hope remains.
Mead (Cuts):
Well,
yes, it is due to “politics” in a sense. But political scientists should know
better: university faculties ultimately depend on taxpayers and their
representatives for many of the resources they need for their work. This fact
of life is truer than ever when health care and other costs are forcing
discretionary spending down. Funding for political science is just another
budget line item that needs to be justified. Writing obscure articles for
peer-reviewed journals that nobody, not even other people in your discipline,
will read is not the best way to do that.
And
here’s another thought: making departments in social sciences and other
disciplines more welcoming to political conservatives and—horrors!—seriously
religious people may help build that bipartisan support without which federal
funds will be increasingly hard to get.
