Over the weekend I read a story in The Economist that questions the narrative that science these days is self-correcting. We, meaning the general public, place an awful lot of trust in the integrity of the scientific method, that scientists themselves are honest, and that peer reviews and follow-up studies will catch errors or fraud. According to the article, that trust may be grossly misplaced. Read the whole thing when you have a moment, because it's quite disturbing in its allegations.
The focus of the article is biomedical research, but my gut tells me that similar flaws and failings are happening in other parts of academia. The pressure to do research, to "publish or perish," has perverted higher education in ways that I don't think the public realizes. My dad saw it take over the business department at the local college he taught at for 37 years.
The game goes like this: Schools pressure or require professors to do research papers, one of the thousands of academic journals publishes it, it gets delivered to a few thousand libraries and colleagues, and nobody reads it.
Okay, that's not fair of me. A great deal of published research is valuable and does get read within its field. But even more, far more according to my dad, is just crap that provides no value to the education system other than getting professors points for promotion or tenure. Nobody reads it and nobody cares, but everybody plays the game.
This is not a new phenomenon in higher education. Here's a great piece from 20 years ago that talks about this very problem. What has changed I believe, is the scope. Once mostly confined to larger universities or specialty schools, the practice has spread to smaller colleges and universities over the years and the pressure to do research has damaged what used to be education-focused institutions.
There are other components to the higher education bubble we are in, but I think this farcical deluge of crap research is a significant part of the problem. In general, the 80-20 rule should apply: 80% of higher education institutions should be focused strictly on staying up to date academically and educating their undergraduates, and let the 20% of bigger schools do education, including post-graduate work, and research.
I'm not sure what the solution is short of starting to cut off government funding for some of this useless research. I hesitate to call for academic "reform" though, because that word has become a siren call for politicians to helicopter in and muck things up even further. Maybe there is no graceful way out and the only way for it to end is for the higher education bubble to burst and this will be just one more thing that comes crashing down. It would be better if it didn't happen that way, but I'm afraid that the powers that be in academia are too short-sighted and too corrupt to prevent it.
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