Academia is worth fighting for

Many criticisms of academia are floating around — I’ve made some of them myself — including: peer review is inefficient and unfair, academic publishers are greedy parasites, academics are woke self-righteous lefty loons, universities are incompetently managed, universities racially discriminate in the service of their lefty loon ideology, p-hacking and questionable research practices are discomfitingly widespread, and prestigious universities have too many outright fraudsters.

These are all somewhat to extremely valid! But people are rarely balanced in their criticisms. And so….

We now need some balance.

Most scientists are not frauds

I hope it’s obvious, but outright fraud is rare in academia. Being found out is career-ending. Most academic papers have multiple authors: to commit fraud you either have to conspire together, greatly increasing the risk, or to do weird, suspicious things like providing data to your coauthors with no paper trail. Even if fraud were easy, the academic career path is not a first choice for a crook. You take hard exams in your chosen topic, then write a dissertation, all while being paid very little. At the end you still aren’t paid a lot, especially compared to the other things a smart person could do. These are not attractive conditions for the greedy and unscrupulous.

The grey area of questionable research practices is a much bigger problem. I’m pretty sure some of my earlier papers have some p hacking or secret multiple hypothesis testing. If so, this isn’t because I was dishonest or desperate to get a job, it’s because I was naïvely excited to see my first significance star, and also just didn’t know how easy it was to mislead oneself by trying out a few different analyses, then telling myself a credible story to explain the results post hoc. In general, the whole academic community was less aware of the problem back then. Now we are doing better, and norms of research design, pre-specified hypotheses, and so on are gradually improving. Again, this is because most of us are genuinely interested in finding things out.

Peer review does a lot of good

Everyone hates peer review because anonymous people get to tell you your work is shit. We all remember that one guy and his unfair comments which you already addressed, God damn it, in footnote 12. He’s a folk devil who goes by the name of “Reviewer 3”. I have a rap lyric about that jackass. We rarely remember Reviewers 1 and 2, whose thoughtful comments actually improved the paper. All my papers have been improved by peer review, even if the annoyance and delay wasn’t always worth it.

But the social value of a scientific paper is different to its individual value for my career. In particular, science is valuable because it excludes stuff. Some suggest we should just publish whatever we like. For an individual, sure, that can be valuable, and I’ve written up results here myself. But what if everyone did that? What if there were no peer review at all? The answer to that counterfactual is here. Ugh. If you remove obstacles to scientific publishing, the equilibrium outcome is not the same scientists writing the same papers and getting published quicker.

I think even very clever people can suffer intellectually when the wholesome discipline of the reviewing process is removed. Case in point: Bryan Caplan. He’s a very smart and fun guy and when he’s interesting, he’s really interesting. But he doesn’t care about publishing in top journals. He writes what he feels, without having to face a finicky audience tasked with fault-finding. He can even do cartoons. As a result, his work sometimes has the shining clarity of the man who has mistaken the map for the territory. His support for open borders is one example. But nothing beats his argument that the mentally ill just have different preferences from the rest of us. “The stupidest idea I’ve ever heard” is a terrible cliché but this may really be the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. It deserves mockery, not counter-arguments, but for sure Scott Alexander, who can never pass up a chance to prove the earth is not flat, has written several.

Enough Substack gossip — peer review is very imperfect, and deserves to be improved to catch up with the modern world. We need new ways to find the good stuff in an ocean of dross:

But peer review is a way and it still provides value.

Springer and Elsevier are absolutely parasites, though.

Not every unpopular view gets cancelled

The image people have of the Campus Cancel Culture Craze is of ideological zealots running amok. There are zealots, but I think a bigger background cause is cowardice and timeserving. It’s not the impassioned leftwingers; it’s the ones who come up in the corridor afterwards and mumble “a lot of us agree with you, but….” (But my spine has been filleted.) It’s not the Students for Decolonization and Beheadings; it’s the Diversity Deans.

Cover of Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue. The good old days.

Despite this, many academics actually believe in freedom of thought. You can live as a conservative in academia. Niall Ferguson does. (Doubtless celebrity helps.) Occasionally people may hug you and call you “their conservative friend”. Just don’t touch my hair.

Some level of leftwing bias is just natural. Small-business owners and pensioners lean right. Students, intellectuals and people in large public organizations lean left. Obviously in some parts of academia this has gone to extremes — but often these are the least interesting bits.

Big places may be worse. They certainly top the list of cancellation attempts from the left. But do you actually need to be there?

Stay in and fight

Academia’s flaws are fixable. It’s important that alternatives are available, like new universities or think tanks. But it’s also important that people shouldn’t be discouraged from going into academia. That will make the whole problem self-fulfilling. If you are in academia, you should loudly and publicly defend free speech and open enquiry. Equally important, you should stand up for curiosity and open enquiry and push back against bureaucracy, greed, careerism and status-seeking — values which don’t belong in our groves. And if you’re thinking of a career in science, you should not be put off: finding out about interesting things, and telling other people, is still one of the best known ways to have fun. The publishers, frauds, terrible admin and timeservers are annoying fleas on a basically good dog.

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If you enjoyed this, you might like my book Wyclif’s Dust: Western Cultures from the Printing Press to the Present. It’s available from Amazon, and you can read more about it here.

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