Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research

A couple of months ago, the dean of the college, where I teach reviewed my work over the past few years and declared that it essentially amounted to me being on the "mashed potato circuit" ... I asked him whether writing in a third- or fourth-rate journal that nobody ever reads was really worth it.  His response was even more classic--that "bean counting" was his responsibility.  (Yes, the phrases in quotes are the dean's very words!)

As I wrote in an essay in the Chronicle Review, almost ten years ago, 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 am hoping that the financial urgency will force higher education to review its bizarre facade of scholarship, before the public figures it out as much as Uncle Vanya figured it out ...

In this essay in the recent 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 ....

In another essay, elsewhere at InsideHigherEd, Arthur Levine notes 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.

Ahem, 20 years ago, the late Ernest Boyer wrote about this issue of the need to (re)establish the priorities of the professoriate!

There’s quite a story in the non-story at the spelling bee

(For The Register-Guard, Appeared in print: Tuesday, Jun 8, 2010)

It is almost a non-story anymore when an Indian- American kid wins the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

Last Friday, for the third year in a row and the eighth time in the past 12 years, an Indian-American student won it all. This year’s champion, Anamika Veeramani, won after out-dueling another Indian-American, Shantanu Srivatsa.

The linkage between the spelling bee and Indian- Americans started back in 1985 when Balu Natarajan won the event. That “kid” is now Dr. Natarajan, a physician with a specialty in sports medicine, who notes on his Web site that “winning the ‘bee’ was definitely an important experience,” and adds that he is more proud of being a good doctor and the work he does with his patients.

Given Natarajan’s profession, and the career choices of quite of a few other past winners, it is not a surprise that this year’s champion also plans to go into medicine. Anamika wants to be a cardiovascular surgeon.

It is far more intriguing that these champion spellers do not seem to be keen on careers in English literature. It is not that these contestants lack an interest in literature, either — one, who is not even a teenager yet, lists “Gone With the Wind” as a favorite book.

Despite the rather jaded reaction to yet another Indian- American winning the bee, the champion’s first and last names caught my attention. There was a fantastic message in her first name being Anamika, a Sanskrit name that literally translates to “without a name.” Like “anonymous.”

One might wonder then why parents would name a child “anonymous.” Well, it’s because there is a much more profound and philosophical meaning behind that name. “Anamika” means that there are not enough words to describe the value, beauty and importance — the equivalent in English is when we say something like “there are no words to describe it.”

Thus, it is quite a linguistic irony that the Spelling Bee recognizes kids who are talented with words, while this year’s winner has a name that means there aren’t enough words to describe her preciousness!

The champion’s last name, Veeramani, suggested an origin in Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India. Tamil Nadu, or the “land of the Tamils,” is where most of India’s Tamil-speaking population is concentrated. A significant minority of neighboring Sri Lanka’s population is also Tamil.

Having been raised a Tamil, with immediate and extended families still living in Tamil Nadu, I naturally was curious about Anamika’s parents. I even checked with my father to find out whether we might know them, and was a tad disappointed at being unable to bridge the degrees of separation. But that’s understandable, given that there are an estimated 75 million Tamils worldwide.

Anamika’s parents’ names turn out to be equally cinematic of sorts. The father’s name is Alagaiya and the mother is Malar. In the Tamil language, “malar,” as a noun, means a flower. The same word also can be used as a verb to mean “to bloom.” The father’s name is derived from a Tamil word for beauty — “Alagu.”

Typically it is only in fictional worlds that someone named “flower” would marry one named “beauty” and then together they would have a child named “anonymous,” who would go on to win a championship that is all about words. Real life, yet again, is more exciting and dramatic than fiction.

The Indian-American dimension of the spelling bee is as much a story of immigration to the United States as it is a reflection of a common heritage of having been British colonies, which is the reason English is the lingua franca. America and India were once a part of the British Empire, where the sun never set.

One particular connection is quite poignant. Lord Cornwallis, who was the governor-general of British India from 1786 to 1793, previously had served the crown as an army officer during the American War of Independence. It is strange that after surrendering to George Washington and returning to England with Benedict Arnold, Cornwallis was rewarded with a powerful and influential posting in India.

To paraphrase Paul Harvey, now you know “the rest of the story” behind the non-story of yet another Indian-American winning the spelling bee.

Score this for the mashed potatoes :)