PUBLISH OR PERISH VS VISIBLE OR VANISH

Academics can change the world – if they stop talking only to their peers

I do not “completely agree” with this article.  Indeed, like most experienced academics, I have abandoned many of my once firmly entrenched ideas, favoured curricula and approaches to education as I learned more from colleagues, students (especially past ones) and informed members of the community.  Because of this “lived experience”, I generally don’t ‘completely agree’ with anything.

In the ‘bad old days’ the pejorative term “PUBLISH OR PERISH” was sometimes abused to castigate young academics with paradigm-challenging views.  Having said that, ultimately, the only path to progress is for these paradigm-challengers to confront the entrenched view by publishing in reputable vehicles that employ peer-review.  “Reputable” and “peer-review” are potentially loaded terms that may be undermined by defenders of outmoded paradigms.  But, as the great boxer Joe Louis said: “You can run; but you can’t hide”.  This process of falsifiability will never change, regardless of whether the ideas are communicated with a chisel on rock or with a word-processing laptop via the internet.

So, the bottom line is that academic scholars cannot evade subjecting their ideas to peer-reviewed scrutiny.

Sadly, in these ‘good new days’, some (to my mind too many) academic dilettantes are evading submission of their publications to ‘reputable-peer-reviewed’ journals and only communicate them, generally in shortened (< 1000 words) form, in ‘cyber journals’ (and elsewhere in the social media) that do not ‘referee’ submissions adequately and may not allow constructively critical commentary by readers.  Readers of such potential pseudo-science, ‘alternative facts’ and ‘post truth’ have to filter the wheat from the chaff.

Yes, there is “a huge [and welcomed] change” in academia. More and more academics (even codgers like me) are ‘seeing the light’ and at least attempting to become respectable “public intellectuals” (PI) and recast their ‘ivory tower’ findings to make them understandable by informed readers in the general public.  In my field, evolutionary biology, pioneer PI, Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, used the magazine Natural History to encourage youngsters to pursue the discipline and enlighten the post-school-university informed public. Proactive universities also help in this exercise via their in-house media.

To conclude, being VISIBLE is not SUFFICIENT.  The adage PUBLISH OR PERISH should be replaced as an outmoded ‘paradigm’ with RESPONSIBLY WIDELY COMMUNICATE OR WITHER.