[Todos] Fwd: The Argentine chapter of the academic show (Second letter)

[fabio vicentini]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: fabio vicentini <fmvicent en gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 28, 2013 at 9:31 AM
Subject: The Argentine chapter of the academic show (Second letter)
To: "presidencia en conicet.gov.ar" <presidencia en conicet.gov.ar>,
FulbrightNEXUS en iie.org, info en fundacionsadosky.org.ar, info en mincyt.gob.ar,
prensa en mincyt.gov.ar




Buenos Aires, June 14, 2012

 Dear colleague:

Subject: Academic Bullshitting

I have worked as an operations researcher for industral concerns for 30
years and I consider that 5 out of 70 projects I dealt with were worth
transmitting to my colleagues, the rest was routine. That would amount to
one paper every six years. On the other side my colleagues in the Academy
publish one paper every 6 months. Either I am a PhD idiot or my colleagues
are publishing rubbish!

 In the nineties I lost my job in industry and was forced to take refuge in
the School of Sciences of Buenos Aires university wherein I found that
professors are pressured to publish papers.

 Full-time professors are expected to lecture and do research. Their
academic performance is evaluated mainly by their research, and research is
measured by the number of his papers - mind you, by the number not by the
content. It is assumed that its content has already been judged by the
journal's referees.

 Every seven years professor X is subject to a contest where his number of
papers is counted. If another candidate Z has a number of papers greater
than X has then they would give X's job to Z. Even if X would overcome this
ordeal, he will have to confront again the contest after the next seven
years and so forth. There is no tenure.

 Now, if X is successful in finding the solution to his research problem he
would publish it in a journal, but this is not the objective. The objective
is to publish papers no matter what because that is what they count. X
realizes that a serious problem may take very long to be solved... or
never. So, in order to survive X should leave behind certain qualms like
honesty. There are ways to maximize the number of papers: 1) to join a
prolific "research group" 2) to choose a successful coauthor 3) to choose a
papers-generating problem 4) to exploit your thesis students 5) to enlist
in the school mafia, but whichever his choice the end result might probably
be a bullshit paper. Hence our academic policy does not favor the honest
researcher. It is not the most intelligent that survives, it is the one
that is the most adaptable to the rules of the game.

 Whoever was first in dreaming up this evaluation procedure got his
inspiration from the monkey theorem: *If you put a thousand monkeys banging
at a thousand typewriters, one will eventually reproduce a sonnet of
Shakespeare with probability one.*

* *As already mentioned our academics fabricate two papers per year on the
average. I ascertained this estimate from a sample selected from the math
dept faculty. For each professor in the sample I gathered the following
data:

 (1) Professor name

(2) Subject area

(3) Number of published papers

(4) Period= 2010,5 -  initial year

(5) Papers/año = (3) / (4)


**

 *Área*

*papers*

*años*

*papers/año*

1

diff.equat

154

15,5

9,9

2

diff.equat

48

11,5

4,2

3

diff.equat

33

9,5

3,5

4

algeb.geo

33

9,5

3,5

5

diff.equat

32

11,5

2,8

6

nume.anal

68

27,5

2,5

7

diff.equat

11

4,5

2,4

8

func.anal

30

12,5

2,4

9

algeb.topo

25

10,5

2,4

10

harm.anal

41

18,5

2,2

11

diff.equat

21

9,5

2,2

12

diff.equat

13

6,5

2

13

nume.anal

20

10,5

1,9

14

alg.non.co

21

11,5

1,8

15

?

42

24,5

1,7

16

harm.anal

35

20,5

1,7

17

comp.alge

16

10,5

1,5

18

func.anal

16

12,5

1,3

19

hom.algeb

31

24,5

1,3

20

comp.alge

25

20,5

1,2

21

hom.algeb

14

14,5

1

22

comp.alge

5

5,5

0,9

23

nume.anal

15

18,5

0,8

24

alge.geom

17

27,5

0,6









2.1

 The last column's average is 2.1 (outlayer 9.9 is excluded )

 All these people are smart but none is a genius. A normal human being
cannot discover a significant new fact of science twice a year. But the
“publish or perish” command exerts on him the feeling of being in danger of
losing his job if the paper is not forthcoming. As a consequence he may
fake research to produce papers.

 While working in industrial concerns I wrote progress reports to my
supervisors about the project I was engaged in, but there was no
paper-making for journals in the production milieu. The impression I
derived from the Academy is that they are not doing science but a "show of
science". The theory advanced in papers has a merit if it eventually finds
its way to benefit society, otherwise bullshit is financed by We the
People.

 Fabio Vicentini, PhD
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