If you understand this, it means that I am not an academic?

Over the winter break, when talking with the family in the old country, to hear them remark that it has been thirty years since I left for the US was, well, quite something.  Thirty years!

I continued to think about that--after all, reflecting on my life experiences is what I seem to do most of the time! ;)  Que sais-je?

One of the actions that resulted was an email to a graduate school professor of mine.  In that lengthy email, I thanked him for one thing in particular:

I want to thank you again for one particular aspect of my intellectual and professional life: There is a good chance you do not remember a conversation that I had with you during my grad school days, when I said I wanted to directly contribute to the public, instead of the traditional research.  You encouraged me in that, but also cautioned me that academia does not value public engagement.  You went one step more and said that society needs active engagement from academics.

Over the years, I have witnessed higher education call for public engagement. Over and over again.  Like even in a recent tweet from the incoming president of the American Association of Geographers:

.@AmericanGeo @CanGeographers @theAAG @NCGE1915 Imp for geographers to be good storytellers who resonate, esp in uncertain times @JoshGeog https://t.co/iQPOOS2A6Z

— Derek Alderman (@MLKStreet) January 21, 2017

But, higher education does not walk the talk.  Storytellers who engage with the public are not considered real academics.  Unless one publishes in journals that nobody reads, one is not really an academic.

The situation is worse in science.  Carl Sagan, despite all his formal and rigorous publications and research was not considered to be a top-rated scientist by his peers because he dared to be a phenomenal storyteller.  I don't ever understand why this is the case.

But, of course, with regularity, we find calls for more public engagement.  Like this one, in which the author wants scientists to be more than mere storytellers--he wants them to be more involved in the political process:

The dearth of lawmakers who bring a scientific perspective to national issues of energy, climate change, national security, and technology deeply concern me as a scientist and as an American. As scientists we are trained to embrace uncertainty, use the tools of data, hard evidence, and analysis to solve problems. For scientists, there are no facile answers; rather, there are complex questions that require disciplined, dispassionate and systematic thought —our aim to arrive at solutions that serve truth above expediency. I realize the importance of bringing the scientific perspective to bear on today’s urgent and complex environmental and technological issues because of my background and training.

The world of higher education would not care about these.  And then they continue to wonder why the public does not understand the importance of education and ideas!

If you have not been peer-reviewed, screw you :)

There isn't a single route to intellectual inquiry, particularly when it comes to social issues and social policies.  But, academics have managed to develop a format that is increasingly used only to devalue the intellectual merits of discussions that do not conform to their preferred method.  And what is that one route to revelation according to the pointy-heads?

Why, "peer review," of course!

As I have noted, even in this blog, while the pubic might be led to believe that "peer review" ensures that earth-shattering research is carefully evaluated by peers, and accepted by them, the reality is far from that.  In addition to all those earlier points, consider what Brendan O'Neill writes:

Being peer-reviewed no longer simply means that you wrote an academic report that was considered by other academics to be serious enough for publication – it means you possess the truth, Pure Knowledge, elevated insights that are not available to mere mortals who have not been PR’d. So in the debate about climate change in particular, those whose work has been peer-reviewed are now held up as oracles of wisdom in contrast to their critics, who are increasingly written off and sent to the intellectual equivalent of Connaught with three simple words: ‘Not peer reviewed.’ To be peer-reviewed is to have the right to speak publicly on important matters – to be non-peer-reviewed makes you immediately untrustworthy, a bit of an intellectual charlatan, possibly even suspect in your motives.
There is a censorious dynamic at play here, as a divide is erected between those who are PR’d and those who are not, between those who we should listen to and engage with and those we should look down our noses at - in effect between those who say mainstream, acceptable things and those who spout off-the-wall, experimental stuff. It is ironic that Pickett and Wilkinson, so very keen on the idea of equality, don’t like the idea of an equal right to speak and critique. In this area of life, their attitude is: ‘If you’ve been peer-reviewed, let’s talk. If not? Screw you.’

Of all the "peer-reviewed" colleagues of mine, I doubt whether even ten percent of them will be able to have a meaningful conversation on their subject matters with the world of intellectuals outside that "peer review" circle.  One of the wonderful aspects of the internet is how much it has liberated intellectual conversations from the narrow confines of the incestuous ivory towers.

It might come as a surprise to many of the cloistered academics that there are plenty of intellectuals in the world outside the classrooms and labs.  And most of them couldn't care less about academics and peer-review.  Megan McArdle, who has no shortage of credentials, noted that:

This is not to say that the peer review system is worthless.  But it's limited.  Peer review doesn't prove that a paper is right; it doesn't even prove that the paper is any good (and it may serve as a gatekeeper that shuts out good, correct papers that don't sit well with the field's current establishment for one reason or another).  All it proves is that the paper has passed the most basic hurdles required to get published--that it be potentially interesting, and not obviously false.

Yep, that is all there is to peer-review.  In most cases, particularly when one moves away from the first tier journals with high impact factors, a peer-reviewed publication is nothing more than work done by a hardworking student who faithfully does all the required work, and on time.  The authors of such work are, unlike what they think of themselves, no "oracles of wisdom" as O'Neill puts it.

Let me quote Frank Furedi from a previous blog-post:

Increasingly, peer review has been turned into a quasi-holy institution, which apparently signifies that a certain claim is legitimate or sacred. And from this perspective, voices which lack the authority of peer review are, by definition, illegitimate. Peer review provides a warrant to be heard – those who speak without this warrant deserve only our scorn.

Turning peer review into modern-day holy scripture

Controversies over "peer review" in research is not anything new.  My favorite story is the one about Alan Sokal, the physicist, getting an essay "Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity" published in Social Text.  Talk about the filtering work of peer-review!

Recently, the "hard sciences" have been forced to defend peer-review thanks to various controversies.  In writing about peer-review at Spiked, Frank Furedi notes:

Increasingly, peer review is cited as kind of unquestioned and unquestionable authority for settling what are in fact political disputes. Consequently, the findings of peer review are looked upon, not simply as statements about the quality of research or of a scientific finding, but as the foundation for far-reaching policies that affect everything from the global economy to our individual lifestyles.

Increasingly, peer review has been turned into a quasi-holy institution, which apparently signifies that a certain claim is legitimate or sacred. And from this perspective, voices which lack the authority of peer review are, by definition, illegitimate. Peer review provides a warrant to be heard – those who speak without this warrant deserve only our scorn.

You can almost visualise peer-review dogmatists waving their warrant and demanding that their opponents be silenced. For someone like George Monbiot, the British climate-change alarmist, peer review is the equivalent of a holy scripture. Boasting of his encounter with an opponent, who challenged him to a debate on speed cameras, Monbiot wrote: ‘I accepted and floored him with a simple question.’ Predictably, the question was: ‘Has he published his analysis in a peer-reviewed journal?’

In a world where opponents can be ‘floored’ simply because they lack the authority provided by the ritual of peer review, it is not surprising that there is considerable incentive to manipulate the system of peer review, to bend it to one’s own will and needs. 

Yep.  It is all mashed potatoes if they are not peer-reviewed :)