Pleased to appear in Persuasion… Speaking as a seasoned veteran of public broadcasting and Ivy League PR—having spent a formative few years under the wing of PBS icon Bill Moyers and then working for a decade plus as a reporter and flack across Columbia University—there’s one overarching truth about marketing higher education. No matter what the discipline, the very most rigorous scholarly research tends to be pretty damn boring and incremental and hard to promote.
Oh my gosh. Spot on, every word. Except I think you cut STEM too much slack. I was quite often the only person in the way of some bullshit STEM claim just because no one else could or would challenge it. Magic crystals, cold fusion, cloak devices - I saw it all
In my experience most of STEM was pretty solid even as various labs and departments faced a ton of temptations for goosing funding and attention... doesn't surprise me that there's a lot wriggling under rocks in some places!
The stories I could tell! We had faculty and administrators spending tens of millions on Bigfoot, cold fusion, and cloaking devices. I kid you not. If there were funds available to prove the earth was flat, there'd have been a line.
The underlying problem is one of scale. Modern universities were created as elite institutions, where teaching could be balanced with original research, since the relatively few professors would be able to find plenty to research.
But when we scaled them up under LBJ, the basic assumptions were violated. Universities now saw money to be made, and so increased their student bodies, which meant admitting students with lesser abilities, which meant lowering the rigor of their courses. At the same time they had to hire many more professors, which meant accepting those with lower abilities… and yet the more numerous professors were still expected to do original research in ever more mature fields, with fewer useful questions to be answered.
I recall running across a comment in a chemistry textbook that something to the effect that in the nineteenth century, even second-rate chemists could do first-rate research, while in the twentieth century, even many first-rate chemists could only do second-rate research.
That combined to lead to so many papers being published on uninteresting subjects that there were just not enough people who were likely both to care and knowledgeable enough about ever-more specialized areas even to have useful thoughts and critiques.
One of the most impactful courses I ever took in college was on the history of higher ed and what that really meant culturally and institutionally over time. Symbolically academia came to mean so much as to often confuse what the actual mission was originally supposed to be. Certainly there's been decades of shameless self-interested distortion, egads!
Oh my gosh. Spot on, every word. Except I think you cut STEM too much slack. I was quite often the only person in the way of some bullshit STEM claim just because no one else could or would challenge it. Magic crystals, cold fusion, cloak devices - I saw it all
In my experience most of STEM was pretty solid even as various labs and departments faced a ton of temptations for goosing funding and attention... doesn't surprise me that there's a lot wriggling under rocks in some places!
The stories I could tell! We had faculty and administrators spending tens of millions on Bigfoot, cold fusion, and cloaking devices. I kid you not. If there were funds available to prove the earth was flat, there'd have been a line.
The underlying problem is one of scale. Modern universities were created as elite institutions, where teaching could be balanced with original research, since the relatively few professors would be able to find plenty to research.
But when we scaled them up under LBJ, the basic assumptions were violated. Universities now saw money to be made, and so increased their student bodies, which meant admitting students with lesser abilities, which meant lowering the rigor of their courses. At the same time they had to hire many more professors, which meant accepting those with lower abilities… and yet the more numerous professors were still expected to do original research in ever more mature fields, with fewer useful questions to be answered.
I recall running across a comment in a chemistry textbook that something to the effect that in the nineteenth century, even second-rate chemists could do first-rate research, while in the twentieth century, even many first-rate chemists could only do second-rate research.
That combined to lead to so many papers being published on uninteresting subjects that there were just not enough people who were likely both to care and knowledgeable enough about ever-more specialized areas even to have useful thoughts and critiques.
One of the most impactful courses I ever took in college was on the history of higher ed and what that really meant culturally and institutionally over time. Symbolically academia came to mean so much as to often confuse what the actual mission was originally supposed to be. Certainly there's been decades of shameless self-interested distortion, egads!