Inward-facing Circles
I enjoy reading the Chronicle of Higher Education. I'd like to say this is because the articles are so frequently enlightening and well-articulated, which may or may not be the case, but that would be a lie. Instead, I enjoy reading the comments. I enjoy reading the comments of all articles, and the reasons why could be a blog entry of its own.
Today, I'm reading about what this CHE author calls the "Academic Bait-and-Switch," whereby TAs with no education experience are recruited to teach freshman-level writing courses at elite universities.
I'm not going to write about that.
The comments to these articles ponder the failure that is sending underprepared--strike that, unprepared--recent graduates to teach courses which they have never taken. One commenter remarks that it is the function of faculty to produce research first and foremost, and the faculty's graduate students are then expected to spread the knowledge to undergraduate students. Faculty directly spread knowledge by publishing in journals.
Just at the end of this semester, I have been having my UROP students slog through literature review in an effort to add a real research component to their semester. What does this literature review do? Sure, it gives them knowledge on a field and topic. Mostly what it does is find fodder for writing backgrounds and introductions to research papers. My reasoning was that a real research project is meaningless anyway if not conducted with a goal to be published, and this is because the point of research is to share knowledge. Right? And yet this explanation seemed unsatisfying to my poor UROP students, as it was equally unsatsifying to me as a UROP student myself all those years ago. And so I quote this text from the comments of CHE:
Of what societal use is knowledge creation if our institutions of higher education denigrate or ignore the effective distribution of that knowledge? Before you say, "Publication is the way to distribute newly created knowledge," you should know that the people who actually read that stuff have specific reasons:
1) To find fault with your methodology or conclusions. These are the other "knowledge creators" who read academic journals.
2) To try to stay current in their field. These are knowledge creators, but can also include the ones who are mainly concerned with teaching actual students.
3) To fulfill odious reading and "research" requirements for classes. These are the students who are compelled to read the dense, insider-directed (see #1) "knowledge" that is being "created" and published in the journals.
The rest of society does not see published research at all. Occasionally, they might hear a distorted or incomplete version of some of it if it is deemed newsworthy due to being spectacular (physical science) or controversial (social science, and sometimes physical science).
link
I feel like I am committing blasphemy by admitting I agree with this numbered list. Perhaps this is the reason why, after undergrad, I no longer see graduate school glowing as a beacon of empassioned learning. Instead, after seeing what learning is like at a higher institution, the image of what it's like to attend graduate school is rather unflattering; I don't feel comfortable sharing it in text. Let's just say that I've always found groups of people standing in a circle facing inward...creepy.
In high school, I would envision research as the chance to be cutting-edge, positioned on the precipice of a not unspiritual transcension. My vision would probably look something like this: standing above a glowing river the color of the sun in a blue sky; arms outstretched, perhaps pumping; fists clenched; emitting nonsyllabic effusions of rapture; and people standing round in a circle, looking inward, smiling and golf-clapping and nodding.
I feel embarrassed admitting that.
I can now name the different symbols in the image described above. The glowing river is the body of knowledge that is all knowledge. The posture of the body is obviously one of triumph. Those standing round in the circle are peer-reviewers of some posh academic journal, who have all themselves stood in my same precarious position. In my old age, I will join that circle and smile, nod, and golf-clap at the other young researchers who stand on that precipice for the very first time. The image is definitely creepy, and it is, too, completely useless. What is anyone going to do with that?
During and since college, my vision of contributing to the body of knowledge that is all knowledge looks something more like a colony of ants burrowing in the dark, leaving chemical trails and feeling each other out with our antennae, asking, "what's over there? What's over there? Should I go? Should I look?" and eventually we might learn quite a bit about this place where we've made our home.
It's conversation. It's exploration. We're tiny. Stuff is huge. Knowledge is perspective. "The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms is the second." In which ways do academic journals contribute to perspective?
And just yesterday I read an article leading to a comment leading to an article about how a psychology graduate student presented an incomplete dissertation at a convention and the newspapers got hold of it and reported the complete opposite of her presentation... blaming rape victims for being sluts when the student was presenting that men prefer sober women to drunken women.
And why don't more scientists talk to the press? Shouldn't they go to the press with their research findings? Why do they go to expensive, subscription-only academic journals? Because there their research is peer-reviewed; but why shouldn't news corporations employ high-ranking scientists as consultants? There ought to be a better way to communicate science than through an inward-facing circle.
In opposition to these inward-facing circles, I present Emerson's essay, Circles.
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the _termini_ which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs are supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, - knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, - property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like, have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations, and dance before our eyes.
For him, knowledge-seeking is a flame and a passion, and the essay has little relevance to what I've said today, but I present it anyway as solid, thought-provoking reading from one of the cockiest countenances I have ever encountered.
Ah, Emerson. I would love to take his essay Self-Reliance and turn it on its head.
Today, I'm reading about what this CHE author calls the "Academic Bait-and-Switch," whereby TAs with no education experience are recruited to teach freshman-level writing courses at elite universities.
I'm not going to write about that.
The comments to these articles ponder the failure that is sending underprepared--strike that, unprepared--recent graduates to teach courses which they have never taken. One commenter remarks that it is the function of faculty to produce research first and foremost, and the faculty's graduate students are then expected to spread the knowledge to undergraduate students. Faculty directly spread knowledge by publishing in journals.
Just at the end of this semester, I have been having my UROP students slog through literature review in an effort to add a real research component to their semester. What does this literature review do? Sure, it gives them knowledge on a field and topic. Mostly what it does is find fodder for writing backgrounds and introductions to research papers. My reasoning was that a real research project is meaningless anyway if not conducted with a goal to be published, and this is because the point of research is to share knowledge. Right? And yet this explanation seemed unsatisfying to my poor UROP students, as it was equally unsatsifying to me as a UROP student myself all those years ago. And so I quote this text from the comments of CHE:
Of what societal use is knowledge creation if our institutions of higher education denigrate or ignore the effective distribution of that knowledge? Before you say, "Publication is the way to distribute newly created knowledge," you should know that the people who actually read that stuff have specific reasons:
1) To find fault with your methodology or conclusions. These are the other "knowledge creators" who read academic journals.
2) To try to stay current in their field. These are knowledge creators, but can also include the ones who are mainly concerned with teaching actual students.
3) To fulfill odious reading and "research" requirements for classes. These are the students who are compelled to read the dense, insider-directed (see #1) "knowledge" that is being "created" and published in the journals.
The rest of society does not see published research at all. Occasionally, they might hear a distorted or incomplete version of some of it if it is deemed newsworthy due to being spectacular (physical science) or controversial (social science, and sometimes physical science).
link
I feel like I am committing blasphemy by admitting I agree with this numbered list. Perhaps this is the reason why, after undergrad, I no longer see graduate school glowing as a beacon of empassioned learning. Instead, after seeing what learning is like at a higher institution, the image of what it's like to attend graduate school is rather unflattering; I don't feel comfortable sharing it in text. Let's just say that I've always found groups of people standing in a circle facing inward...creepy.
In high school, I would envision research as the chance to be cutting-edge, positioned on the precipice of a not unspiritual transcension. My vision would probably look something like this: standing above a glowing river the color of the sun in a blue sky; arms outstretched, perhaps pumping; fists clenched; emitting nonsyllabic effusions of rapture; and people standing round in a circle, looking inward, smiling and golf-clapping and nodding.
I feel embarrassed admitting that.
I can now name the different symbols in the image described above. The glowing river is the body of knowledge that is all knowledge. The posture of the body is obviously one of triumph. Those standing round in the circle are peer-reviewers of some posh academic journal, who have all themselves stood in my same precarious position. In my old age, I will join that circle and smile, nod, and golf-clap at the other young researchers who stand on that precipice for the very first time. The image is definitely creepy, and it is, too, completely useless. What is anyone going to do with that?
During and since college, my vision of contributing to the body of knowledge that is all knowledge looks something more like a colony of ants burrowing in the dark, leaving chemical trails and feeling each other out with our antennae, asking, "what's over there? What's over there? Should I go? Should I look?" and eventually we might learn quite a bit about this place where we've made our home.
It's conversation. It's exploration. We're tiny. Stuff is huge. Knowledge is perspective. "The eye is the first circle, the horizon which it forms is the second." In which ways do academic journals contribute to perspective?
And just yesterday I read an article leading to a comment leading to an article about how a psychology graduate student presented an incomplete dissertation at a convention and the newspapers got hold of it and reported the complete opposite of her presentation... blaming rape victims for being sluts when the student was presenting that men prefer sober women to drunken women.
And why don't more scientists talk to the press? Shouldn't they go to the press with their research findings? Why do they go to expensive, subscription-only academic journals? Because there their research is peer-reviewed; but why shouldn't news corporations employ high-ranking scientists as consultants? There ought to be a better way to communicate science than through an inward-facing circle.
In opposition to these inward-facing circles, I present Emerson's essay, Circles.
Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck up the _termini_ which bound the common of silence on every side. The parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and even express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. When each new speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and exclusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another redeemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. O, what truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs are supposed in the announcement of every truth! In common hours, society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, - knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, - property, climate, breeding, personal beauty, and the like, have strangely changed their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakes and rattles; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their foundations, and dance before our eyes.
For him, knowledge-seeking is a flame and a passion, and the essay has little relevance to what I've said today, but I present it anyway as solid, thought-provoking reading from one of the cockiest countenances I have ever encountered.
Ah, Emerson. I would love to take his essay Self-Reliance and turn it on its head.