Pridie Kalendas Martias, Anno Domini MMXXIII
Rescripta: Ante diem quintum Nonas Martias, Anno Domini MMXXIII
I rant about how an obsession with counting scientific papers made academia go from a nurturing mother to a negligent one. Still, due to the tireless efforts of the many altruist academics, who care for their students, academia remains a nurturing mother for her children. Consider taking the time to thank the nurturing academics in your life.
Academia nata est in Platus hortus. Just kidding I’m not gonna write the whole post in my horrible Latin… Just the headings. As I was saying… The term academia stems from the garden where Plato taught his students. Tracing the entire history of academia is far beyond my abilities, but in Europe, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest universities were founded by Kings and recognized by the Pope. I’m not saying the gardens of ancient Greece or the Medieval universities were perfect, but I think it is fair to say that they weren’t obsessing over outputs. Catering mostly to high-status individuals, and having the patronage of Kings, probably didn’t place the universities in a position where they had to obsess over their position in international rankings. Still, one could say that in some corners of the world, particularly in the United States, universities still cater to wealthy students (or their families), and continue to have patrons with deep pockets. In other corners, as in European countries, such as Portugal, many universities are publicly funded. I guess that’s not that different from being funded by the Crown (not the TV show). Even in the United States, universities still get a lot of funding from public grants. Obviously, there has been tremendous social change from ancient Greece, and the Middle Ages, to today. Apart from the Taliban and other extremists, nobody seems to be saying women should not bee allowed to attend higher-education. Still, that isn’t the social change we’ll focus on today. Let us look at how states started to rank and fund universities, and consequently how universities select and pay their academics.
In evaluating its members, academia is obsessed with outputs. That is the real problem that seems to cause all other problems in academia (or in my horrible Latin problematum problematorum). Those outputs are mostly defined as scientific papers. Books, patents, oral presentations, also count, but they count much less than scientific papers. The quality of a scientific paper is then graded by the impact factor of the journal that publishes it, and by the number of times the paper is cited in, guess what, other scientific papers. Likewise, a journal’s impact factor is also a function of how many highly cited papers it publishes (amongst other factors). Academia is thus turned into a printing press that measures its sales by the number of times its prints are cited in other prints. Truth be told, the citations of a paper should correlate with the number of times it was read, but much of this is probably amplified by the fact that platforms like Google Scholar will sort by citation count (amongst other factors). Importantly, the number of times the paper is read by people outside the ivory tower, or by those (far too few) in the ivory tower that disseminate science, is not really a factor. This is nothing new to academics, nor even to many in the general public.
We could discuss the relatively recent history of academia’s obsession with outputs, or highlight initiatives that aim to change that. However, there are others more qualified to that, and that’s not the point of this post. We could also debate in length the so called replication crisis, but we’ll also have to postpone that discussion for another day. Instead, I’ll focus on an (arguably) often neglected symptom effect of the problematum problematorum (aka., the real problem)—the quality of academia’s teaching.
The university one graduated from is referred to as alma mater. Alma mater translates to nurturing mother. However, I’m afraid that the obsession with publishing scientific papers has shifted the focus from what students can learn in a university, to how fast and how much can their professors write. Academia could be a place where students have a chance to expand their world-view, to learn about big ideas, to learn foundational skills. It can/should also be a place where students learn the necessary skills to enter the job market. Regardless, today, academia seems to be focused on neither of those. Instead, academia seems to be neglecting her children due to an healthy obsession (to have become a negligens mater). This is not to say academia doesn’t play any of those roles, but that academia is obsessed with how many papers her professors publish, not with how well she’s preparing her student.
Academia seems to have become a place where students come to take a lot of time from their professors—professors that should be spending their time writing papers. Why else should academics mostly be graded by the number of scientific papers they publish? I guess senior academics were publishing too much, not giving a chance for junior academics to compete… Maybe that’s why universities tried to slow senior academics down with more teaching appointments… Maybe that’s why some senior academics try to get their PhD students to teach their classes. One could think that senior academics teach because they have a better grasp of their fields (than junior academics). One could think senior academics sometimes offer the chance for junior academics to share their new ideas, with new generations of students. That would make sense in an academia focused on teaching students, and sharing knowledge with the public. However, surely, if that was the case academics wouldn’t be graded merely by the papers they publish… Yet academics are graded by how many papers they publish, and rarely by the quality of their teaching. I guess universities must be really recruiting students only to make publishing harder for academics, lest they break the printing presses from too much printing (or crash the scientific journals' servers from too much uploading).
I’m sorry for the negative tone of this post, and I do wish to end on a positive note. I believe students are being protected by incredible academics, who still believe academia is more than a printing press, and who deeply care for them. Those righteous (justi) individuals work dutifully (pie) to honor, not what academia tells them their duty is (i.e., to publish), but what they believe their duty to be—to teach (docere). To be clear, those amazing academics also do amazing research and publish in top journals, they just refuse to focus solely on that. I don’t wish to make a clear cut binary distinction between those who care for their students, and those who care just for their career. I believe most care for both, and most go out of their way to teach their students, and that’s why the problem is not made worse. Still, the real problem is that academics are having to go the extra mile to do their job, and risk falling short on an unfair metric, that poorly measures only a portion of their job. To end on a positive note then. Let us all do our best to appreciate the amazing people who go out of their way to teach, and care for the people entrusted to them. I owe so much to so many amazing academics. They are the caregivers who pick up the slack for the negligens mater, allowing academia to continue to be an alma mater for so many students. To them my gratitude. To them I dedicate this post.
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