<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">Orsan Senalp</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:orsan1234@gmail.com">orsan1234@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Mon, May 25, 2015 at 12:45 AM<br><div dir="auto"><div>:<br><br></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><b>From:</b> Patrick Bond <<a href="mailto:pbond@mail.ngo.za" target="_blank">pbond@mail.ngo.za</a>><br><b>Date:</b> 24 May 2015 19:19:09 GMT+2<br><b>To:</b> DEBATE <<a href="mailto:debate-list@fahamu.org" target="_blank">debate-list@fahamu.org</a>><br><b>Subject:</b> <b>[Debate-List] (Fwd) Academic wanking: no one reads journals; but bureaucrats read productivity forms</b><br><br></div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div>
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<h1>Do Academic Articles Need Wide Audiences?</h1>
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<p>by <span><a href="http://hyperallergic.com/author/rebecca_rothfeld/" target="_blank">Becca Rothfeld</a></span> on <abbr title="2015-05-19">May 19, 2015</abbr></p>
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<div style="width:650px"><3375358760_e98058d9cc_o-640.jpg>
<p>(image via <a href="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/" target="_blank">flickr.com/centralasian</a>)</p>
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<p>The gap between academia and the general public looms wider than
ever, according to <a href="http://www.straitstimes.com/news/opinion/more-opinion-stories/story/prof-no-one-reading-you-20150411" target="_blank">an
article</a> in <em>The Straits Times</em>. 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.</p>
<p>There are several factors that contribute to scholarship’s
dwindling readership, the <em>Straits Times</em> 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 <em>The Partisan Review</em>,
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.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2014/12/09/storming-the-ivory-tower/" target="_blank">providing
funding for scholars to write books aimed at a broader public</a>.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>The Straits Times</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>***<br>
</p>
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<div>
<h1>Bureaucracy: why won’t scholars break their paper chains?</h1>
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<p><span>21 May 2015</span> | <span>By Elaine Glaser</span> <br>
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<div style="width:450px">
<p><mime-attachment.jpg></p>
<p><cite>Source: Alamy montage<br>
</cite></p>
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<p>If the form-filling that plagues academia is pointless, why
do academics comply with it? asks Eliane Glaser</p>
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<div style="width:450px">
<p><mime-attachment.jpg></p>
<p><cite>Source: Alamy/iStock montage</cite></p>
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<blockquote>
<p>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</p>
</blockquote>
<p>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 <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/audit-overload/410612.article" target="_blank">documented
in these pages</a>. 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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Serendipitously, a book of essays on bureaucracy by David
Graeber, the anthropologist and activist, appeared in March.
Titled <em><a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy-by-david-graeber/2020109.article" target="_blank">The
Utopia of Rules</a></em>, 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”.</p>
<p>Shielded, therefore, by an illusory opposition between the
market and bureaucracy, the new university management imposes
systems of <a href="http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/academic-assessment-gone-mad/2011045.article" target="_blank">audit,
evaluation, assessment</a> 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 <em>Strike!</em> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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?</p>
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<p>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</p></div></blockquote></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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