Publish? Only once every five years

Publish? Only once every five years!

Academic publications are seldom read. Anecdote has it that a young man who had just got his doctorate stuck a € 50 bill on page 100 of his dissertation, with a note attached saying that the studious reader who had got this far deserved the award, and deposited this work in the university library. After a year’s time he borrowed the volume from the library – only to find the € 50 bill was still there. Most dissertations are read only by the dissertation committee; most academic publications are read by no more than four people. Yet the pressure to publish is now greater than ever before. Even undergraduates are encouraged to send their stuff to special journals and it is simply impossible to obtain a permanent post without a ridiculously impressive list of publications – quantitatively impressive that is. Whence fraudulent publications of academics trying to save their jobs, whence the dismal state of academic life in general.

         How has this state of affairs come about and what, if anything, could be done about it?

         The Dutch poet and classicist Ilja Leonard Pfeijfer in the newspaper NRC/Next evoked the swan-song of the academia he experienced when he was a doctoral student and a junior lecturer: one could do research into whatever took one’s fancy and one could lecture on whatever one wanted to lecture about. This academia of what in Dutch is called academische vrijheid – academic freedom – has disappeared. In its stead there is now a ratrace of academics scurrying and tripping, crushing each other in the throng of little men trying to reach their ‘targets’. The university has to all intents and purposes become a knowledge factory. For there is so little difference between a factory and a university that managers who used work at soup factories now run universities along the same lines.

         Anyone who looks around at a university will find this out in five minutes’ time, provided they have not imbibed any mind-narrowing business school theories. The university of today, being a business, is looked upon as a system that has students and academics as its input into two subsystems that have a respective output of BAs and Mas and publications. The quality of the publication has its measure in the rating of the journal in which it is published; if you go to the right sort of conferences, chat with the right colleagues and abide by the fashionable opinions in the fashionable research programmes – a sort of fashion collections in academia – you will publish in top journals, therefore you are taken to be an excellent academic.

         The point of this is not to suggest that all excellent academics are yes-men (some of them are not), but rather that ‘excellence’ or ‘quality’ essentially have nothing whatsoever to do with the level of research or teaching, since ‘excellence’ and ‘quality’ are merely accounting notions. One is excellent if and only if one has so many publications in journals with precisely this and this rating. There is no question of what it is that one is saying.

         It is an illusion to think that the business culture of the yes-men could be changed by anything less than a revolution, since most of the organizations mediating between government and the universities as well as many academics themselves will think they have too much to lose in the demolition of the current system. And yet there is one very concrete point that might assist in bringing back the university Pfeijfer talked about. What we must have is a publication quota, a limit on the number of publications an academic is allowed.

         We publish too much and we publish too much of the same thing. We repeat ourselves over and over, but since nobody reads our work nobody cares. However, science does not progress through repetition, it progresses through creativity. Creativity requires insight and insight requires time. And it is time which we don’t have because of the pressure to publish, due to which we will keep repeating what we have said in our dissertations, or what we will say in our dissertations yet to be written up.

         The problem is more pronounced in the humanities than it is in the natural sciences, because in the natural sciences gained insights are cumulative in a way that research in the humanities is not, especially where experimental research is concerned. In the humanities there are no experiments or proofs. The arts, theology and philosophy demand a steady development of insight. Every philosopher for example must go through the history of philosophy for himself to so much as start having insights of his own. I can only know whether Aristotle has said anything of value for my investigation into perception when I have read Aristotle, which is something else entirely than reading the latest publication on the topic, which says that Aristotle is ‘a thing of the past’.

         As George Steiner once said “The young man tells us that Keats is a very complicated poet. I had gathered as much.” The need to mature in a humanistic discipline implies that it is simply silly to ask of someone before or just after their doctorate to produce a stream of publications containing genuine insight. It also implies that even academics who have had time to develop need time to think through a topic that’s new to them. The only one, after all, who can judge where he is, as far as his topic is concerned, is the academic himself.

         The ideal, then, would be perfect academic freedom. Given the addiction to numbers that plagues current academia however, a measurable criterion may not be a bad idea. It will at least keep the auditing wolf from the doors of learning. That is why it would be a good idea if academics were allowed to publish only once every five years – were allowed to(, not have to)! They would have to think hard whether they really want to put this book out into the world, since they won’t have another chance to publish anything else for the coming five years. A publication quota may not be good news to the makers of league-tables and other accountants, but it would be a blessing to the academic world. There would finally be time to think, read and write – books of course, not articles. And to read the work of your colleagues. Which will probably make fairly nice reading then.

Part of this piece has recently been quoted in the education column of Mark Bauerlein of Emory University in the USA. See http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/face-time-learning-styles-stem-avoidance-faculty-productivity/43642