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[Reconnecting Alex Lubet's comments on 18 August to the original Canada /
US Special Ed thread (17 Aug), by a stray whisker, then taking off at fresh
tangents...]
The picture of N.American academia and its rating of various products looks
fairly similar to what I understand of the game in England and Wales up to
recently. (Scotland has always had some differences, possibly stemming
from factors such as a deeper-seated traditional public respect
for 'education', and a longer tradition of facilitating the participation in higher
education by people from economically poor / culturally not-poor families
[Scottish readers, feel free to disagree!] There are also much greater
differences across Western Europe). Actually achieving and maintaining a
broad understanding of the British academic game became more difficult
recently, as its major house journal or chronicle, the Times Higher Education
Supplement, gave up the long struggle to reflect complexity and seriousness,
and finally dumbed down to 'colour magazine' format, publishing less, and
simpler, textual material, shorter articles and reviews, with increasing use of
pictures (often stereotypical) to fill the spaces.
[I'm not sure how far that deterioration reflects a real loss of guts in the Brit
academic game itself, or merely economic factors, or an individual quirk of
the owners. It was a jolt to lose the old THES, and a further kick on the shins
to see its pathetic replacement. It might possibly reflect something to do with
the further expansion of Higher Ed, with fuller integration of the old
Polytechnics into the University system -- they used to do a different
educational job, sometimes rather well, at a less formally 'academic' level,
with more practical applications and less research; but were given the
chance to rename as 'University', and bump staff up from 'lecturer' to more
prestigious titles, as part of an ideology that notionally wishes to offer 'equal
opportunities' to all (younger) people, and then (when that proved difficult) to
enforce an illusory appearance of 'equality of outcomes', while
simultaneously cutting per capita funding and raising various real and
imaginary hurdles for researchers, teachers, students, and other participants;
among which the introduction of student fees is likely to be an increasingly
significant barrier to many of the people whose participation some of the
other moves were intended to encourage. (In this series of mutually
contradictory moves, later historians will try to discern rational patterns that
probably never existed). The majority of academics must be well aware that
they are caught in a system that is evolving rapidly in contradictory directions,
with the money flowing to the strong and the trendy, and freshly-greased
poles to be climbed every month. One can feel some pity for the ill-meshed
cogs and pole-clingers who struggle on with it; also for those who are
struggling to obtain qualifications to join a system that will certainly reject
most of them, and can only disappoint and embitter most of those who
succeed in jumping the entry hurdles.]
Much of the change in UK could perhaps be put down as much to the
population's continuing, deep, and apparently ineradicable social divisions,
as to the structural stupidity of successive governments and the long English
traditions of anti-intellectualism. Yet looking at the broader picture, these
minor dramas of British universities are being played against vast changes
in the global availability of information, and a number of complex factors
accompanying it. A major problem with the information 'explosion' is that the
outcome is mostly 'debris', a vast amount of it is not so much 'knowledge' as
a multitudinous and omni-lingual 'primal scream of humanity', mutually
unintelligible across the world's divisions, yet having some deep resonance
as an expression of 'something' from the gut of the human species.
Astonishingly, the IT developments not only made this swelling cry or howl
audible and viewable to a substantial proportion of humanity, but also
facilitated the development of fairly intelligent search engines to do each day
what even a million human indexers could not accomplish by the joint efforts
of a lifetime. The rise and differentiation of Google, separating text, images
and other media and branches, listing 'Google scholar' separately as
an 'open' version of what ISI and Scopus do more rigorously within the
academic enclave - is a remarkable phenomenon, not devised by the
academic community, but responding to an odd combination of opportunity,
curiosity, new technology, gamblers' itch, and other factors. (Incidentally, I
have been made to understand, by private mail, that an earlier posted
remark, "...and in a desperate moment I even tried Google; {aigh - needed
a strong drink after that experience}", to which I reacted with some
puzzlement and incredulity, was in the nature of a pleasantry, rather than the
assertion of cloistered arrogance for which it might be mistaken).
When one looks at what 'went through' as doctoral theses 20 or 30 years ago
(and what continues to be submitted in some European and Asian
countries), there is some evidence that research methodologies in many
social science fields have now become a good deal more rigorous: the bar
has been raised, for what is accepted in most British universities as 'soundly
based and significant' research outcomes; yet at the same time there has
been a considerable increase in the number of sub-disciplines and inter-
disciplinary studies, and a proliferation of journals kitted out with international
editorial boards, that publish academic materials of widely varying quality --
some of it soundly research based, some of it perhaps interesting but with a
weaker base. In the newer sub-disciplines and inter-disciplinary studies, this
may be inevitable -- working near the indistinct edges of somewhat fuzzy
knowledge, with new and sometimes surprising light being cast on one side
by a discipline on another side, it takes some time for a consensus to
emerge on what can be 'well-founded' knowledge -- that is precisely the
issue, but participants 'at the edge' often have a strong personal investment,
which seldom co-exists with the ability to maintain a balanced critical
judgement and sceptical scrutiny of one's own output, or that of people who
may be competitors for funding, or for journal slots, or promotion, etc.
In the UK, some of the newer (ex-Poly) universities have been, or are
becoming, useful bases for innovative research, partly because they carry
less historical baggage, and can tolerate 'unlikely' inter-disciplinary efforts,
some of which do open up valid new fields -- having little or no prestige to
lose, they can take more risks and accept a higher rate of failures, provided
that some of the gambles pay off. (I believe something similar was noticed in
France 20 years ago, in their younger universities). One of the less
publicised hazards is that students studying for postgraduate qualifications in
some of these 'new' fields may discover, too late, that they have been
unwitting participants in one of the gambles that turns out to have a rather
short shelf-life. So, for example, some kind of 'Disability and X' study
courses may yet turn out to be a few aces short of a winning hand. Some
varieties of disability-related 'therapy' courses are destined to end up not
being formally recognised or endorsed by professional organisations, or not
until 20 years too late for those who take them now. Obviously, people who
get their fingers trapped in some of these slammed doors, or who lose their
digits as the cutting edge of research takes an unexpected swing past them
before disappearing into someone else's research enclave, will be unhappy.
Histories of the development of human knowledge are full of the sorrows of
those who gave it a useful shove -- into the arms of others who were better
placed to collect the kudos and more tangible rewards.
On the larger scale, it looks inevitable that the tsunamis passing through the
information ocean will end up causing much greater changes in tertiary
education. On the one fingerless hand -- ever more desperate (and
unsuccessful) efforts by governments to get outputs controlled, measured,
graded, predicted (and also bent to serve the prevailing ideologies); while
multinational businesses compete more ferociously to capture and
monopolise or at least curtain off huge areas for commercial exploitation,
against the growing 'global commons' trend with its open online archives of
refereed publications, in the health and social sciences. On the other hand --
the means are already available, and experiments under way, for 'Open Web
Universities' using (for example) the world's 20 most commonly used
languages, purveying cumulative instruction in pretty well all fields of
knowledge, incidentally doing so in formats accessible to people with most
of the major impairment categories. (It will be difficult to cater for people with
significant learning difficulties, or intellectual or cognitive disabilities, as
things are presently understood).
It's quite possible that Open Web schools, colleges and universities will not
get much beyond modest experiments in the present half-century -- there is
too much professional investment in the existing infrastructures (shambolic
though they are), and the barriers may be even more rigid in most developing
countries. Yet the serious innovations may come from countries such as
China, which has adopted new IT and the web at breakneck speed, and is
capable of shedding some blood and tears to break traditional strangle-
holds. (China reports 90% adult literacy, and 99% literacy in the 15-24 group.
That would hardly have been achievable using the old method of writing,
which had served for centuries and was heavily entrenched - yet it was
broken open and simplified; with the drawback of heavily reducing the
access of subsequent generations to the previous 4000 years of its written
culture and history). China certainly has the capacity to extend tertiary
education to the masses over 30 years using the net, to produce several
hundred million people with advanced training in new technical skills, who
would continue to work in modestly paid occupations, while becoming richer
in knowledge that can be applied for the common good, such as adaptation
to climate change, (or maybe to extending civilisation to the ignorant masses
of South Asia, Europe and Africa). Whether it will go that way remains
uncertain.
The world's disabled people, or maybe 50% of them, could be significant
beneficiaries, though probably not in ways that would look attractive to very
many at present. The idea of having a 'proper job', with good salary, long
term security, a career structure, an extendable network of social contacts
and affiliations, etc, looks increasingly chimerical. But to get rich in a different
way, feasting daily or nightly on knowledge and understanding, on the world's
music and art, while sustaining physical needs on a standardised 'basic
needs' income, and meeting social needs on the successors of today's
virtual social networks, is perhaps a more credible possibility. (A majority of
the western world's people with significant disabilities are already over 60,
and may have the leisure to make the most of the free educational feast.
Many economically weaker populations are also greying, but at a slower rate
and perhaps still have more younger than older disabled people).
[The speculations above are open to plenty of disagreement. They are not
offered with any strong conviction...]
miles
*****
On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:51:26 -0500, Alex Lubet <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
>Hi miles et al,
>
>My response to miles somehow died yesterday and a couple of you wanted
>to know what I said, so here's a synopsis:
>
>To make a long story a
> > tad shorter, your perceptions of North American academia are correct.
> > Chapters in books, edited volumes, articles in guest edited fora of
> > journals, and even entire books may be held in lower regard than
> > peer-reviewed journals. The precise nuances of ranking vary from field
> > to field, with those that claim to be sciences, like psychology and
> > political science (which I think you call something else that's more
> > accurate) leaning most heavily on peer reviewed journal articles.
> > Another category likely to get chopped is anything that might be
> > regarded as interdisciplinary, like disability studies. At my
> > university, there are all kinds of incentives for interdisciplinary
> > work, but I think they're just to lure us out in the open. The begin
> > decisions on things like tenure and salaries are made by traditional
> > disciplinary departments that regard their own orthodox journals (and
> > sometimes books) most highly. At my last review, all my publications
> > were basically blown off as "interdisciplinary," as I refuse even to
> > consider music journals. The field of my training is just too
>ableist to be my audience of choice.
> >
> > Thanks, miles, for your posts. I save them for future reference and
>have cited
> > your work on several occasions.
>
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