Tenure track & Auschwitz track

My job, as I see it, is to convince you over the course of the life of this blog that the tenure track, intellectually speaking, is not that different from the track at Auschwitz, the one with the little girl in the red coat.

Both tracks were designed to keep overwhelming numbers of untutored geniuses from competing for the too few good jobs that the tutored un-genius children of un-tutored geniuses regarded as their own - by simple birthright.

(Most educated people today are half aware that large numbers of bright, driven Jewish scholars tried to get some of the relatively few academic jobs available in the 1920s and 1930s .

And that this badly rattled the the equally bright but not so driven Aryan and WASP students expecting those same jobs as their birthright.

Columbia University's solution was quotas ; Chelmno used gas.)

small "m" modernization

Open commensality, in fact global commensality, is the inevitable end result of the unconscious process of modernization.

In self conscious reaction against modernization a new form of the ancient black art of closed commensality, one involving hierarchical selection and certification procedures, arose.

As much against the simultaneous and self conscious ending of a land-based noble aristocracy as against the unconscious arise of modernization.

Big "M" Modernity

Thar reaction we now know as the supra-ideology of Modernity.

Today's tenure track and peer review - together with yesterday's Auschwitz train track, are the very pinnacles of achievement for Modernity.

The retort that 'to a hammer everything looks like a nail', has never really lost its sting because so many of us have seen it ring true in the lives we live.

Let us see how accurately it describes Modernity's science.

Land aristocracy almost instantly replaced by Professional aristocracy

The passage, beginning in the 1830s, of the various Reform Acts in Great Britain, then the globe's leading edge power, signalled the slow death of a land based noble aristocracy.

I do not consider it at all a coincidence that, at that very same point in time, the student bodies of universities and colleges began to rapidly change their character, becoming dominated by the driven and the competitive.

No longer did Daddy extract the rents from thousands of acres of prime farm land to buy an Army commission for his surgeon son.

Instead wealthy, connected Daddy bought 25 years of extremely expensive education, from childhood tutors and holiday foreign grand tours, prep school, the best university money could buy its way into, grad school and post-grad specialist training overseas.

Then surgeon sonny got a commission in the military, after displaying his considerable credentials and passing a tough series of exams - open to all (with similar extensive credentials) - 'on his own merits'.

To professional science , every natural event looks like a tenure procedure...

Science had once been an amateur activity, open to all who loved it - allowing untutored geniuses from poor families, people like Michael Faraday, to secure world fame for their discoveries.

Jealous tutored un-geniuses envied the untutored geniuses that the open commensality of amateur science threw up.

They tried (successfully) to create a scientific world where 'who you knew' (who was your academic mentor, what institutional letterhead was your grant application written upon) once again became far more important than 'what you knew' (the actual discoveries you had made).

Soon these would-be professional scientists had created a closed commensal hierarchy of worth.

At the top, the only ones with a good salary, a secure job for life and a direct line to the media and the powerful were the full professors and department heads at the biggest research universities.

These positions had been obtained as much by luck as by effort, family money and genius.

Connections, dad's money, sheer hard work and raw genius could only take one so far.

For one had to also have the acute political sense of what were likely to be the up and coming sub-disciplines when one was forty, paddle to those pools and always swim well within their circumscribed intellectual worlds.

Espousing the 'wrong' intellectual theories - in their eyes - before tenure was fatal. After tenure, you remained alive. Remained alive as an associate professor for life - just barely tolerated by your ever collegiate colleagues.

Peer review gatekeepers guard the sacred flame

Always, always there were endless peer review gatekeepers to ensure the continued purity of the sub-discipline's sacred flame.

Peer gatekeepers always were about : busy deciding who got into graduate schools, into tenure streams, got the grants, the conference invite, book contracts from the biggest university presses, invites to honour-based academic societies, calls to serve on government commissions.

On and on.

You and I could take all this as a bit of a joke - the sort of things that we tutored un-geniuses simply must do to live happy and fairly productive lives.

But when science's peer review hammer heads out into nature to do some real work , trouble ensues - for now every looks like a nail.

Survival of the fittest, normal and deviant, lives worthy and unworthy of life, lower and higher fungi, virulent and avirulent bacteria are just some of many similar sounding modernity era scientific concepts.

And today - to me - they all seem like direct echoes of the selection processes that so dominate the lives of the academic and professional scientist then and now ...

Academic Peer Review and the Breen Office : can you tell the difference ? Is there a difference ?

Did Hollywood's notorious Joe Breen spend his entire career defending normal movie making within the current movie-making paradigm , rather than encouraging new voyages into untravelled waters ?

Is that how social scientist Thomas Kuhn would have regarded the Academy of Film Producers' reviewing activities, if he had looked at them instead of the Academy of Scientists ?

We'll never know - but it is worth asking ...

"Open Commensal Publishing" ?

Anyone in the world can write it. Anyone in the world can read it. Anyone in the world can critique it.

Post-publication peer review ---- by seven billion peers .....

Open Commensal Publishing : because on climate change , pace President Obama or the NAS , 7 billion heads are better than one or even 2000

Open Commensal Publishing simply means that anyone should have a right to publish --- without either commercial , professional or academic gatekeepers pre-censoring that right.

Laws of Libel still apply.

And peer (and non-peer) reviews still happen under this approach --- as they do now, after publication --- whether that publication was pre-vetted or not.

Self published works , to many of us alert to typos and woefully inaccurate fact-reporting , seem to be no better and no worse than the work published after vetting by commercial editors, press gallery journalists with journalism degrees, and by academic editors and pre-publication academic reviewers.

The best have never needed a commercial publisher , a journalism degree , tenure or a PhD to be able to contribute to a culture's intellectual life.

The second-best, however, do.

They need that validation, to reside behind the wagons of some sort of aristocracy - to feel proud to be inside its closed commensal publishing, to be able to offer up whatever it is that they are capable of.

Too too often professionalism is merely the last refuge of the second best.

I have never sought that refuge but I also number myself as one of those second best, as perhaps you are too.

We second best and second rate never can tell where the true flashes of untutored and unfettered genius will briefly emerge and then vanish ---- and we can't afford to stifle any of them , not with the state this planet is in right now.

Open Commensal Publishing is simply the Cabinet of All the Talents needed to address our current global crisis ....

Freemium vs Open Access Tracts vs Open Commensal Publishing

Freemium

Self Published e-books currently has strong connotations that the self-publishing author intends to make money off their work at some point in time.

Partly this connotation is driven by the fact that the best avenues to put self published e-books before the worldwide public (such as Amazon) are all themselves profit-seeking and distributing permanently free e-books will only lose them money rather than make them money.

So they simply won't distribute* self-published work that remains permanently free-to-read.

Because what really keeps afloat this connotation that self-publishing authors seek profit is that it is overwhelmingly true.

The majority of the self-published only appear to embrace a free-to-read ethos because they tend to release the initial books or chapters in a larger work for free - permanently or just for a limited time -  hoping enough readers prove willing to pay good money for the rest of the work.

This is really an ancient version ("loss-leader") of a seemingly 21st century model from the world of apps , freemium : give away the basic app and hope to sell premium features to a sizeable minority of the resulting users.

There is still a form of implicit censorship within all such profit-seeking self publishing, of course.

It is the self-censorship of those who, in seeking profit , tends to write what their potential audience wants to read.

Open Access to closed Group-Think : academia's closed commensality

Still at least part of most self-published world is free-to-read , while the author and publisher retain copyright control ---- so how then is this really different from the academic world's copyright-retaining Open Access free-to-read approach ?

Well for a start, and tellingly, self-publishing is detested by the academic priesthood .

This is because it is truly open to all : all would-be-authors and most frighteningly , all would-be-ideas.

Open Access : to the closed world of academic group-think

Amazon's self publishing division only rarely refuses to carry a book because of its content and no group of fellow authors (self-published or otherwise) ever sits in judgement deciding whether a self-published work should be allowed to be published.

Ultimately there is peer review --  but of an ancient , cumulative and permanent sort.

This peer review can ensure an author never sells a book , other than to their mother , or it turns a book into an enduring classic that is taught in schools, worldwide, for centuries to come.

Because , unlike in the cosseted and closeted world of the scholar the reviews of their fellow authors (peers) , along with those of ordinary readers, do indeed come - in spades, but in public , no holds barred - and only after that initial independent publication.

Musical producers - to this very day - do not bring their new work before their fellow peers on Broadway or the West End and beg them to allow them to bring their new musical out in competition with the musicals currently running.

And until the 1950s, nor did scholars.

They could independently publish via a commercial for-profit publishers - in mainstream magazines or in books - and yet have that work evaluated formally by their peers before they got tenure or a grant.

They are still free to write books , or blog or  even post articles on non-peer reviewed open access depositories --- but this time-consuming work will not count towards receiving peer-reviewed promotions or getting peer-reviewed grants --- no matter how popular or useful this work may be.

Advising a President counts - inside this academic Beltway - far less than publishing me-too articles in a specialized journal that even the few specialists in that sub-field rarely read extensively.

Today , Socrates and Plato would need to have a PhD, an academic position (in practise tenure, and at a well known research university) and have their work pre-approved by peers in their sub-field before it could be published in an scholarly journal or university press.

Only then would it be taken seriously by academics.

The days of untutored longshoremen offering up their thoughts on moral philosophy and being taken seriously are long gone.

In earlier times, before peer-review hardened into dogma (for largely atheist academics !), longshoreman Eric Hoffer's THE TRUE BELIEVER sold more copies than 99.99% of all professors in history have ever sold of their work.

Academics - precisely because of this case-hardened procedure of peer-review - can proclaim their peer pre-approved 'bold' thoughts with the reassurance no public mob or mob of university deans will try to lynch them.

Their peer-reviewed published thoughts might seem bold , but only bold within a paradigm that is consensually held by most of their fellow practitioners around the world.

A US Senator outraged by any such article can't get any traction - any academic expert he consults , from far right to far left , is puzzled : the article seems bold but well within the mainstream of that discipline -- what's the Senator's problem ?

Academic work then , with rare bold paradigm-breaking exceptions , is really less pamphleteering and more Tract writing.

It can appear bold and even bitingly brutal but it works within a consensus and for all its criticisms of that consensus, seeks merely to strengthen it not destroy it.

So let it be understood ,when I call them Tracts with a capital "T" , I refer explicitly to the TRACTS FOR THE TIMES , produced by what is now known as the Oxford Movement -- highly critical but always within the orthodoxy of their own sub grouping of the Anglican church.

Open Commensal Publishing or Pamphleteering

If the commercial author is restrained to write only what their profit-seeking publisher thinks will sell well , their competitor the self-publishing profit-seeking author is also restrained by what they think the audience wants to buy.

Similarly, the Open Access academic author is restrained to reserve their 'best orthodox' thoughts for peer review publication and direct their wildest but perhaps most honest thoughts to something dashed off in their personal academic blog.

(Where it might be wider read than any of their articles in top peer-reviewed journals that each were the product of three years of very hard slogging !)

But Open Commensal Publishing is today's digital pamphleteer, at least as George Orwell understood that term.

At its very best, it can be unrestrained by 'what the commercial publisher, general public or academic peers wants to hear' and instead it can deliver some new - badly needed - insights that would never have made it past those three filtering gatekeepers.

I hope to be a small part of that process...

___________

(* This could change if Amazon convinced enough such authors (who wish their work to be permanently free-to-read and yet to remain within these commercial distribution channels) to allow Amazon to sell subject-related ads intended to be displayed at the beginning, back and middle of their e-book, each ad subject to the author's prior approval. But I digress.)

Is "digital-only" the future of OPEN ACCESS journals - or are pre-imposed PDFs of feature articles the printed 'offprints' of tomorrow ?

A serial that is OPEN ACCESS (the ponderous academic term for what you and I, the little people , would be content to simply call "free-to-read" magazines) can hardly afford to provide endless amounts of mailed out printed "offprints" of its longer "feature" articles when it has *little or no income -- so what is the best solution ?

(*Charging - rather than paying - an author to publish their article can only be justified in academia , where there is an expensive (because labour-intensive) process of peer-reviewing articles before they are published.)

Both authors and readers sometimes rather like having a printed out version of feature articles to carry about.

The quick and dirty PDF offprint is free to email worldwide and the end reader pays only for the computer paper and ink to print it out.

But as conventionally printed out on A4 or letter sized pages, a long feature article is a pain to read.

The endless pages of overly-wide lines of text confounding centuries of typography best practises and it still isn't really "printed" in the sense we think journals or books are printed.

I much prefer the fiction-bound *A5 variant (based upon four print pages roughly 8.5 inch tall by 5.5 inch wide on each single letter sized sheet) of the 19th century story paper or feuilleton.

 Simply by folding the sheets of paper and re-arranging the page order ("imposing") allowed narrower columns of text reading correctly from the front cover to the back cover.

And : the friction of folded page on page holds it all together, much as conventional newspapers hang together without staple binding.

Pre-imposing the conventional PDF is easily done with cheap or free software (I like Cheap Impostor myself) and the end user needs simply to access the increasingly common office duplex computer printer to make up a little chapbook for the article in one go.

Or , do it at home in two stages on old fashioned simplex computer printers.

Presto --- Bob is your auntie's live-in lover ...

(*Truth be told , I really prefer A6 sized books myself - fits (hides) in any pocket, attractive to read , but until A5 computer paper is readily available I doubt many readers have access to the high quality blade paper cutters needed to make the idea do-able !)

After all, sharing unexamined assumptions is what makes two scientists 'peers' in the first place

Logically, the only thing worth examining is the unexamined assumptions that we all hold in common

The only real test of a scientific hypothesis is to have it reviewed by non-peers , for they will probably not share the underlying 'unexamined assumptions' that form the outer limits of whatever space a potentially new scientific theory can inhabit in a particular discipline.

By its very definition, peer review always fails, must fail, any truly ground-breaking scientific effort.

But having new ideas torn apart by non-peers is difficult in practise because many non-peers will fail to fully understand the context of the subtle internal arguments being made in support of that particular hypothesis.

Perhaps pre-publishing a particularly bold and unorthodox hypothesis to the world wide web and inviting critiques from all and sundry might get an useful blend of non-peers and peers tearing it apart.

But for most academics, the hypothesis in their potential article or monograph is simply too limited in 'newness' to be viewed as controversial by more than their fellow specialists.

This is a long roundabout way of saying that if a hypothesis really deserves a Nobel prize, it better have been first rejected by peer reviewers in all of the most influential journals in that scientific field.

Unfortunately, most Nobels are for normal science,  for works that only bites away at exciting new patches of grass , well inside the unexamined assumptions that form a scientific field's boundaries.

The Modern Age (and its Science) had a particularly strongly hegemonic set of unexamined assumptions to hold it together .

 This was in fact the main reason for the strength and uniformity of the underlying beliefs that united Modernity's many warring ideologies.

As a result, when a few minor and extremely non-charismatic  scientists fundamentally challenged those unexamined assumptions, they were not put on trial and burned at the stake, in a scientific sense.

Instead their views merely caused bemusement and puzzlement among the scientists and the science-following educated laity of the Modern Age.

These minor scientists might not even have been aware of how fundamental their critiques were.

Thus they saw no need to further nail their views dramatically, in a Luther-like fashion, upon the nearest lab wall as some sort of troop-raising manifesto.

One minor scientist however, did unite his intellectual opposition to the Modern Age's unexamined assumptions with his moral objections to the Modern Age's behavior and his impact, perhaps as a result, had world wide and prophetic impact.

His name was Henry Dawson (Martin Henry Dawson).

The conclusions he drew about the microbial small and the weak from his pioneering studies in HGT (and other such marvels) , put steel beneath the velvet of his moral objections as to how the human small and weak were being mis-treated by Modernity's Axis and Allied alike in WWII.

His heart was open, agape, to the sufferings of small but his mind was also open, agape, to the brilliance of the small as well.

And that made all the difference......

Was it me who said Peer Review is too often "Lions reviewed by Donkeys" ?

I guess it was.

I mean that all too often 'cutting edge' research  - paradigm-shifting research - will be rejected by normal science reviewers.

Instead, a scholar's work should be posted online and judged, over time, by a jury of all of their peers the whole world around, not just by six anonymous ( and usually over-worked) colleagues.

If it stands up, then, and only then, should it be considered for formal review by a senior journal in their field....

Journal Atherosclerosis may be more dangerous than atherosclerosis itself - to your science career

STATINs vs EGGs

If you are a friend of the statin industry, enduring a successfully peer-review in Elsevier's journal Atherosclerosis must be like being beaten by marshmallows : the true peer-review, much more savage, only happens when your article emerges in the real world and in blogs.

A Dr David Spence, a friend of the statin industry and a foe of all things egg-like, is certainly finding this out in the most brutal fashion --- as are the PR flacks and flakettes at his and their employer, the University of Western Ontario, once upon a time a well regarded research centre.

Are eggs as (almost as) dangerous as cigarettes as the headlines scream (and as the PR spinners at U of Western Ont more subtly, (nudge, nudge, wink,wink) hinted ?

Most experts who looked at the study don't think so.

And these experts are not all shills for the egg industry, not be a long shot.

The scientific value in (or danger of) eating eggs is a highly contested popular science issue --- as SVE believes all scientific issues to be.

Science statements are not just peer-reviewed by six science reviewers cloaked in secrecy and then accepted by an ever grateful public, as if delivered carved on tablets of stone.

Instead the meaning of all such statements are initially constructed by the originating scientists and their friends (including the rarely-critical science cheerleaders in the science journalism trade).

Then these meanings are critiqued by ordinary members of the non-scientific public in organized groups (perhaps as patients' groups and industry groups) as well as by citizens acting alone based on their individual opinions.

The Dance of the Dialectic , revisited 

A sort of dialectic, back and forth, process follows.

Over time a temporary truce is called and a widely-accepted  meaning of that science statement is declared the temporary winner, but new conflict can and does break out at any time.

Science's uncivil War is, in fact, endless. It runs on far longer than any Cold War Warrior could ever imagine...

(FULL DISCLOSURE : I have high blood pressure, believe in the worth of statins and take them. I love eggs but frequently do not get enough exercise and endure far too much stress. I do not smoke or drink....)

rise of THINK TANKs closely followed rise of rigorous PEER-REVIEW

Junk Science is the Think Tank's raison d'etre

If you got away with JUNK SCIENCE before 1945 - and many academics did because rigorous peer-review before publication was not actually all that common back then - increasingly you couldn't so after 1945.

Second rate and lazy scientists and academics who couldn't cut the mustard, cut classes - bailed out of academic life after they had established a few credentials and swam - like rats - to the rising ships of the anti-peer-review-oriented think tanks.

The post-1945 rise of the think tanks were also industry's and the wealthiest families's response to that fact it was getting harder and harder to find real university professors willing to be their denier-liars  for hire.

The two trends met in the middle : both needed each other.

Think tanks thus do serve an useful role for society after all ; providing the first rate sort of home for the second rate sort of scholar....