Ivory Towers

This blog fell into disuse during 2008.  Today I have decided to renovate it through layout and title changes.  Where once it was rather plain it now has a little colour.  And the previous title - Non academic work - was clearly cumbersome and far too literal.  Moreover, I am certain that I cannot escape my academic ways.  It is too late for that.

Now renovated I must resurrect it through production.

The new title refers to what has been and what will, I trust, follow.  And that is discussion of ideas with the aim of developing perspectives and possibly testable theories.  The conceit is that a blog will enable a certain freedom that peer-reviewed organs will not, and a slight liberty with respect to academic strictures.  The blog description, however, refers to Ivory Towers and I wanted to explain that choice.

The term Ivory Tower has had various historical uses as Wikipedia relates.  Its modern usage is negative.  Academics hide from the real world in their Ivory Towers and engage in useless obscurantism.  I have received this criticism every now and then, and my quip is that the view is much better from the Ivory Tower than it is at ground level.  To some extent I believe this, as academic activity is a form of surveying, where perspective helps.  But it is also a process of excavation and mining, trying to find the deeper structures underlying nature.  The writing in this blog will sketch a certain viewpoint from my current floor in the Ivory Tower.  Any detailed scientific work will happen elsewhere.

Another reason for this reference is a growing concern with the current bureaucracy around auditing academic output. In the U.K. we have the Research Excellence Framework (REF), and we are about to be assessed from the autumn of 2013.  In effect, universities submit subject areas to an audit of outputs in order to achieve direct funding from the government for a number of years.  Outputs mean different things to different disciplines, but in my own it is academic articles that count, and only really empirical articles at that.  Reviews and theory are less well regarded.  In the forthcoming audit the impact of research is also to be assessed.  Impact means many things but it can be reduced to a requirement to demonstrate the socioeconomic benefits of one's research.  In essence it is an index of practical use.

Whilst it is not the case that all research is expected to have impact, it is the case that all submissions must demonstrate an agreed proportion of impact relative to their overall research output.  So some researchers can happily pursue blue-sky research, just so long as some others have impact.  And of course, this impact agenda has influenced many funding bodies including the government run Research Councils, who look for statements of pathways to impact in grant applications.  This will have a broader effect than the REF.

REF gives a clear signal to my discipline.  Data driven papers are of premium value, even though we know that for logical reasons as well as reasons of empirical fallibility such papers are almost certainly wrong; and also a sign that as a discipline we should be directing our efforts to address key societal issues.

Data is golden and experiments are essential.  I am committed to a Popperian view of science.  But theory is also essential and the point of experiments is to grow theory.  Theories need reviewing and weighing against one another.  None of these actions are reasonably separable. 

Academics are mostly paid from the public purse and I am convinced we owe society a debt.  But debt is repaid through our work and also through our teaching.  Universities should incorporate pragmatic activity but they must also remember that pursuit of understanding for its own sake yields fruit further down the line.

All told, the impact agenda is in danger of discounting the future in favour of more immediate, practical yield.  It also feels like a capitulation to those who accuse academics of living in Ivory Towers.  What many of us see as surveying the problem space, as trying to understand what is before us, must not be seen as obscurantism.  We stand to lose too much if we allow that to happen.