The Conceptual Penis in Breastaurants

So, yet another gotcha! moment in the academic world of "research."

In case you missed it, because you were preoccupied with the teetotaler pussygrabber defending a beer-drinker by claiming that Jews were ruining the country, well, you are correct in ignoring the latest tempest in the academic teapot.

But, we shall address that here.

Yawn!

To me, this is merely yet another dog bites man story.

Note that in the opening sentence I wrote "yet another" ... because the one that really should have alerted academia was the original--by Alan Sokal.  That was more than two decades ago.

However, academe couldn't be bothered.

Academe didn't change because of the entrenched publish-or-perish culture.  Publishing intellectual masturbation as "scholarship" is a requirement for promotion.  These days, it is a requirement to even get the first job in higher education--in contrast to the old days when intellectual masturbation began after getting hired!

Does it bother you that I repeatedly refer to intellectual masturbation?  It should.  I am being intentional here.  As I wrote in an essay in the Chronicle Review, 17 years ago, almost to the very date, most of the academic "research" is pretentious work that will not sell even for penny, or for a kopek according to Anton Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" that I quoted in that essay.

I had always hoped that the financial urgency will force higher education to review its bizarre facade of scholarship, before the public figured it out as much as Uncle Vanya figured it out.  But, academic "scholars" could not be bothered with all that.  The intellectual masturbation continues with cries of orgasmic pleasures within the walls of the ivory towers!

In this essay in The Chronicle Review, the authors note:

We need policy makers and grant makers to focus not on money for current levels of publication, but rather on finding ways to increase high-quality work and curtail publication of low-quality work. If only some forward-looking university administrators initiated changes in hiring and promotion criteria and ordered their libraries to stop paying for low-cited journals, they would perform a national service. We need to get rid of administrators who reward faculty members on printed pages and downloads alone, deans and provosts "who can't read but can count," as the saying goes. Most of all, we need to understand that there is such a thing as overpublication, and that pushing thousands of researchers to issue mediocre, forgettable arguments and findings is a terrible misuse of human, as well as fiscal, capital.

The authors list a few suggestions for reform.  What is their bottom line?

Best of all, our suggested changes would allow academe to revert to its proper focus on quality research and rededicate itself to the sober pursuit of knowledge. And it would end the dispiriting paper chase that turns fledgling inquirers into careerists and established figures into overburdened grouches.

Here is the ultimate kicker: the authors are, implicitly, referring to the research universities.  If this is their set of observations on the happenings at research universities, then one can easily imagine the state of "research" at the vast number of universities that are not research universities but teaching universities, like the one where I teach.

In another essay, Arthur Levine noted that rapidly widening gap between "Digital students, Industrial-era universities" :

[It] is important to ask how much colleges and universities need to change. In 1828, facing industrialization and a Connecticut legislature that disapproved of Yale’s classical curriculum, the Yale faculty responded with a report which asked, in part, whether the college needed to change a lot or a little. This, Yale’s faculty said, was the wrong question. The question to be asked, they argued, was: What is the purpose of a college? This remains the right question today.

What is the purpose of college, and what is the role of "research" that faculty do?