Dear Terry,
Without dipping into the substance of our October conversation, I will respond to two comments in your reply.
The context of your quote marks does indeed condition their meaning. The context was a reply to my post. You refer to the “assumptions outlined in your [KF’s] post.” You comment on what you characterize as my assumptions. When you use quotes, you seem to restate my words:
—snip—
My previous post proffered some evidence it might be worth reconsidering the assumption outlined in your post, that universities appeared to be ‘better’ at research, or had some kind of privileged status in understanding or theorising about design related issues. The post wasn’t intended to fill out every detail that would map the situation completely, only to point to several issues that challenged any assumption that ‘universities are obviously best at research’.
—snip—
In numerous posts to this list, you argue for the clarity and precision of mathematical analysis. It may not be possible to achieve mathematical clarity and precision with words. It is possible to avoid the unclear meaning and imprecision that often attends quotation marks when they are used for purposes other than quotes. Quotation marks used for quotes are explicit and clear. Quotation marks used for other purposes rely on implication – they are unclear and usually ambiguous. Whatever you intended, the context of your note gave these marks the appearance of quotations.
Bob Dylan wrote, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” in Subterranean Homesick Blues. This works perfectly well when you want to know the direction of the wind where you stand.
In contrast, you need a weatherman or a meteorologist to know the direction and development of a weather system – and you need comparable expertise to understand the behavior of any complex adaptive system. This applies to the networks of interlinked national research systems and the partly linked network of global research universities.
If you had described two universities in Perth and one or two in the UK, I would not have challenged the description.
Instead, you attempted to describe and critique the global research university system. That’s a system of 500 research-intensive universities, another 500 or so with aspirations to research intensity, and a great many specialized and quasi-independent or fully independent research centers, along with numerous organizations linked to the research university network. This includes organizations such as CERN, NIH, or astronomical observatories. In all these systems, researchers move freely and frequently between organizations inside and outside universities. The global research network operates in roughly 50 nations with some smaller presence in other nations. The systems in Finland, Switzerland, or Italy are quite different to those in Hong Kong, Australia, or the UK, each of which differ from each other.
The general common features and goals of the modern research university are relatively similar. Administrative systems, governance, program management, and relations to national research and industrial systems tend to differ significantly. This is even the case with respect to such systems as graduate education and research training (see, f.ex., Clark, 1993). This is particularly true of those qualities and attributes that distinguish roughly 1,000 research universities from the other 13,000 or so universities in the world.
I don’t suggest that you need a role in university management to understand these systems. There are other ways to get the appropriate background and experience. Your post did not seem to reflect those kinds of experience and understanding.
A weathervane works well enough on one farmer’s barn. It won’t show the wind two valleys over or indicate rain in the next state.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | University Distinguished Professor | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia | [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> | Mobile +61 404 830 462 | Home Page http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design/people/Professor-Ken-Friedman-ID22.html<http://www.swinburne.edu.au/design> Academia Page http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman About Me Page http://about.me/ken_friedman
Guest Professor | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China
--
Reference
Clark, Burton R., ed. 1993. The Research Foundations of Graduate Education. Germany, Britain, France, United States, Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
--
Terry Love wrote:
—snip—
You wrote <snip> You have been placing your own reading of my thoughts in quote marks as though you are quoting my words.<endsnip>
Quote marks are widely used for other purposes than quotation. I used 'quote marks' in the other common senses - as a marker of potentially different meanings, for irony and for emphasis. This should be obvious from the context.
In answer to your comment about experience in university management, one doesn't 'need to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows'.
—snip—
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|