Academic mass production | The past

Higher education has grown exponentially across the world since the 1950s. In Britain, for example, fewer than 20,000 students were accepted each year into undergraduate courses in 1950, compared to more than 350 000 today. Overall, the increase is even more dramatic.

Graduates aren’t the only thing mass-produced by modern higher education. Universities are centers of education and research. They also compete with each other – for students, for staff, for grants – and they are judged largely by research results.

The measure of research is publication. Academic staff and postgraduate students should publish. So, along with everything else, there has also been an exponential increase in the publication of reviews and articles.

I can’t find any statistics on this, but I assume that the increase in the number of journals and articles over the past 70 years will reflect the expansion of higher education in general. To give an idea, a quick Google search produced a list of over a hundred journals in print for archeology alone.

That must be a good thing, right? We have a huge increase in scholarships, don’t we?

But here’s the weird thing. While excellent modern research is being done, increasingly, in my own work, I find myself ignoring most recent findings and returning to work published 25, 50, and even 75 years ago. And what is absolutely clear to me is that while there has been a massive increase in the volume of articles published, there has also been a dramatic collapse in average quality.

I pondered this for a while, and now think there are three fatal flaws in the modern academic mill.

Number one. Everyone in universities is under massive pressure to publish books and articles – as much as possible, since quantity has been imposed as the primary means of measuring research output. There’s no point in writing a seminal article once every five years: it’s still just an article. Instead, you should write two routine articles a year, probably modifying the same material a bit to suit different journals.

Fault number two. Every newspaper must say something new. In the mass production of vehicle components, difference is a defect. In the mass production of academic papers, difference is a requirement. There’s even a bad word for simple reproduction: plagiarism.

If you have new research to report, you can of course publish a simple empirical article: this is what I found during my excavations; this is the distribution of parts by date; that’s what I saw under the microscope.

But empiricism is not enough. Academics are expected to provide interpretation and synthesis. They are supposed to be idea providers. So, under pressure both to publish and to say something new, they may end up questioning conventional wisdom not because the evidence suggests, but because they have to.

Fault number three. The grand narratives that gave rise to so much outstanding work in previous generations have been largely abandoned. We now have a fragmentation into a thousand disconnected pieces.

Thus, in Roman studies, it is strictly point out ‘regional differences’ and a plethora of alternative ‘cultural identities’. Infinite scope here for an incessant rolling of papers.

What if we wanted to understand the nature of Roman town planning? Why did the state need cities? Why did the local elites adopt them? Why did they all look alike? What was the relationship between town and country? etc

You know what? I think the best thing to read would be Moses Finley The ancient economy. Absolutely seminal. Never improved. Published in 1973.

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