🇺🇸 Philosophy Politics Economics & Liberal Arts College Prof in 🇳🇱 | Catholic⚓ | Likes, Follows & Retweets = curiosity =/=identity | Opinions: My Own
The Hague, The Netherlands
Joined October 2010
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This needed revision to be perfect:
The problem is that CULTURE, funding and career progression models favour 'research'. ACADEMICS should be doing a lot less 'research' and a lot more scholarship. The difference is that research tries to find out new things, whereas scholars relearn, INTEGRATE, SYNTHESIZE, EMBODY and pass on old things INTEGRATED WITH THE NEW.
There lies most of my universal theory of university decline.
If only some tradition of education existed in the West we could revive to accomplish this.
Sigh.
Too bad.
Science is not *merely* the systematic search for truth, nor is its simulation, actually science.
The 'Scientific method' is the systematic search for truth (to the extent such a thing can be said to exist at all).
Science is not merely the method of acquiring true sentences to put on a shelf. It is a body of knowledge built on a tradition using methods of science to evaluate and create contribute to that body of knowledge.
Likewise, mathematics is not a series of proved statements. That is merely the output of researching mathematics on the basis of mathematical knowledge grounded in tradition.
Nor, to hit an old note, is an academic or scholar defined by research output, or modules successfully taught. These are outputs of scholarship, but are not scholarship itself. Scholarship is the formation of knowledge in oneself. This involves research like and teaching activities, but may never be realized as a written works published or degrees conferred. Socrates, for instance, was a scholar.
(a) That adjunct given binder of lectures of material they barely grasp than successfully conveys a unit -perhaps even better - than someone who knows them deeply and achieves lower results is not a scholar.
(b) A researcher who is basically a paper technician who 'knows the methods in the literature' and who can 'direct AI to write a paper that will pass peer review' is actually not a scholar.
If the subject is science, they are not scientists doing science if they are doing (a) and (b).
If the subject is math, they are not mathematicians doing math if they are doing (a) and (b).
This goes on...
So, no, it is not some hobby that serves the emotional needs of mathematicians, but it is an activity for which their formation - and not proofs - is the primary defining identifying concern.
And, once lost, would mean that we no longer have humans that can evaluate and understand the AI proofs.
old note:
xitter.cf/ProfBZZZ/status/211414…
We have the job. It's called "professor" or "lecturer".
Historically these jobs were geared towards engaging in scholarship and passing on that scholarship,tradition,and the fruits that activity through teaching, lecture, and writing.
The job predates the PhD, and there's a good argument that the research centricity of the PhD made a damn mess of it.
Chefs kiss. Just lovely.
My friends know my wife is a huge anti-Trumper. She believes firmly that he's gonna seize permanent power and never let go. She knows this in her soul and cannot be dissuaded from the certainty by any argument. I know. I've tried.
Setting aside the fact the man is *old* and has no desire for a third term, I keep coming back to the fact that Trump has become the defining personality of American politics in the 21st century. Doesn't matter if I think he's a showboating showman with no real statesmanship. He towers over Obama, W. Bush, every Senator, every Congressman, every Governor, etc.
Everyone and everything just pings and pongs off the hull of the U.S.S. Trump and it's all reactive politics all the time. Even the DSA—who are Communists cloaked in Millennial metrosexualism—just hurl rotten fruit at this guy. Using him to hype up their growing base. If he did not exist they would have to invent him.
The Orange One is the dragon breathing fire across the American political scene, and the number of jousting pugilists who tilt at the Orange windmill is legion.
He defines who they are. Never the opposite. And I suspect in many ways this is what drives their hate.
Brandon Zicha retweeted
Who knew?
Rock-solid piece: Oliver himself appears in my upcoming "Confidently Wrong" book - as part of a whole network of hacks who use massaged data to terrify people.
HBO's @LastWeekTonight has a long track record of citing social science findings without the appropriate context, massaging them to support whatever point @iamjohnoliver is trying to make.
Brandon Zicha retweeted
This has been the argument. It's increasingly total nonsense. It wasn't when Humbolt articulated it... But nearly all the concerns Weber raised about it have been realized.
Firstly, the massive overproduction of research product doesn't increase knowledge. It's mostly unread, of questionable quality, and unvetted. This has been a growing problem.
Second, research centricity has overemphasized specialization, leading to disconnection between the narrow set of questions they focus on. But, good teaching (and practical relevance) is built ona solid understanding of holistic connection between ones area of knowkedge and other areas of knowledge.
Third, indeed, research centricity encourages even hyperspecialization within fields in order to quickly move to production in a literature. Most PhDs don't even know their own discipline very well beyond their specialization anymore.
Fourth, all the benefits of research for teaching don't actually require engaging in any of the massive publishing infrastructure and output. We know this because that has only existed in the last 60 years or so. All the great PhD research from before recently was vastly sparser and not subjected to the intensity of today. But that process now is the majority of an acwdemic's activity and the entirety of their career focus.
Consequently, the core hypothesis one might derive from your statement is almost never born out: the best researchers are almost never the best teachers. Indeed, it is usually the reverse today.
That being said... The activity of research and scholarship that contributes to teaching are identical. Research isn't pathological. It's centricity is...
We have the job. It's called "professor" or "lecturer".
Historically these jobs were geared towards engaging in scholarship and passing on that scholarship,tradition,and the fruits that activity through teaching, lecture, and writing.
The job predates the PhD, and there's a good argument that the research centricity of the PhD made a damn mess of it.
I actually think this problem is a big part of the larger story of the decline of university function, prestige and perceived relevance.
This needed revision to be perfect:
The problem is that CULTURE, funding and career progression models favour 'research'. ACADEMICS should be doing a lot less 'research' and a lot more scholarship. The difference is that research tries to find out new things, whereas scholars relearn, INTEGRATE, SYNTHESIZE, EMBODY and pass on old things INTEGRATED WITH THE NEW.
There lies most of my universal theory of university decline.
Brandon Zicha retweeted
Doctor means teacher in Latin. The title was always about teaching until the Germans overcomplicated it in the latter 1800s (imagine that) and everyone else followed suit.
As a political scientist, I ask other political scientists... is there a greater example of a more obviously foreseeable case of campaign choice between obvious and catastrophic political malpractice that you can think of?
I am struggling to think of one. I mean, there are other contenders but few I can think of are as obviously foreseeable as this.
Brandon Zicha retweeted
"Professional development" but that means reading really good books with really smart and wise people
Brandon Zicha retweeted
Research *is* important. You can think that, and even think it is endangered in many ways, without denying that its role in the university has become poisonous.
Brandon Zicha retweeted
Those who doubt the significance of the distinction being pointed to here, or who are puzzled by it, ponder the spectacle over the past month in my own academic home of mathematics in the wake of the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize solution and the later dump of proofs for 700+ open problems by OpenAI. The idea that a career goal might be mining these manuscripts for understanding is being greeted, if not as anathema, then certainly as a lower order of academic effort.
This needed revision to be perfect:
The problem is that CULTURE, funding and career progression models favour 'research'. ACADEMICS should be doing a lot less 'research' and a lot more scholarship. The difference is that research tries to find out new things, whereas scholars relearn, INTEGRATE, SYNTHESIZE, EMBODY and pass on old things INTEGRATED WITH THE NEW.
There lies most of my universal theory of university decline.
That - again - is confusing the product or activity of value for the source of value.
Reading challenging books happens for a reason. It is motivated by a vision of self-development and of the value in inhabiting other minds and engaging with ideas in an immersive non-instrumental manner.
It requires an anthropology of the human that values reading challenging books.
The problem we have is not a 'what to do' problem.
It's a 'why to do' problem.
The value questions that Weber said the Research University model forbade us from taking seriously, now need to be taking seriously if any human research and knowledge accumulation and transference is going to survive.... after all... why should we read challenging books or do complex math, when the computers can do that for us and explain it like we are 5 year olds?
The answer is a vision of the human that we have abandoned.
Probably should reclaim.
Brandon Zicha retweeted
JD was absolutely looking strong in 2024... a Trump interpreter that could hold his own with journalists and come off looking good to those aware of the media spin. Articulate based answers that appeal to those that know what he is talking about. The 'Cat Lady' debacle was only a debacle with people who don't hate HR.
But since..., it seems like every quarter his political instincts get worse, his presentation less charismatic, and his message and political identity more incoherent. He claims to lead a conservative post-liberal faction, but is in bed with Peter Thiel who's grindset message is antithetical to all the sensibilities of post-liberals other than in being illiberal. He can't seem to say things about AI that don't make everyone upset.
Meanwhile, Marco Rubio seems to be going in exactly the opposite direction.... from a politically floundering insecure incoherence machine to a strident confident politician telling folks to 'grow up' and being more or less right about it.
Politics really is something.
Worse. Some of it isn't. It is actually a sign of the costs of deprofessionalization and disabling of faculty and the utter confusion as to what higher-ed is.
Turns out, if you totally prioritize specialized research output the people you end up getting aren't very good academic adivsors, or mentors, and the skills that they develop are ever more specialized to their domains and of generally less relevance to life beyond. Nor are they encouraged to reflect on it's alternative relevance..
So, combined with youth that are less self-governed, and a mission that keeps adding bits to it such that it is public R&D center, job training center, cultural center, and cultivation center... in a country with lots of lawyers and it turns out you need quite a bit of extra help to keep things going and 'in compliance'.
Worse. Some of it isn't. It is actually a sign of the costs of deprofessionalization and disabling of faculty and the utter confusion as to what higher-ed is.
Turns out, if you totally prioritize specialized research output, and people you end up getting aren't very good academic adivsors, or mentors, and the skills that they develop are ever more specialized to their domains and of generally less relevance to life beyond. Nor are they encouraged to reflect on it.
So, combined with youth that are less self-governed, and a mission that keeps adding bits to it such that it is public R&D center, job training center, cultural center, and cultivation center... in a country with lots of lawyers and it turns out you need quite a bit of extra help to keep things going and 'in compliance'.
Brandon Zicha retweeted
It's true that much bad scholarship is a product of the imperative to say something new. But that imperative is imposed by the structure of the research university. There need to be places where people can read Hamlet in the spirit of recovering the enduring wisdom it contains.
