[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] Fwd: [Debate-List] (Fwd) Academic wanking: no one reads journals; but bureaucrats read productivity forms

Sun May 24 20:32:57 CEST 2015

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From: Orsan Senalp <orsan1234 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:45 AM
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*From:* Patrick Bond <pbond at mail.ngo.za>
*Date:* 24 May 2015 19:19:09 GMT+2
*To:* DEBATE <debate-list at fahamu.org>
*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

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