A propos my recent post, "On the seemingly ever-increasing pace of philosophy", a reader has drawn my attention to this awesome 2007 post my Aidan McGlynn. A few choice excerpts:
'For those who think in terms of completion rates, mine is disgraceful. 'Completion rates' - the very phrase is like a bell. British universities are in the course of being transformed by idealogues who misunderstand everything about academic work...The plan of the idealogues is to increase academic productivity by creating conditions of intense competition. Those who compose what is known, in today's unlovely jargon, as academic and academic-related staff are now to be lured by the hope of gaining, and goaded by the shame of missing, extra payments and newly invented titular status. Their output is monitored by the use of performance indicators, measuring the number of words published per year. Wittgenstein, who died in 1951 having published only one short article after the Tractatus of 1922, would plainly not have survived such a system. Those most savagely affected by the new regime are, as always, the ones on the bottom rung of the ladder: the graduate students working for their doctorates...
The universities have no option but to co-operate in organising the squalid scramble that graduate study has become, in introducing the new 'incentives' for their professors and lecturers and in supplying the data for the evaluation process. The question is to what extent they will absorb the values of their overlords and jettison those they used to have. Once more, it is the graduate students who are the most at risk, for they are in effect being taught that the rat-race operates as ferociously in the academic as in the commercial world, and that what matters is not the quality of what you write but the speed at which you write it and get it into print.
Hi Marcus,
Have you read Ruth G. Millikan's passionate discussion of our emerging brave new world?
I offer her conclusion, but note she gives reasons leading up to it..the link to the whole is at the end.
"...it has always struck me as a no-brainer that forcing early and continuous publication in philosophy is, simply, genocidal. Forcing publication at all is not necessarily good.
In philosophy there are no hard data. And there are no proofs. Both in the writing and in the reviewing, deep intellectual honesty and integrity are the only checks on quality. This cannot be hurried. Authors who discover their errors must be free sometimes just to start over. They need time to be sure that their use of sources is accurate. Reviewers need time to digest and to check sources themselves when not already familiar with them, nor should they feel under pressure to pass on essays out of sympathy for the impossible position of young people seeking jobs or tenure. Unread journals should not be proliferating to accommodate, mainly, the perceived needs of administrators to keep their institutions competitive. What we philosophers are after is not something one needs to compete for, nor will more philosophical publications result in more jobs for philosophers. Necessarily, carrots and sticks produce cheapened philosophy."
http://philosophy.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/365/2014/02/Accidents-APA-John-Dewey-Lecture.pdf
Posted by: Brad Cokelet | 04/27/2014 at 02:05 PM
Brad: Thanks for your comment. That Dewey lecture by Millikan is so awesome I don't know where to begin! :)
Posted by: Marcus Arvan | 04/27/2014 at 02:40 PM