---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Orsan Senalp <[email protected]> Date: Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:45 AM : *From:* Patrick Bond <[email protected]> *Date:* 24 May 2015 19:19:09 GMT+2 *To:* DEBATE <[email protected]> *Subject:* *[Debate-List] (Fwd) Academic wanking: no one reads journals; but bureaucrats read productivity forms* Do Academic Articles Need Wide Audiences? - by Becca Rothfeld <http://hyperallergic.com/author/rebecca_rothfeld/> on May 19, 2015 <3375358760_e98058d9cc_o-640.jpg> (image via flickr.com/centralasian <https://www.flickr.com/photos/centralasian/3375358760/in/photolist-69gAyG-58FNwB-kYiYC-gTemN6-bVk1fS-DPWnp-fwuo5-a3XC9d-a7h7Yu-34Ydj3-atvnG7-7EYKGD-5QVFUf-dFPnWy-2g4jpR-5Sqz9E-5RnABw-6PxGnk-PnsF3-mGjhs7-DuHx9-6UxFRe-4esQj-2URg6h-btT7Qx-ac1Rk-7rNLdi-6QAW3m-7Cofgn-dHRhG2-aKQ7tR-9ayqsd-GdKts-5XfwXE-8XjWtu-iPP66-2KQqD-aDDQvH-ckMr8C-dxS7iQ-ie3kqD-eiwixk-e4pjMJ-e4iKnM-e4iKn4-e4iKmn-fr8Nu-9Usofw-bbWonH-7gtjxh/> ) The gap between academia and the general public looms wider than ever, according to an article <http://www.straitstimes.com/news/opinion/more-opinion-stories/story/prof-no-one-reading-you-20150411> in *The Straits Times*. The newspaper reports that only 82% of academic articles in the humanities are ever cited — and estimates, even more alarmingly, that most scholarly articles appearing in peer-reviewed journals attract a meager audience of around ten readers. There are several factors that contribute to scholarship’s dwindling readership, the *Straits Times* suggests. Most peer-reviewed journals are prohibitively expensive for those of us without institutional affiliations. (After all, who can afford to pay something in the range of $30 for every interesting article that surfaces on JSTOR?) But the prime culprit, the article argues, is lack of general interest: academic writing is specialized and inaccessible, focusing on issues that bear little attraction for the layman. Where scholars of yore often doubled as public intellectuals, contributing works of long-lasting significance to publications like fabled *The Partisan Review*, today’s academics appeal to a narrow audience of like-minded professors and researchers, preferring to publish in niche scholarly journals that most of us have never heard of. The article goes on to argue — rightly, I think — that academics should strive to effect greater engagement with the public sphere. And several initiatives to this effect have launched recently: the NEH recently announced that it would be providing funding for scholars to write books aimed at a broader public <http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/12/09/storming-the-ivory-tower/> . The NEH program is admirable: I think it’s true that academics should strive to participate more actively in their communities, if only to make the relevance of their work obvious to a wider range of people and to facilitate cross-disciplinary connections that it’s difficult to establish from within a more insular sphere. But I think it is a mistake to intimate that research can be worthwhile only in virtue of its reach or tangible impact. *The Straits Times* mistakenly assumes that the main point of a research project is always the end product. Often, the crux of scholarly undertaking is dialogue along the way — and dialogue, be it interpersonal or at a talk or conference, can have broader effects on a wider community. The cultural push towards artifacts with obvious, immediate utility is symptomatic of a culture that fails to place sufficient value on humanistic or artistic pursuits, many of which don’t have tangible or quantifiable benefits. For one thing, quality of audience is often more important than quantity: a Joyce scholar may want to have a detailed conversation about a particular passage with other experts in the field. For another, it’s not clear what sorts of concrete change scholarship in the humanities is supposed to precipitate. An article about a question in ethics may have “succeeded” if it encourages us to subject our lives to greater scrutiny. Not all worthwhile scholarship comes in the form of recommendations to policymakers. *** Bureaucracy: why won’t scholars break their paper chains? 21 May 2015 | By Elaine Glaser <mime-attachment.jpg> Source: Alamy montage If the form-filling that plagues academia is pointless, why do academics comply with it? asks Eliane Glaser <mime-attachment.jpg> Source: Alamy/iStock montage We spend more and more time assessing what we do, and fewer and fewer hours doing it - just to give administrators something to do for their gold-plated salaries Time allocation forms, research excellence framework documentation, module monitoring, and research funding applications: these Gradgrindian horrors are the subject of many a senior common room rant, and they have been extensively documented in these pages <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/audit-overload/410612.article>. Academics are spending less and less time thinking, reading and writing, and ever more time filling out forms. It seems clear that bureaucracy is somehow intertwined with the transformation of what were once institutions devoted to the pursuit of knowledge into commercial enterprises. Yet for me, two conundrums remain. If the “modernisation” of higher education is supposedly all about efficiency and productivity, why are managers imposing tasks that are by any common-sense measure a complete waste of time? And if academics are so demonstrably fed up with demands to fill out yet another piece of pointless paperwork, why do we continue to consent? As part of a knowledge exchange project at my university – itself arguably a product of the bureaucratic imperative to measure “impact” – I organised a modest survey of academic bureaucracy: first, to identify the bureaucratic activities carried out by colleagues at my institution and beyond; second, to attempt to identify their source and apparent motivation; and third – crucially – to probe the underlying factors that might explain the curious fact of academic compliance. Serendipitously, a book of essays on bureaucracy by David Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, appeared in March. Titled *The Utopia of Rules <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy-by-david-graeber/2020109.article>*, it’s a fascinating elucidation of an ostensibly unpromising topic. Bureaucracy is traditionally associated with the public sphere. But as Graeber demonstrates, this association is far from natural: it is the result of bureaucratic controls being forcibly applied to the public sector. Meanwhile, the private sector appears lean only because the regulatory apparatus has been all but stripped away: in the public sector, bureaucracy is called “accountability”, in the private sector, it’s “red tape”. Shielded, therefore, by an illusory opposition between the market and bureaucracy, the new university management imposes systems of audit, evaluation, assessment <http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/academic-assessment-gone-mad/2011045.article> and accreditation in the name of increased value for money. Yet this is deeply ironic, because the infinite regress of online forms and email chains leads academics directly away from productivity. In a related, widely read article for *Strike!* magazine titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, Graeber asks why it is that in advanced Western economies, saturated in the rhetoric of austerity, and supposedly reaping the rewards of modern technology, administrative labour has proliferated. “In a world ever more in thrall to the imperatives of profit, competition and market-driven efficiency,” Graeber observes, “it is bizarre for employers in the public and private sector alike to be behaving like the bureaucracies of the old Soviet Union, shelling out wages to workers they do not appear to need.” Graeber’s explanation is that long-hours pen-pushing – or mouse-clicking – is imposed on employees as a form of social control: it’s a way of ensuring that we are too monitored, busy and tired to raise questions or revolt. The “moral and spiritual damage” resulting from the fact that “huge swathes of people…spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed” is, Graeber claims, “a scar across our collective soul”. Likewise, bureaucracy has become a ubiquitous cliché of modern academia, and to call it out seems naive, as if not accepting the “real world”. Yet it produces a disjunctive sense of playing along with a fiction. If accounting measures applied to academia to make it more efficient actually have the opposite effect, what is their real purpose? Is the impulse to count and assess all activity via “performance indicators” and “quality assurance” a quixotic yet sincere attempt to increase productivity; the application of a belief that things are not real unless delineated virtually; a simple failure to grasp that the more time one spends trying to “capture” academic “output” via bean-counting and online systems of representation, the more it slips away? Since the financial crash of 2008-09, we have seen ample evidence of misguided faith in marketisation to suggest that this explanation is credible. Yet it does not account for the moralising and punitive manner in which bureaucratic demands are formulated. They are derived from private sector managerialism, yet while they have been largely flushed out of business itself, they are applied to academia in a correctional spirit, as if it is not behaving in a sufficiently businesslike manner. There’s a simple explanation for the drive to quantify everything: the replacement of the horizontal self-government of university departments with the vertical hierarchy of departmental heads and senior management. Academics used to document their output on their CVs; now, managers have to find ways to justify their existence. “Everyone knows the results are absurd,” Graeber tells me via email. “We all spend more and more hours of our day discussing, analysing and assessing what we do, and fewer and fewer hours actually doing it, and all of it, just to give these high-level administrators who aren’t really needed something to do for their gold-plated salaries.” But this is more than just a power shift, Graeber notes. “It represents a transformation in our basic assumption about what a university is…Thirty years ago, if you said ‘the university’, people assumed you were referring to the faculty. Now if you say it, people assume you’re referring to the administration.” The corporate bureaucrats who now run universities are “often more interested in real estate speculation, fund-raising, sports, and ‘the student experience’ than anything that has to do with learning, teaching, or scholarship at all”. Through a curious inversion, to insist that knowledge should be valued in and of itself, and that universities should be places of learning, has come to seem morally suspect. Just as public sector employees are repeatedly reminded that their salaries are funded by “hard-working taxpayers”, academics feel increasingly beholden to fee-paying students. The result is guilt for having a nice job, for being able to stare out the window thinking interesting thoughts about subjects that have no obvious, tangible “application”. It’s almost as if it would be better if academics spent the bulk of their time filling out forms for the sake of it, because at least then they wouldn’t be enjoying themselves on the public, or the students’, purse – even if that resulted in fewer books being written. One acknowledged that bureaucracy ‘can become addictive and/or act as a means of avoiding other activities’. Is this an awkward truth - that form‑filling provides convenient relief from taxing intellectual labours? The bureaucratic lexicon is revealingly disciplinary: time allocation software is introduced to make academics “account for” their time, with all the financial and moral connotations of bookkeeping and being “held to account”. A recent KPMG report on time allocation monitoring stressed that “it is important that t _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list [email protected] http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/