Academic bullshit

Academic bullshit
© Richard Parncutt 2009-2010

Universities make invaluable long-term contributions to public life in areas as diverse as culture, technology, law, economics, religion and education - so much so that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them. In so doing, however, universities have a remarkable tendency to generate statements that are intentionally not quite true, aka bullshit.

Bullshit is everywhere. It infects not only public institutions (politics, religions, business) but also our everyday life and relationships. Universities are no exception. But since universities are primarily in the business of generating and spreading knowledge, they should be in a better position than other institutions to identify and eliminate bullshit. That is what this page is about.

Bullshit is deliberate distortion of the truth - often for personal gain. It is misleading and insincere. It is not blatant lying, nor is it quite the same as nonsense. It is not funny (Austrian: Schmäh), because generally other people suffer or lose out as a result. Because bullshit is not clearly untrue, it is sometimes hard to identify, criticise and eliminate it. This is encouraging for bullshit artists (German: OpportunistInnen), who feel free to continue with their evil work. The bullshit mounts higher and higher. The consequences can be devastating.

The word "bullshit" is únfortunately not socially acceptable (German: salonfähig) and gives the impression that the author is angry about something. But in fact there is no other word in the English language that corresponds exactly to the above meaning, which is the only reason why I am using it here. I guess the authors cited in the literature list below would say the same thing.

What is academic bullshit? Academia is a collective term for research and teaching at universities (German: Wissenschaft). Academia is about knowledge: research is about expanding it, and teaching is about sharing it. Academic bullshit is bullshit in an academic setting. For example, some academics try to blind their readers by adopting an impenetrable writing style, which makes it difficult for the reader to evaluate the content. That is classic academic bullshitting. But there is much more to academic bullshit than that - as I will attempt to show in the following text.

To understand academic bullshit, it helps to take a quick philosophical look at the idea of knowledge. Knowledge comprises claims that are generally supposed to be true. But what is truth? Well, there is a long philosophical tradition of discussion about the nature of truth - whether it exists at all and if so how it can be identified. Different academic disciplines approach the concept of truth quite differently. But one thing is for sure: however defined or regarded, truth is centrally important for all academic disciplines. Because if something is evidently not true, it is evidently not knowledge, either.

Given this background, the expression "academic bullshit" seems like a contradiction. If academia is about searching for, identifying and sharing the truth, and bullshit is about distorting it, how can academic bullshit exist at all? The reason is evidently that academics do not work for nothing. Like everyone else, they need motivation. Academics are rewarded (by jobs, research grants, prestige and so on) for discovering, expanding or constructing "truth". But it is often difficult to judge the extent to which an academic has succeeded in doing that. So mediocre academics develop the art of tricking others into thinking that they are good at what they do. To cover up their real or perceived inadequacy, they develop the art of academic bullshit.

Academic bullshit is no small problem. Academics may find themselves surrounded by it at all levels - administration, teaching, research. So if an academic is to make significant and lasting progress toward the "truth" (whatever that means), s/he must be skilled in identifying, exposing and avoiding academic bullshit. This, then, is one of the main skills that students should acquire before getting a university degree. Unfortunately, sometimes the opposite occurs - masters of the art of academic bullshit (I guess you could call them "academic bullshit artists" - or just "old farts") naturally and effortlessly pass their art onto their students.

There are two ways to stop academic bullshit artists in their tracks. One is peer review. Academics who are forced to publish their research in good peer-review journals will soon change their ways. Good anonymous reviewers will not put up with bullshit for long. But poor reviewers, alas, may already be up to their necks in their own bullshit. The other way is to train students in the art of critical thinking. An important part of critical thinking is the identification and rejection of bullshit in teaching materials. University students should choose their courses, instructors and supervisors accordingly. That's not as difficult as it sounds, and this page is intended as a step in that direction. Just ask your students to read and discuss it. Rescue them before it's too late.

Academic bullshit is a serious threat to research and teaching everywhere. If universities are worried about their public funding and social relevance, they should take a long, hard, honest look at the bullshitting that is going on within their own ivory tower. The best way to get rid of bullshit is not to accuse individuals of being bullshit artists, but to increase general awareness of what bullshit is so that people recognize it when it happens. Peel back the layers of bullshit, one by one. Expose them, talk about them, and understand why they are there.

Varieties of academic bullshit

Incomprehensibility

If your academic colleagues cannot understand a text that you write, they cannot evaluate or criticize it. At the same time, you can even accuse them of being too stupid to understand it. Or at least imply that they are. If you are not very intelligent yourself, may start to believe your colleagues really are stupid. And so it goes on. That is one of the ways conflicts can emerge in mediocre academic settings. Such conflicts tend to waste a lot of time and money and reduce the academic standard even further.

Incomprehensibility is perhaps the most common and familiar form of academic bullshit. To expose it, we need to be clear what we mean by an "appropriate academic writing style". Academics do not usually write in the style of everyday speech, because everyday speech contains colloquialisms (for which clear definitions may not be universally accepted or found in dictionaries) and repetitions (which in a written text can often be avoided). Moreover, the way academics speak - when for example they present their work at conferences - is different from the way they write, because the reader of a text has the chance to skip from one place to another and read the same sentence several times, but a listener has to follow the temporal course of an argument from start to finish.

For these and other reasons, one might say that an "appropriate academic writing style" is a style in that is concise (saying as much as possible in few words - important especially if you have to summarize an entire research project in a 300-word abstract - and considering that most academics don't have much time to read anything properly) and clear (using terms that are either clearly defined or whose different meanings are discussed in the text so the reader can get a clear idea of what the writer is trying to say). Technical terms, abbreviations and words borrowed from foreign languages should only be used if they are necessary and clearly understandable to the readership. (Incidentally, the German words in italics and brackets in the above text are intended to clarify my ideas to my German-speaking readers, while English-speaking readers might feel they reek of bullshit.) It often helps to avoid technical terms altogether, to open the text to a widership - both within academia in different disciplines and outside of it. Beyond that, the material should be tightly organised and presented in a logical order so that a typical reader will understand it. In that regard, spoken and written texts are rather similar.

Academic bullshitters try to fool their readers by writing in a style that sounds like academic but in fact breaks the above basic rules of academic communication. A text that contains important-sounding words that are not used in everyday communication may sound academic to a reader from outside the field in question, or a student who has not yet been initiated into that field. Such readers can easily jump to the conclusion that those important-sounding words are necessary. They do not want to admit their ignorance and guess that if they keep reading, they will start to understand those words. In academic bullshit, however, these words are often not clearly defined, or not defined at all. No amount of reading will make ever them clear. Even international leaders in the same specific discipline have to guess what they are supposed to mean - which they will not do for long before reading something else. And if those experts cannot understand the text, it is useless. It is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Proof by bullshit

Research is about expanding knowledge. That often involves formulating claims (theses) and then trying to convince colleagues that the claims are true. There are several ways that bullshit can play a role in this process.

Proof by superficial impression: A reader who thinks an idea sounds good but does not really understand it tends to accept it as the truth rather than admit her/his ignorance (which can be embarrassing) or try to understand it properly (which can be hard work). Impressive, complicated jargon is used to impress non-experts. The jargon is deliberately not clearly defined, which gives the writing an aura of mystique. New words are invented, and foreign words and fancy abbreviations are used unnecessarily. Non-experts (including students) may be impressed by this kind of speaking and writing, but experts (people who do research in the same specific area and have a good internationnal reputation) just laugh and press the delete button.

Proof by repetition: If you say something often enough, people will start to believe it. A well-known example: in the period leading up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, political leaders such as George W. Bush and Tony Blair repeatedly claimed that Iraq had been involved in the 2001 terrorist attack on New York and was subsequently developing nuclear weapons. Both points were obviously untrue, but people started to believe them, simply because they heard them so often. Another example: during the 1990s, multinational oil companies and their supporters repeatedly claimed that global warming either was not happening or, if it was, was not being caused by humans - at the same time as independent researchers were publicly explaining the opposite. The resultant confusion enabled the American president to neglect the Kyoto treaty, with disastrous consequences. Academics who repeat the same half-baked ideas again and again to their students or research colleagues and applying the same technique.

Proof by authorship: The underlying idea here is that if a famous person said something, then it must be true. But famous academics are often famous because they were creative in their ideas and took the risk of making claims that were unpopular, both of which suggests that a lot of what they claimed was unreliable or experimental in nature. In any case, the truth content of a claim can only be determined by analysing the argument. This is surely the main skill that students should be learning. There is nothing wrong with citing the ideas of famous people - but the fact that they were famous is not relevant for a critical evaluation of the argument. A variant of this idea is that a statement by a member of a group of people with which an author and/or her/his intended audience strongly identify is more likely to be true than an equivalent statement by a member of another group. So if I am a humanities scholar I may consider the opinions of humanities scholars to be generally superior to those of scientists (or vice-versa). Or if I am an English speaker I may think the opinions of English speakers to be generally superior to those of German speakers. Bullshit of course.

Exaggeration

A common form of bullshitting is to exaggerate one's own positive achievements and to exaggerate the negative achievements of others. The former tends to be done publicly, the latter privately.

A familiar example of the first form of exaggeration is the word "excellence" (in modern German: Exzellenz, Exzellenzinitiative, Exzellenzcluster...). These days it seems that just about any academic program that promotes an above-average standard can be called "excellent". But the term "excellence" often means no more than "academic quality". There is no point talking about "research excellence" before a system and a tradition of good research evaluation is in place; the term "excellence" should only refer to the best of a large body of research that is already well above average. A similar thing happens when departments give final grades to students at the end of their degree programs. Students often get very good grades (A or 1) although their performance clearly merits B or 2. This is a common form of bullshitting used by university departments to bolster their self image. "Look at how many of our students got an A at the end of the course - we must be good!"

Exaggeration of the negative achievements of others is a central feature of academic mobbing. Mobbing is a time-honored method of suppressing colleagues who are competing for the same resources. Just attack them repeatedly over a long period until their reputation is destroyed and they can easily be pushed around. When describing the work of a colleague, it is not difficult to make just about everything that s/he does sound bad, especially if s/he is doing creative new things, challenging time-honoured traditions, or merely being different. Since evaluation is an important academic skill, a typical academic can easily and quickly formulate a convincing story that a given colleague is generally bad - poor in administration, research and teaching - even if that person is in fact one of the best in all three areas. Most universities have anti-mobbing policies, but they generally sound better than they really are, which itself is a form of bullshit. When mobbing victims look for the support promised in anti-mobbing procedures, they tend to be presented with a lot of reassuring talk, but precious little politically effective action. It is hard enough to have a mobbing claim investigated, let alone have a mobber clearly identified as such. And even if that happens, there is little chance that the mobber will be appropriately punished - as a signal to other potential mobbers that mobbing is not acceptable behavior.

Denial

A classic form of bullshitting is to deny that something exists, although it is evidently important.

Ignoring relevant research: One way to convince non-experts that you are right is to present only arguments in favor of your thesis and deliberately leave out known arguments against it. Just pretend that the counterarguments do not exist. This strategy is remarkably common and I have even heard supervisors recommend it to their research students. That is essentially how contradictory schools of thought emerge. A school of thought that is in conflict with other schools may reflect either a promising new idea or a general inability to communicate and rejection of academic globalisation. The latter is none other than academic bullshit.

Ignoring practical applications: Good research does not necessarily have any practical application at all, and sometimes practical applications only emerge long after the research has been done. But that does not mean that research without practical applications is "pure" and therefore superior, or that academics should be encouraged to lock themselves in an ivory tower and free themselves from practical considerations. Quite the opposite is true: since academia is largely publicly funded, academics have a responsibility to inform the public about the practical applications of their work.

Ignoring big issues: The following example is close to home for the author of this page. A handful of German-speaking universities can be found among the top 100 in typical global rankings, e.g. ETH Zürich, Uni Zürich, Uni Basel, Uni Bonn, TU Munich, Uni Munich, Uni Heidelberg, Uni Wien. Other German-speaking universities are way, way down the list - often in spite of a long and previously successful academic tradition (prior to the Nazi period). This problem tends to be suppressed, along with the main reasons for it: a general reluctance to engage in international academic quality control procedures and, to enable those procedures to work, to promote German-English bilingualism. The usual cover is to talk about money - the universities need more of it to do their job properly - which is a nice example of bullshit: it is not untrue, but it is also true that much more could be done with the present amount of money if only research quality were evaluated against current international standards.

Avoiding expert evaluation

Academic bullshit artists don't like evaluation procedures, for obvious reasons. So they apply their artistic skills to the task of systematically avoiding them, while at the same time maintaining an aura of academic respectability.

Peer review. One approach is to develop sophisticated arguments about why peer review is bad and should be avoided. Common arguments include: (i) reviewers often have ulterior motives, (ii) the review procedure can suppress motivation and creativity, and (iii) great thinkers of the past never had to deal with peer review. All these points are excellent examples of bullshit: they are not untrue, but then again they are not really true, either. The real truth is that (i) conflicts of interest can usually be avoided, (ii) review procedures can also motivate researchers by giving them good ideas, and (iii) almost all would-be great thinkers of the past have now been forgotten. Peer review is not perfect, but neither is democracy - and the no-bullshit truth is that there is no better system of academic quality control than peer review. (Given that peer review is more prevalent in some disciplines than others, it may be appropriate to apply the following rule of thumb. A researcher who regularly cites refereed articles, or addresses topics that are addressed in refereed articles, should her- or himself publish in peer-review journals. If s/he does not, s/he is either bullshitting or free-riding.)

Language. Another way of avoiding expert evaluation is to publish your research or write your dissertation in a language that most international experts in your specific area do not understand. You can understand what they do, but they cannot understand what you do. Since the international language of academia in most disciplines is now English, this trick works in just about any language that is not English. You can write things that you know international experts don't like, but potential reviewers within the specialist academic world of your minority language are likely to accept (if only out of solidarity for other speakers of their language).

Accepting criticism. Those who avoid evaluation tend also not to take suggestions and constructive criticism very well. But since good research is almost always the result of interaction between many different researchers (even if the article in which it is published has only one author), the willingness and ability to implement serious suggestions is an essential skill of any academic.

Academic populism

Researchers whose research is consistently rejected by their academic peers may instead turn to their students for feedback. If the students seem to like it, it must be good! The researcher finds a new success strategy: base your research and teaching on student feedback. Research evaluation by students is a kind of academic populism.

Here's how it works. Course content emerges gradually over years of interaction with students. The teacher learns from each generation of students how to impress the next generation. Over the years, the students become increasingly impressed. They attend not only the courses taught by the academic populist but also choose her/him as a supervisor (advisor) for their bachelor, masters and doctorate projects and theses. The content of the teaching then becomes the content of the research. Top-down becomes bottom-up.

This strategy can work so well that many colleagues and administrators may be totally fooled by it. Colleagues with an international profile in the same specific discipline see immediately what is going on, and they may even be so courageous as so to point out that the academic populist has no internationally recognized publications and is presumably polluting the minds of innocent students. But others are so impressed by the academic populist's success that all warnings are ignored. Just look at all those satisfied students! In this way, a mediocre and unscrupulous academic can build up a good reputation at her/his home university while remaining internationally totally unknown.

This strategy is surprisingly prevalent and surprisingly often tolerated, although it evidently makes a mockery of the academic system. Why is it wrong? The main problem is that students are unable to evaluate research content - otherwise they would not be students. The "research" that emerges from academic populism often includes interesting questions (that is certainly a positive aspect) but if neither teacher nor student is capable of the kind of critical thinking that is essential for research progress, the answers that are offered to those questions exhibit typical characteristics of academic bullshit.

Students who choose an academic populist as a supervisor for their bachelor, masters or even doctoral theses destroy their chances of a respectable academic career. If they ever start to interact with international experts (and many never do), they find their ideas and approach to research is consistently rejected or ignored. To some extent, they are prepared for this, since their supervisor has often made disparaging remarks about international colleagues - which now seem to be confirmed. But they are quite unequipped to deal with such a consistently negative reaction. At that point, most drop out or recede to the protection of their populist mentor at their home university. They can only survive if they adopt their mentor's isolationist, populist strategy - and the cycle continues.

Academic populism is more prevalent at universities where it is (or was) possible for low-level researchers to get tenured or tenure-track positions. It may also be more prevalent in countries with strong xenophobic tendencies (which these days seems to be just about everywhere). Academic populism will become less prevalent when tenure is offered only to academics with a strong international research record. The populists will be forced to interact constructively with their international peers or lose their jobs.

Power games

The ideas that we regard as "true" or as "knowledge" are often determined by power relations. The mechanism by which power relations influence knowledge is none other than bullshitting.

Climbing up the hierarchy (sometimes called "arse licking", but of course I would never say such a rude thing): Academics often cite the work of influential friends and colleagues in the hope of being rewarded with a better job, an invitation to a keynote presentation, a successful grant application, or just being included in high-level decision making. It doesn't matter whether the work is particularly good or not - the main thing is that the author is influential.

Staying up the hierarchy, or abuse of existing power or influence: Academics who do not enjoy the respect of their international peers (and even those who do) can get respect another way: by manipulating their students into supporting the ideas expressed in their research. Students are told (or come to realise) that they will get good grades if they reproduce and support those ideas in spoken and written examination procedures, and reject the ideas of the instructor's academic enemies. This trick works well given that students are generally not in a good position to evaluate research (otherwise they would not be students).

Staff selection

The bullshitting that often occurs in the context of staff selection procedures is perhaps the most devastating for universities. The most important assets of any university are its academic personnel. If staff selection procedures do not succeed in selecting the best candidates, the quality and quantity of the university's main output - its teaching and publications - will suffer in the long term. Large amounts of public money will be effectively misused or wasted.

Ad personam. A common form of bullshit is to advertise a position as if anyone can apply, but to select a candidate informally in advance. This trick has two main stages. The first is to make the job advertisement correspond to the target candidate's area of expertise, pretending that that area is just what the department in question needs. The second stage is to ignore applications from others even though they may be better qualified, or to invent good arguments for not taking them. There are many reasons why a given candidate may get preferential treatment - academic ability, conformity to the approach and ideals of their superiors, good looks, sexual compliance, existing deals and promises. No such reason can possibly be considered a good reason for deceiving other applicants and the university direction, or for misusing public funds.

Infighting. Beyond that, staff selection procedures often become politicized. Committees become divided into factions that support different candidates. In the process, people forget the main aims of the selection procedure. The candidate that is finally selected tends to be the one preferred by the biggest or most powerful group. That is not necessarily the person most likely to make the biggest long-term academic contribution. This is an example of an important but often forgotten weakness of democracy: democratic procedures tend to suppress minorities and diversity unless complementary procedures to promote minorities and diversity are in place.

Administration

Computers are supposed to make life easier so that academics have more time to devote to research. But university administrators tend to use them to develop ever-more-complicated procedures for controlling how academics spend small amounts of money. When the effective amount of money spent on financial administration becomes comparable with the amount of money being administered, it is clear that something is wrong. The academics who are filling out complicated forms and getting distracted from their main work by trivial problems are wasting their valuable time and reducing their academic output. The administrators who are trying to help them deal with their own administrivia and designing ever more complex control mechanisms are also being paid by the hour, and after that there are the overhead costs.

Specifically German tendencies

For cultural and historical reasons, the following problems tend to be more acute in German-speaking academia.

Overlegislation. German-language universities are regulated by national laws. One of the main problems faced by creative academics is that innovations often contradict existing legal structures. The situation becomes absurd when promising initiatives that would improve academic quality and allow a university to take an internationally leading role are found to be illegal. The word bullshit is appropriate when innovations that are consistent with the intention or spirit of the law are rejected because they contradict the law's detailed content. We need to reduce the amount of regulation and increase incentives for individual initiative. Internal regulations (Satzung) should be shortened and replaced by more flexible guidelines. When universities suggest legal changes to governments, they should firstly suggest a net reduction in the total length of relevant legal texts and in their specificity, and then provide examples. Legal texts can be shortened by focusing on the main overriding principles. The overriding principle governing universities is that of academic quality; anything that directly or indirectly promotes academic quality should be enabled and encouraged. Once that principle is clear, a lot of the legal detail can be eliminated.

Titles. This problem is particularly acute in Austria. Academics present ridiculously long strings of titles in front of their names. The titles are supposed to tell you their academic degrees, whether they are licensed to teach at university level (Habilitation) and whether they have a real professorship (i.e. whether they were selected by a committee from an international field of candidates). But when people are addressed by their titles it becomes clear what their real function is to make people feel important, and to reinforce hierarchies and power structures. Since titles are supposed to promote academic quality but in fact do not, they may fairly be regarded as a form of academic bullshit.

Venia legendi, venia docendi. Courses in German speaking universities are categorized into different types, and the most important types are lectures, seminars and colloquia. Instructors of these course types are supposed to have a license to teach or habilitation, which is the highest academic qualification following the doctorate. The license is generally confined to a given discipline. In this way, a university may claim to cover all major academic disciplines. This system used to work in the good old days when there was less academic literature to read. Today, the total amount of academic literature is doubling about every twenty years. It is quite impossible for one person to plausibly represent an entire discipline such as economics, law, psychology or religious studies. Even subdisciplines such as microeconomics, international law, social psychology or Jewish studies have become too big for one brain. If international experts are consulted, they will confirm that no individual can plausibly represent a discipline of that size any more. A further problem with the habilitation system is that the boundaries of academic disciplines are continually shifting. At the same time, individual specialisms change. Seen from this angle, the system of habilitation and venia is outmoded and a potent source of bullshit. As German universities become more international, it is gradually being abandoned anyway. Academics should simply teach in the area of their best publications. Courses at Masters level and higher should only be taught by academics with doctoral degrees (at Bachelor level, with Masters degrees). Doctorates should only be granted to candidates who have made a significant international contribution to research in their field, which can only be determined if the thesis is written in the international language of their discipline and the supervisor/s is/are excluded from the examination procedure. (Amazing but true: Supervisors often contribute to the examination of doctoral theses in German-speaking universities, which is another form of academic bullshit since any supervisor is biased by her/his personal relationship with the candidate.)

Everyday bullshit: The broader context

Of course bullshit is not confined to academia. It is everywhere, which perhaps explains why it is so surprisingly strong in academia. Contrary to what those who like to call themselves "Professor" seem to believe, academics are just everyday people with everyday strengths and weaknesses. So like everyone else they are subject to social influences.

Everyday life. Sociologists have studied everyday lying and bullshitting extensively (e.g. Barnes, 1994). You can lie to get what you want, or to protect someone else. Lying is not always bad, but it would help if there was less of it.

Flirting. Darwin helped us to understand why people are constantly evaluating each other's reproductive potential. He also explained why we are constantly flirting, at some level, with potential mates. Flirting is a form of acting, and acting is a form of bullshitting. (No wonder we are so good at bullshitting!). But Billy Joel was right when he sang that "honesty is such a lonely word", which presumably explains the high divorce rate. (By the way, there is nothing generally wrong with acting - or with flirting of course. In fact, theater is an excellent medium in which to explore and understand the phenomenon of bullshitting).

Advertising. We are constantly being encouraged to buy things that we do not need. Advertising, and hence bullshitting, belongs to the foundations of a capitalist economy. The only consolation is that communism was even worse.

Politics. Politicians are constantly trying to convince voters to re-elect them by pretending to work effectively and solve problems. They conceal essential facts from voters and appeal to their irrational fears. For example, the electorate is told that foreigners take away local jobs and dilute local culture, when in fact the opposite can be the case: an influx of foreign ideas and expertise can boost local industries, and local culture can be enriched by intercultural interactions. Because politicians primarily aim to be re-elected, they tend to confine their planning to the short term - avoiding the biggest global problems, because they cannot be solved in three years. This state of affairs is bringing the world to the brink of disaster (consider global warming). Perhaps the deepest form of bullshit is denying world hunger and poverty, especially given that the problem could realistically be solved within about two decades if only the rich countries would keep their promise of spending 0.7% of GNP on foreign aid.

Religion and spirituality. In one way or another, spirituality is important for everyone. But people who talk about it are often masters of bullshit. People are leaving the Catholic Church in droves because its representatives habitually distort the truth. They deny that women can and should have positions of power, that contraception can and should prevent AIDS, that holy texts were written by humans, and that world religions have remarkably similar aims and functions. The prominent representatives of Islam and Judaism do not seem to be much better. But it is possible to cut the bullshit without denying the universal importance of religion and spirituality.