108. In Defense of "Publish or Perish"

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Ah, the ghost of deans past, rising again to speak for the real world, rising to dispute my last post (#107). "You forget, you forget. Sing your song about Socrates, that he didn't publish a single word, that he would never have gotten a Ph.D.  Promote his tradition, concentrate on the good life, make the classroom experience the center of higher education. So in the criteria for tenure and promotion you manage to put teaching ahead of publication. And what do you discover? That teaching is the hardest thing in the world to measure. Nothing is reliable, not test scores, not classroom visits, not student evaluations. Scores can be raised by teaching to the test, visit reports are subjective, and student evaluations can give a very distorted picture."

You mean student evaluations aren't reliable?

"Not enough to make trustworthy comparisons. The year they had him students can complain about a teacher as a crabby futz and ten years later thank him for teaching them everything they needed to know. The 'humane' and 'relevant' livewire can be called, in hindsight, a 'shallow entertainer.' It's all so subjective. Student evaluations are helpful, but they require a sophisticated reading. And that will vary according to the sophisticate.

"Publication can easily be measured and reliably used for comparison. Much can be quantified: how many articles, how many times cited by others in the field, how many long reviews. There may be some subjectivity in the editors' choice of articles but they, the gatekeepers, are guided by the peers of the discipline. That thins out the subjectivity. No matter how strongly you urge a Promotion and Tenure committee to prioritize teaching they are going to gravitate toward publication — just because, in a swamp, it gives them some firm, accessible ground to stand on.

"I know, that's gravitation, convenience, not justification. So forget it. Let's talk about your idealistic principles, the ones you inherit from Plato's Socrates. Socrates left you with no doubt about the right approach to truth. It's through dialogue, debate, what you all later lovingly called 'dialectic testing.' The question is, Do you want tough testing or easy testing? Say you've come up with a piece of truth. Will you test it in the classroom? That's too easy. Your students don't know how to be tough. If you really love truth, and are really committed to the Socratic way, you'll lay your piece out in a journal, where the really tough people can test it.

"That, I think, is what one of Plato's most eloquent spokesmen, John Milton, would want you to do. Truth,' he said, 'can't be won without dust and heat,' down in the arena. 'That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.' He who shuns such a trial 'slinks out of the race.' And you know what? That classroom, for all its connection to the good life, for all it contributes to the examination of it, for all its beauty, is a place you are slinking to."

"That's a hard thing to say, but if you accept it I'll tell you something else. You can't want me, your dean, to let you or any of your colleagues do that kind of slinking. First because you want credit for that piece of truth, and you want the credit to be granted objectively. You don't want it to be based on anybody's report of its success in your classroom; you want it to be based on reports that can be compared with other reports — like number of citations. In other words, you, if you really want to adhere to Socratic principles, want our present system. For all its faults."

107. The Structure of Academic Revolutions

Want to know what drives a revolution in an academic discipline? Ask a young searcher for truth what he would rather have in his hand at the end of three years, a new statement of truth or a letter from the dean granting him tenure.

OK, your subject may well plump for the truth. That's nothing to sneeze at, a bona fide truth. But now do this: substitute in his hand a statement of what might possibly be the truth and put around him peers who possibly won't, or can't, recognize it as the truth. He could live alone with it, in an attic, for decades. Put that against a grant of tenure.

You there in the outside world, struggling to hang onto your job, running the rat race, getting by on a smile and a shoeshine, surely you understand the desire for tenure. I mean, a lifetime hold on well-paid independence? a yearly three-month vacation? What's not to understand? But still, you can under-estimate, you can fail to feel the full strength of it, the belief in it.  Have you ever heard that awed statement about the philosophy professor who had made himself into the purest possible nihilist (believer in nothing)?  "He believes only in tenure."

All right you've got that strong desire for tenure. Now give those who don't have it only three or four years to get it. Have them during those years teach some large lower-level courses. Give them a few of the administrative jobs the tenured profs are sick of. Anything to make sure a new Ph. D. doesn't have the time to sit back and think deeply — the way nearly every other discoverer of a significant truth has had to do. Then, a key provision: make publication in a refereed journal — a journal in which our young searcher will have to compete with all those in his discipline who have had the time to sit back and think deeply — a condition of his obtaining tenure.

The young searcher knows about learned journals. You get into them by stirring up truth. And he's got clear eyes. He sees that he's churning garbage. What else can he do on his schedule? Last, he's got a very reasonable human fear: that those deep thinkers, and particularly the journal editors, are good enough at garbage detection to see what he's doing. His only hope is that the distinction between truth and garbage can be obscured long enough for his garbage to get past the editor and onto the list the dean uses to grant tenure. And where does garbage most easily get a pass? In a revolution. You know, like the thing Sigmund Freud pulled off.

But you've got to be sure of the conditions. You don't want any garbage detectors coming down from the dean's office, or one department raking over another department's garbage. So look for department autonomy. Then if you can find a department that has successfully rejected the tests for garbage, or disputed the category, or denied it had distinguishing features, you're on the way. Your ideal, I think, is what Sinclair Lewis called the state university of his time, "a vast department store" — that is, a university from which the notion of a common academic enterprise had been entirely removed.

You have to be careful in your choice of a department. There's no hope in those fields where a new arrival can go to a frontier of knowledge and, using established research methods, add, or stir up, some recognizable truth. You want a field where there's no frontier, or if there is one nobody agrees on where it is, or whether it's moving forward or backward. Like in the arts and, often, the humanities.

You'll find a field of confusion somewhere in there. Uncovering a good one is not nearly so hard as it was before the German Ph. D. program became the model for everybody. Now there are so many arts, crafts, skills, and sports made into "fields" with a "graduate faculty" imposing "responsible standards," so many young scholars wandering around looking for a non-existent frontier, so much pointless rigor, so much free-floating scientism, so much confusion, that you can start a revolution without half trying.

And, without too much effort, you can keep it going — long enough, maybe (if you still haven't had time to really think) to get a promotion out of it. It won't be hard if you've started right. If you've got people revolting against predecessors whose position can be easily, but not too obviously, caricatured; if they've chosen, as a latently revolutionary father, someone who won't disown them when they give his doctrines the necessary exaggeration; if they've introduced enough new terminology to earn credit for new ideas (a vocabulary shift is a sign of a paradigm shift, right?); and if they've managed to start a journal where display of these things will be safe from non-revolutionary criticism, then, since the criteria for promotion are pretty much the same as those for tenure, you'll have no trouble.

The only thing your revolution really has to fear is a revival of the Socratic tradition. When Socrates put the pursuit of the good life at the center of the academic enterprise he marginalized (to spear a good word out of one revolution) every specialty to come. Specialists were the servants of those examining and, yes, enjoying, what was good — the art, the craft, the skill, the sport. The philologist in this tradition is prized for his service to the Chaucer story, the joy in it, not for his philology.

Since your revolution presumes the specialization of the Germanic tradition, with fields and disciplines and a graduate faculty and publication, it's going to fall apart in any institution that decenters (ah, another good word) it in favor of the Socratic tradition. The center (or, more appropriately, the heart) will be in the undergraduate classroom, or in the sculpt lab, or out on the track. With joy going for it. You're not going to be able to build up much steam for a revolution out on the margins.

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