The game of academia

A summary of:
Stone, A. R. 1991. Will the real body please stand up?: boundary stories about virtual cultures. In Cyberspace: First Steps, M. Benedikt, Ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 81-118.
(Part 1)

A few months ago, a went on a rant about what I call “the game of academia.” Here’s a bit of that rant:

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Academia has risen to an exalted place in modern society. Berman suggests that it has achieved this status because “the scientific method seems to discover laws and facts that are incontrovertible” (Berman, 1981: 150), such as gravity. What we fail to recognize is that “all knowledge is ‘situation-bound,’” according to Karl Mannheim, which means that the scientific understanding of the universe is no less valid than any other epistemology (ibid).

Alas, so long as someone from some respected institution publishes a paper on something, it will be reported as undeniable fact, and we will believe it. But having read my fair share of journal papers, I am increasingly jaded as I realize that most of the time academics don’t do anything interesting. In fact, they rarely do anything at all. For the most part, they are involved in a game that has certain rules that they are too afraid to challenge.

But to play this game, you must first join the club. This club has certain entry requirements. The first is: Take everything you know to be false. This comes down directly from Descartes, who wrote, “it was necessary to disbelieve everything I thought I knew up to this point” (Berman, 1981: 32).

The second entry requirement for this club is: Swear your allegiance to the scientific method. Polanyi argues that “in attributing truth to any methodology we make a nonrational commitment; in effect, we perform an act of faith” (Berman, 1981: 136). But so it is if you want to join the club.

It is beginning to sound a bit like a cult, and for good reason. The definition of a cult, according to Zablocki, is “an ideological organization held together by charismatic relationships and that demands total commitment” (Wikipedia, 20101). Science has always had its charismatic leaders (Descartes and Newton are only two), and their unfailing belief in the scientific methodology has convinced many others to join in the mania of academic inquiry. And further, those who do not show total commitment to the tenets of this cult are shunned from the community, unable to publish and likely out of a job.

I don’t mean to be unfairly derogatory, but I do want to make the case that this cult-like atmosphere in academia has produced a strange behaviour amongst its members. I mentioned earlier a game that they get to play, and I would like to articulate now some of the features of this game as I see it.

Dividing and Conquering
The point of the game is to divide up the world into smaller and smaller chunks, and to then attach your name to one of the chunks by doing a ‘study’ on that chunk. Think of it as being the opposite of putting a puzzle together; instead, your goal is to cut the puzzle pieces into smaller and smaller pieces so that your opponents (anyone other than you) cannot put the puzzle together again. You lose if anyone succeeds in putting the puzzle together, because you are now out of a job. Game over.

This is a caricature of the ‘atomistic’ method we have inherited from Descartes, whereby “knowing consists of subdividing a thing into its smallest components” (Berman, 1981: 34). We have trained ourselves to think mechanically. This activity is described best by Berman (ibid) as follows:

The mind is in possession of a certain method. It confronts the world as a separate object. It applies this method to the object, again and again and again, and eventually it will know all there is to know. The method, furthermore, is also mechanical. The problem is broken down into its components, and the simple act of cognition (the direct perception) has the same relationship to the knowledge of the whole problem that, let us say, an inch has to a foot: one measures (perceives) a number of times, and then sums the results. Subdivide, measure, combine; subdivide, measure, combine (34).

Unfortunately, the reality is that the world becomes incomprehensible the further it is divided. While academics might earnestly believe they are working towards a coherent understanding of the truth of the universe, it is exceedingly rare for journal papers to contribute any profound insight to those who look to science for answers about how they should live their lives.

Earning Points:
1. The more terms you define, the more points you get. Points double if you define something differently than those that have defined it before.
I cannot count the number of research papers where the only measurable contribution is a new definition of a term. But to me, this is very often a negative contribution, because defining something in a way that others haven’t weakens the inertia that the research community may have been gathering towards actually making some progress in the area.

2. When you are proposing a new idea, you may only earn points if you can quote another player who has said something to support your idea.
This is a Catch 22, and it certainly isn’t conducive to producing radical thinking. But the fact remains, if you want to get published, you stand a much greater chance of success if you can find people of high academic standing who have already said what you want to say.

Bonus Points:
1. Earn Buzzword Bonus points for managing to use words that are determined to be ‘hot topics’ (check for updates to get the newest list of words). Lose points for using words on a previous list of ‘hot topics’ that have now fallen out of favour.
Research communities go through fads like teenagers. One day the hot topic is “community building”, the next day it’s “sustainability”, and the next it’s “digital economy”. Most of the time, these terms are so vague that they are meaningless, but if you want to secure funding, you have to use the words that people are interested in at the moment.

2. Instantly double your score is to come up with a phrase or a term that gets quoted by another player.
I have read a fair number of papers where the researcher seems to be entirely self-indulgent and is simply playing semantic games, usually (it would seem) in an effort to be particularly “quotable.” The substance of what they have said is no different from anyone else, but they have succeeded if they have managed to say it in a wittier way, because now they will be cited by everyone else who needs a reference in their paper and wants the wittier line.

3. Collect Respect Points from other players by creating a framework that describes a phenomenon. If you have created a new framework that is better than other player’s framework, you may steal their Respect Points.
Researchers spend an inordinate amount of time coming up with a framework, usually trying to outdo the last person’s attempt at a framework. But what is the purpose of these frameworks? I have often been left wondering how the framework actually contributes to the world, because in the end, the phenomenon you are attempting to put a framework around will exist whether or not you identify said framework.

Movement:
1. You may only move backwards. If you move ahead one square, you must move back two.
There seems to be no progress being made in academia for the most part. Often times a researcher only manages through their work to explain why the problem is so much bigger than they had previously thought. The game is increasingly to create more work for future researchers by identifying – usually in the concluding paragraphs of a journal paper – what other steps must be taken to make this research meaningful. But more often than not, the research dies at the publication phase, and I find myself asking, “What am I supposed to do now with this information?” or even, “What did you plan to do with this knowledge once you found the answer?” I see this as an extension of the problem of dissecting the world – that we are never going to realize this myth of the fully understood world, and the further we dig into the mysteries in this typical academic fashion, the more we find that it is a never-ending hole.

2. Earn another turn if you conduct an experiment that is so specific that you are the only expert in that area.
A way of generating work for yourself as an academic is to carve out a niche. To do so, many people have become experts in incredibly small fields. Arguably, this type of rationalism is a descendant of capitalist division of labour. In The Wealth of Nations (1977), Adam Smith gave the example of the pin factory to demonstrate the principle of the division of labour. People who had once been responsible for the production of the pin from start to finish, an entire pin, were now in charge of specifics of the pin production assembly line: one would create the top, one would create the pointy end, one would glue to the two together, and another would pain the pins; each person becoming an expert in a very specific task and losing sight of the bigger picture, i.e. becoming alienated from the products of their labour.

Similarly in academia, people are becoming experts in smaller and smaller areas, and dividing up into various disciplines with different expertises; and this is to be expected because the world which we are attempting to understand and rationalize is so complex that it cannot be held within one mind.

The problem is that this is not conducive to interdisciplinarity or solving big problems. On the one hand, it begs for collaboration, but on the other, it makes it very difficult because it requires such a high threshold skill/knowledge base to participate in discussions with these experts. More worryingly, I feel (from personal experience in research labs and from reading many uninspired journal papers) that many researchers have lost the thing that motivated them from the beginning. For example, you get interested in psychology because you want to know more about people, but after several years you find yourself conducting experiments to determine why some children develop right-handed and others left-handed (an experiment that I worked on in undergraduate). The big motivation gets lost somewhere.

If we want to change the world, we are going to need to keep at the forefront of our minds that motivation. We cannot be satisfied with or distracted or dazzled by the appeal of picking off low-hanging fruit and becoming an expert. We need to tackle the fruit at the top of that tree – or rather, we need to address the entire tree – and to do so, we need to become interdisciplinary and bring people onboard as a team.

Questions: If you draw a question, you must answer it. It will incredibly specific, and possibly boring, but that is that card you drew.
Most of the time, the research agenda is set by the institution to which you belong. There are projects that your department deems worthy that you are impelled to follow because these are the people that pay you.

Berman argues that there has been a shift in the kinds of questions we ask these days are different from before. Berman writes:

So long as men were content to ask why objects fell, why phenomena occurred, the question of how they fell or occurred was irrelevant. These two questions are not mutually exclusive, at least not in theory; but in historical terms they have proven to be so. ‘How’ became increasingly important, ‘why’ increasingly irrelevant. In the twentieth century, as we shall see, ‘how’ has become our ‘why’ (Berman, 1981: 28).

But again, this doesn’t lead to an interesting place, as far as I’m concerned. I’m interested in the why questions – or more specifically, the what now questions – and the how questions are another manifestation of our need to dissect the world into oblivion. In fact, removing mystery is not a goal of mine. I’m not interested in the how question at all.

And further, I’m not interested in highly focused questions. I’m interested in the huge questions, the inherently unanswerable ones, and simply exploring them for the purposes of gleaning meaning from the asking. I’m not interested in individuals either; I want to address problems that affect societies, if not the world. No more boring questions for me.

I hope to show in my PhD research that all of the above can be attributed to fear-driven science, i.e. a climate of fear that permeates academia. And like with other mental health disorders, e.g. anorexia, this fear manifests as an obsessive need for control. As Berman argues, “atomism, quantifiability, and the deliberate act of viewing nature as an abstraction from which one can distance oneself – all open the possibility that Bacon proclaimed as the true goal of science: control” (46). For evidence of this pathological need for control, note the following quote from Descartes in Discourse on Method (1637):

[My discoveries] have satisfied me that it is possible to reach knowledge that will be of much utility in this life; and that instead of the speculative philosophy now taught in the schools we can find a practical one, by which, knowing the nature and behavior of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies which surround us, as well as we now understand the different skills of our workers, we can employ these entities for all the purposes for which they are suited, and so make ourselves masters and possessors of nature (in Berman, 1981: 25).
Weber had a word for this overly rational mindset: zweckrational, i.e. “purposively rational, or instrumentally rational” (Berman, 1981: 40). Berman continues:

Embedded within the scientific program is the concept of manipulation as the very touchstone of truth. To know something is to control it, a mode of cognition that led Oskar Kokoschka to observe that by the twentieth century, reason had been reduced to mere function. This identification, in effect, renders all things meaningless, except insofar as they are profitable and expedient… (40).

But why are we in pursuit of such control? And why do we think this is normal and necessary? As Manuel writes in his Portrait of Isaac Newton,
To force everything in the heavens and on earth into one rigid, tight frame from which the most minuscule detail would not be allowed to escape free and random was an underlying need of this anxiety-ridden man…. A structuring of the world in so absolutist a manner that every event, the closest and the most remote, fits neatly into an imaginary system has been called a symptom of illness, especially when others refuse to join in the grand obsessive design (in Berman, 1981: 121).

Foucault argued in Madness and Civilization (1988) that mental illness is defined by the times as whatever is different from the norm. In modern society, it is considered reasonable – i.e. healthy – to seek this level of control, but only because this is the norm. In another age, we might all be considered lunatics. In the end, to argue that the person who embraces the scientific mindset is mentally healthy seems tautological, and ultimately a fruitless line of inquiry. What I think might be more interesting to ask is whether we might be missing out on something greater by retreating into our shells. Why are we so fearful of the world? Can we not seek a more harmonious relationship with it? And in doing so, might this perhaps make us happier?

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What I hadn’t realized, in the course of this rant, was that this kind of thinking had an origin that one could pinpoint! Stone mentions the birth of a kind of cult of like-mindedness, which I had a bit of a chuckle at: “…we probably owe the invention of the boring academic paper to Boyle. Boyle developed a method of compelling assent that Shapin and Shaffer described as virtual witnessing. He created what he called a ‘community of like-minded gentlemen’ to validate his scientific experiments, and he correctly surmised that the ‘gentlemen’ for whom he was writing believed that boring, detailed writing implied painstaking experimental work. Consequently it came to pass that boring writing was likely to indicate scientific truth. By means of such writing, a group of people were able to ‘witness’ an experiment without being physically present. Boyle’s production of the detailed academic paper was so successful that it is still the exemplar of scholarship” (86). The point of this, Stone says, is that this signifies a new epoch in which “texts become ways of creating, and later of controlling, new kinds of communities” (86).