A propos my recent post, "On the seemingly ever-increasing pace of philosophy", a reader has drawn my attention to this awesome 2007 post my Aidan McGlynn. A few choice excerpts:
'For those who think in terms of completion rates, mine is disgraceful. 'Completion rates' – the very phrase is like a bell. British universities are in the course of being transformed by idealogues who misunderstand everything about academic work…The plan of the idealogues is to increase academic productivity by creating conditions of intense competition. Those who compose what is known, in today's unlovely jargon, as academic and academic-related staff are now to be lured by the hope of gaining, and goaded by the shame of missing, extra payments and newly invented titular status. Their output is monitored by the use of performance indicators, measuring the number of words published per year. Wittgenstein, who died in 1951 having published only one short article after the Tractatus of 1922, would plainly not have survived such a system. Those most savagely affected by the new regime are, as always, the ones on the bottom rung of the ladder: the graduate students working for their doctorates…
The universities have no option but to co-operate in organising the squalid scramble that graduate study has become, in introducing the new 'incentives' for their professors and lecturers and in supplying the data for the evaluation process. The question is to what extent they will absorb the values of their overlords and jettison those they used to have. Once more, it is the graduate students who are the most at risk, for they are in effect being taught that the rat-race operates as ferociously in the academic as in the commercial world, and that what matters is not the quality of what you write but the speed at which you write it and get it into print.
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