Scholarship and Research

I attended a meeting yesterday where a colleague from the English Department noted that in Australia, some administrators (mostly from engineering and the sciences) have started making a distinction between "scholarship" and "research."  "Scholarship" is viewed as uncovering of old knowledge, while "research" is the creation of new knowledge, according to them.  This way of thinking is strange to most in the social sciences and humanities, where even "uncovering old knowledge" is effectively also the creation of new knowledge (if you did not know it before, or did not recognize it, then it is new!) 

The attempt to distinguish "old" from "new" knowledge is especially interesting when one considers a recent Chronicle of Higher Education column in which an English professor complains about "Fast Food Scholarship"--articles that are hastily written, with poorly developed arguments, with little or only anecdotal evidence, and with few citations and no examination of past scholarship on the topic. She notes that journals get a wave of submissions shortly after their discipline's annual meetings; academics desperate to get into print submit their conference papers without doing the difficult work of converting a talk into a proper article.

The crisis in publishing is even worse in China, and affects science journals too; the Gene Dog Blog copies an article in Nature News that notes that China's "scientific journals are filled with incremental work, read by virtually no one and riddled with plagiarism." It includes an estimate that "one-third of the roughly 5,000 predominantly Chinese-language journals are ‘campus journals’, existing only so that graduate students and professors can accumulate the publications necessary for career advancement, according to one senior publisher" and one editor reports that 31% of papers submitted to it contain plagiarized material. This is probably true. Someone could do an interesting study of how relationships ("guanxi" and notions of mutual obligation) and ideas of hierarchy make it difficult for a journal editor to reject papers (without destroying his social network).

Academics in China are evaluated based on the number and length of articles, so it is not surprising that you get many and long articles.  Unfortunately, and again due to the dominance of science and engineering models, China wants to use impact factors to decide which are the better journals (My view is that while impact factor can show which are the dead journals, high impact factors do not equal good or important research.  This is especially true in anthropology, where books and edited volumes, which do not enter into impact factor calculations.  Plus, as soon as you rely on impact factor as an indicator of quality, you will create incentives for people to cite their own and their friends' publications.)

The bigger problem is the attempt to find quantitative and administrative means of evaluating research.  Deans and provosts who know nothing about a field feel they need some "objective" way of measuring researchers' and departments' output, so they use silly measures like number of characters written, number of articles, or impact factor. The problem is that these do not track creativity, innovation, and research. In a law firm, associates are evaluated based on how much money they bring in. This is not a perfect measure the quality of work, but it does do a fairly good job of tracking quality and quantity of work (work of the highest quality that is too slow does not help the firm), and shows how satisfied clients are with the work. Plus, firms make allowances for other factors such as promotion work. With academic research, however, there is no measure, like revenue, or even billable hours, that can stand in for productivity.  But administrators are determined to find a quantitative measure that they can use across departments, to reward one department over an other.  This is killing many social sciences and humanities, but perhaps because it benefits engineering, business, and medicine (so it seems, at least), there are many who see nothing wrong with "audit culture" and assume all gripes come from people who resist change because they are not research active so feel threatened by change. They do not see how their "reforms" are going to kill certain disciplines.  Maybe they do not care.

Eels

It is an Italian tradition to eat eel for Christmas eve dinner. Since Christmas eve is still part of Advent, when Catholics were supposed to give up meat, eel was the most oily and rich fish one could eat. It is sort of the meat of the sea. Salmon is perhaps similarly "beefy".  Our family always had fish for Christmas eve dinner. NPR recently had a story that said southern Italian families had seven types of seafood, and that the types did not matter but eel was central. Our family was similar, but I'd never heard of seven being important.  But we were always aware that Americans did not eat eel. We had to get it from Chicago, two hours away, and it was the only time in the year when we ate eel. It was often bought live, and we had to find some way to skin it, which is not easy, as the eel continues to wriggle. A sliced eel will even continue to move in the oven.  Enough to make anyone a vegetarian.  I've been wondering why Americans don't eat eel, and so picked up a short book entitled Consider the Eel from the library. The book has a lot of information, but I find it a bit irritating that when it talks about changes in the business on the east coast of the US, the author reports that his sources, the "eelers", are not willing to tell him the details of mergers in the business because they don't want it to appear in the book. Well, why write the book then?! One dealer, who sells 9" eels as bait for sport fishermen, explains his reluctance to talk by saying that his neighbors do not know he is in the eel business. There seems to be something distasteful about eels, but the book never explains why eel is so reviled.

It does, however, make the mystery even more surprising because it notes that eel was plentiful in the New World, and was a critically important food for the early colonists. They were taught to catch eel by the native American Tisquantum (AKA Squanto), the Patuxet man who had been kidnapped by an Englishman and taken to Europe. After nearly being sold into servitude and suffering humiliations in England, he finally managed to get back to his country only to find that his people had been wiped out by disease. He was living with the neighboring Wampoanog when he met the Pilgrims, and taught them to catch eel, plant corn, etc. He was very generous, and is considered essential to the Plymouth colony's survival (even with his help, half the colony died within the first six months).

The book makes it clear that eel were plentiful and popular as food. Even in 1880, 400,000 lbs of eel were captured commercially in Massachusetts, but about a hundred years later, in 1988, it was down to only 29,900 lbs, and in 1997, only 304 lbs were caught (p. 120). A big drop-off in consumption occurred after WWII, with only ethnics (Italians, Poles, and Irish) eating eel. The book suggests that this is due to eels being bottom feeders, so that they concentrate heavy metals and pollution. Indeed, eating fish from the Hudson River of New York was banned in 1976, especially eel, when it was discovered that the PCBs released by a GE plant had poisoned about half the eel in the river.  This still does not explain why so many Americans are grossed out by eel, though. There are many things we don't eat that don't generate the disgusted comments on websites that explain how to cook eel.

While looking up recipes for eel, I discovered this entry at the start of HowStuffWork's entry on "Why are eels slippery?":

­One of the creepie­st animals you can encounter in the water is the eel. It's a slippery, slimy creature, and it doesn't fit neatly into the water creature categories we've set ­up in our brains, which only amplifies our fear of it. Is it a snake? A fish? An unholy hybrid of both?

To anyone who has read Mary Douglas, this explains everything. Americans do not consider eel to be "clean" and edible not because it is a bottom feeder (so are crabs and lobsters, after all), but because it does not fit into a proper category. It is actually a fish, but it looks like a snake. It can even live a long time out of the water. Plus, it does not die right away and continues wriggling, adding to our fear of it, especially for those of us who are not used to killing our own food (we Americans expect that to be done by immigrants in slaughter houses, so they can remove the heads and tails of fish so we are not reminded that they are real animals!).

This still leaves the question of why there has been this shift since WWII. Surely American categories have not changed during the 20th century.  Why has this become more salient?  Why did a favorite dish of the early 19th century disappear from cookbooks of the 20th century?

Lonely Hearts @ Shangai Ikea

NPR has an interesting story on how older "lonely  hearts" take over the Ikea caffeteria in Shanghai two times a week to meet and make friends. Among the interesting aspects is that many of the senior citizens seem not to understand that this is not really what Ikea want. It is almost as they they are saying, "Well, you have a nice place for shopping, you offer free coffee, so why are you surprised that we like to hang out here?"  Among the more amusing observations:

In fact, some Chinese have always treated IKEA like an extension of their own homes. When the first store opened in Beijing in 1998, people napped on the beds. Families camped out on sofa sets, reading newspapers, drinking tea from glass jars and eating biscuits.

One aspect of the story that was not mentioned is the role that all the moving, the urban renewal, and dislocation has played in causing older people to seek friends in a common space like this.  I wonder if older, established neighborhoods would not have been more able to satisfy the elderly's needs for sociability in the past. But if you've been moved to a remote neighborhood, in a tower where you know few people, you need new ways to make friends. And yet, this is still unusual, because Chinese rarely make friends with strangers. It would be interesting to know how this "custom" developed.

Hong Kong in stop-motion video

Here is a short video that captures a lot of iconic images of Hong Kong, and makes residents feel proud of their city. Note the end, focusing on the July 1st protests which are so much a part of the SAR's identity, at least for some.

The Evils of Advertizing

My alma mater has only last week started blaring rock music in between plays at football games. Football at Notre Dame is sacred, and it is strange that they are playing with this ritual (adding music and a jumbo-tron, which is under consideration, is the football equivalent of Vatican II reforms). There are mixed reactions to it. From what I hear, the music on the loudspeakers is competing with the marching bands' music (USC also had their band there last week), and it makes the announcements impossible to hear. At the very least they need to coordinate the sound system better. But the bigger issue is that if (when) they get the jumbo-tron, it will be paid for by a corporate sponsor, who will expect to have commercials played on the screen.  ND people were actually saying that the ND stadium was said to be one of the quietest in the country, so something had to be done. Apparently, ND is slow to add music and a giant screen; I guess tradition was important.  Some say the stadium was quiet because students only make up a small portion of the stadium (capacity 80,795; it was expanded from just over 59,000 when I was a student there; there are just under 12,000 students, of which only 8371 are undergrads. Students used to make up almost 20% of the stadium, but now they are less than 15% of the audience).  Professional sports events are now dominated by giant TVs and sound systems.  I guess the game itself is not exciting enough, and we need to be stimulated by music and ads. Of course, it is the ads that pay for this, and can bring in more money. From the commercial point of view, if you don't do this, you are leaving money on the table.

The issue of advertising's effect on society is addressed by a very interesting column by George Monbiot entitled Sucking Out Our Brains Through Our Eyes.  He notes that advertizing pays for his salary, especially as the sales of physical copies of newspapers decline, and newspapers rely more and more on ad revenue from online websites. Bloggers rely on ads too. But it is having a pernicious effect on our culture, making us more and more extrinsic in our value orientation, rather than intrinsic.

People with a strong set of intrinsic values place most weight on their relationships with family, friends and community. They have a sense of self-acceptance and a concern for other people and the environment. People with largely extrinsic values are driven by a desire for status, wealth and power over others. They tend to be image-conscious, to have a strong desire to conform to social norms and to possess less concern for other people or the planet. They are also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression and to report low levels of satisfaction with their lives.

Monbiot ruminates on how dependent he is on advertizing for his income. I'm guilty too, in that I enjoy the free content on websites ("free" websites are made possible by ads, of course).  If people were more aware of how ads distort their thinking, they might be more careful. But research has found that everyone overestimates their ability to discount advertising.  It really is insidious.  And it is about to enter the Notre Dame stadium, which is practically sacred ground.  There really is no place safe from advertizing. How many years before there are corporate logos (aside from the jersey manufacturers) on players' uniforms?

China banning US scholars

The cases of US China scholars who are banned from traveling to China should receive more attention than it does receive.  Here is a Bloomberg story from August that discusses the best-known cases.  It is very depressing and disturbing.  I view this as a case of two steps forward and one step back; China is in general much more open than in the past, but this banning of professors is, well, outrageous. And depressing.  These are not people who are activists or law breakers, certainly not in China, and not even in the US. Their difficulties are especially disturbing because they are not officially banned--they just have their visa requests denied. This then leads others to suggest that there must be more to it, or that it is better to wait and see. But what has clearly happened is that they get on some security blacklist, and then no one in China wants to take responsibility for taking them off the list.

Another interesting aspect of the story is that the Xinjiang scholars' problems started because the editor of the book sent a copy of the book to the security people who had shown interest in their book, and that led them to translate it. Instead of this being a sign of good faith and open scholarly exchange (and that they had nothing to hide), it got them into trouble. You are better off avoiding security in China, the exact opposite of the approach in the West, where keeping your activities open is a sign of good faith. Most Chinese I know avoid dealing with "gongan" as much as possible, and treat them like the plague.

More pressure needs to be put on China to stop barring scholars from visiting China. Or, if they continue to do so, there has to be a cost. It is actually an embarrassment to many Chinese that this is happening, so it is important to seek allies to continue opening up China and letting security authorities understand that this is not acceptable internationally. And if other China scholars do not speak out, they are complicit, and give credence to claims that I hear every now and then that scholars self-censor. And universities need to speak out too, collectively.

The Puzzle of Students Talking in Class

I have finally solved a puzzle that has been bothering me for years, and something that visiting professors have asked me about but I could not answer. Our HK students are overwhelmingly polite and well-mannered. There are a few things about which they have different manners, like answering a cell phone in class. I tell students that they should turn off their phones or set them to silent mode when they are in class, and if they forget, that is OK, but they should kill it and not answer the phone. I joke that leaning down and speaking softly does not fool anyone. Today, a student rushed out class with his phone in his hand and said "Wei?" as he was walking out the door, to the amusement of many students in the class. This, I accept, is a difference in standards of politeness, and I just think students need to be taught that in the business and professional world, you do not answer the phone in a meeting (though it is shocking how many academic meetings I have attended where someone thinks they are so important they can answer their phone at the seminar table).

The need to teach phone manners, I understand. What I have been perplexed about is how common it is for students to talk to each other in class. They not only do not whisper but talk, but it goes on for a long time, often for the entire class unless I say something ("Excuse me, do you have a question?").  I have even taking to joking that because Cantonese is a tonal language, students cannot whisper; it is as though a whisper would not carry tones, and so cannot be used. They actually voice their murmurings, which is quite distracting to the lecturer.

Yesterday I took a couple of students out to lunch as part of a "teacher-advisee" program that our department has. It is a great chance to get to know a few students better (I think students dread these lunches, but seem to warm to them after we don't eat them alive in the first 10 minutes).  My very simpatico students told me that they had expected university to be a time of freedom, but they are shocked that they have to work even harder than in secondary school!  One commented that it was OK to talk during class in secondary school, but noted with surprise that some university teachers don't allow that. She said it is a far cry from what she had been told, i.e. that at university you don't even have to go to class! She said they are so busy, and have no time for socializing, so they enjoy talking with their new classmates in class.  Who would have known?  So I now understand why students engage in behavior that, on the face of it, seems so rude: they see it as an expression of the "freedom" of university.  Still, the talking, when it happens, makes my  poor little brain have trouble concentrating on what I'm trying to say, so I assume it must distract others in the audience as well.  I guess the socializing has to take place after my class, not during it. It's a little embarrassing how long it has taken me to figure this out. I should probably take students to lunch more often. Students talk more over lunch than in tutorials!  But then I remember my pathetic Mandarin language teacher at Columbia, who would take her favorite students out to lunch to then hold court at Moon Palace and spread rumors about other teachers.  Maybe deep down, everyone who comes out of Columbia fears becoming like her. I wonder if Michael Oksenberg ever took students out to lunch; he was her favorite student (and her best, she always reminded us).