Drama of Academia

The Fall

The word “academia” used to carry a heavy weight, lifting which required one’s serious consideration and commitment. Although the ideological foundations of academia sound very desirable, even to this day, the practical implementation of those ideas has not yet come to fulfill the desired standards. In fact, the implementation of academic procedures is so significantly and very visibly different that you would have a hard time believing the good intentions of the first caveman who carved glyphs onto a rock. Let’s look at 5 core ideaological foundations of the academia:

• The scientific process must be in the pursuit of knowledge for truth’s sake only.
• Scientific claims and statements ought to be scrutinized in a truth-seeking manner without involving one’s emotions, personal biases, malicious intentions, reputation, and status.
• Science ought to be as accessible as possible to the public without any discrimination.
• Academic freedom must be everyone’s right to be able to question and/or doubt even the “prohibited”.
• Scientific discoveries and inventions ought to be pursued in the good faith that they will benefit society.

Sounds nice, right? I bet it does. Guess what, though? The 5 principles mentioned above do not dictate how things should be anymore. Let’s see how:

• Incentives in academia often lean towards reputation and status.
• Many academic institutions and universities allow unfairness and unjust judgements in the evaluation of one’s scientific work based on discriminatory factors such as status.
• Administrative and financial processes in academia have become a burden on students’ lives.
• Students are hesitant to ask the “dumb” questions because of the humiliation of the so-called education givers, let alone openly doubt the “prohibited.”
• Scientific achievement is sometimes claimed unethically without any academic integrity, only benefiting the self.

Potential Solutions

1. Freedom of Thought

The first part of the solution is to have freedom of thought in the scientific community. Freedom of thought may sound like another name for freedom of speech, but it is something slightly different, in my opinion. I am not saying you should be able to say whatever the hell you want to say. Freedom of thought is about being able to think whatever the hell you want to think. The two concepts are obviously different in this regard. In today’s academic standards, one is not even capable of thinking freely because such an ability is constantly being taken away from us. As unfortunate as it may sound, it is what has been happening over the decades. I don’t know how much of it has been intentional. You see, if you take one’s freedom of thought away, you can let him keep his freedom of speech. Having the right to speak your mind freely does not mean you will say something sensible and actually revolutionary without coming up with the right thought in your mind first. Speech is a part of actualized thought, like a limb movement. Once you don’t have the free thought to begin with, you won’t get the desired by-product. So, this subtle difference may even potentially be used to falsely persuade people to believe in the power and fairness of the rights they were given. It is like letting someone buy as many expensive cars as he wants, but only giving him 5 bucks for it. It is not too hard to get the smell of hypocrisy in the air sometimes.

To implement freedom of thought, an academic institution must change its policy from maximizing the institutional rankings (for feeding self-interests) to maximizing independence in problem-solving among students, researchers, and fellow scientists. The Goodhart law – when a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure – holds for academic institutions and universities. When having a higher graduation rate (or something like that) becomes the target, you get what you optimize for, resulting in a perverse incentive where students start memorizing subject(s) for efficiency, teachers and professors down notching difficulty of exams for preserving their jobs, organizations collecting money from students’ misfortune/retakes making it a strong burden in their future, and so on. Where is the science on that? Where is the freedom of thought? Let students think on their own, unafraid of public humiliation, because the opposite creates insincere, fake clowns. Let them be creative and independent while solving problems, because the opposite creates dumb asses who end up polluting the workspace of those who are really passionate about what they do. Let them be proud of their little yet self-earned discoveries and inventions instead of laughing at them for their works’ imperfections and flaws because the opposite creates cowards scared of taking actions and doing something notable once in their life.

2. Reputation-Free Society

Humans possess the glance of egotistical evil in their nature. This somewhat dark side of humans is very social and seeks constant attention. Reputation must not be something people care about a lot within the scientific community. It is the tastiest food of the egotistical evil. In an actual academic system, one should not aim for the possession of a higher reputation among others. What is worth aiming for instead is to gain access to higher wisdom in order to solve problems one wishes to solve. Reputation is only useful for guidance in the scientific process of truth-seeking; it must not be used for reasons such as unjustly suppressing the voices of those unpossessed with as high reputation. In other words, reputation and status must not give anyone the right to decide on behalf of others; instead, reputation and status ought to be used to give guidance in good faith to those who might need it.

Some people in academia may sometimes consider themselves or their work very serious and almost holy in some sense to be able to stand one row ahead of others. They may think that they have a very special character or a god-given talent in some way. In fact, it is not specific to academia, but I will only talk about academia since it is the main subject of today’s drama. Most of these people pretend to be very sophisticated and sincere, but they do not appear very sophisticated or sincere behind the curtains. Behind the masks lie control freaks. I do not want to over-exaggerate things, but the fact that such egotistical people get to decide and have a word on serious matters that affect others’ lives one way or another is a recipe for an uninformed labor seeker to later get an intermittent explosive disorder when hit with the harsh reality over and over again.