My wife and I were talking about how much pointless, wasteful research takes place today. She was a psych major at one time (actually got a BA in psych and social work, long before getting her RN), and during her time studying she was an assistant to a professor who was conducting an experiment in (I am not making this up) the "walking behavior of snakes"¹. As we talked, it struck me that a lot of what is wrong in academia can, not surprisingly, be laid at the doorstep of the government.

Now, I will grant that to some degree "publish or perish" is an inevitable outcome of the way we conceive education. Because we have made publication the gateway to a doctorate, we have made it over-emphasized. As a result we have universities where publication is more important than teaching, with the result that professors, who are nominally teachers, are selected based on their ability to publish, with the result that real and nominal job requirements are inconsistent² Ask any university student, they can tell you how many professors are "academic superstars" yet cannot teach at all. Their stardom comes not from the ability to impart knowledge or train the next generation, but to conduct research and publish articles.

However, the fact is, the emphasis might have eventually led to our current aberrant situation on its own, but it moved there a lot faster thanks to government intervention. You see, the government funds research, a lot of research, and research grants help fund universities. So, universities have an interest in bringing in those professors who get grants.

Admittedly, grant magnets also give universities prestige, but that would be much less important were there not huge sums of government money attached. It is the huge amount of grants that makes universities so fascinated with researchers, and helps them emphasize research over teaching. And as a result, we end up with universities that are inferior to community colleges³ when it comes to actually imparting basic knowledge to students. Yes, a handful of grad students get to participate in these studies as assistants, and may get benefit, but beyond them the grant recipients often do a very poor job at providing education. There are clearly exceptions, those who bring in grants and take teaching seriously. But, by and large, our emphasis on research has harmed the university goal of imparting knowledge, and, for the most part, government grants are to blame for that emphasis.

I know some may disagree, and will think it natural that universities would want the top researchers on their staff, but if you think about ti for a moment, you will see how counter-productive the current system is. Universities, despite their emphasis on research, still exist primarily to impart knowledge to others⁴. Even research is supposedly conducted to pass on knowledge to others concerning how research is conducted. However, despite the fact that they exist to pass along information, employees are not evaluated based upon their ability to impart knowledge, but rather on the ability to be published or get grants. And so, employees are hired, retained, promoted and fired based upon criteria having nothing to do with their ability to perform the central task.

Let me make an analogy. Imagine if the army hired and promoted based upon your ability to perform comic opera. What impact would that have upon our military readiness? Well, what impact does the focus on publication and research have on the ability of universities to teach?

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1. My wife, sharing my fondness of snakes, was disturbed that the researcher, a pompous, arrogant fellow at the best of times, simply killed off his research subjects after studying their, um, walking...  That was actually the beginning of our chat, as she was upset at the amount of cruelty involved in many pointless animal studies, and I have to agree that it seems rather heartless to torment animals for little or no reason, especially when the benefit of such research is rather dubious at best. One hardly has to be a PETA booster to think a number of these insane experiments inflict a lot of suffering for little or no reason. We are not talking life saving medical research here, we are talking about, well, the walking behavior of snakes.

2. For example, my faculty advisor when I was a chemistry major taught exactly two hours a week, spending the rest of his time on campus locked in his lab. I could not even get hold of him to sign off on my registration forms. He had "office hours", but was neevr in hios office during those times. But, as he was a well know expert on gas chromatography, he brought in a lot of grants and so was allowed to be a thoroughly incompetent teacher and advisor.

3. This is not meant to insult community colleges. In fact, quite the opposite. My thought is that, because they do not focus on research and publication, community colleges, and the handful of 2 year upper colleges (eg. the University of Baltimore which I attended), do a better job at teaching, because they hire based on the ability to teach and love of teaching, rather than the ability to attract money or get published. In my mind, that is what universities should be like, at least at the undergraduate level. Yes, higher level education does require the opportunity to participate in research, and that is also helpful for a part of undergraduate life, but most of undergraduate education has little to do with research, and, even if it did, how many students benefit from the studies of your average superstar grant magnet? maybe five doctoral candidates? If that many. Filling a seat with a grant magnet simply ill-serves the bulk of your students.

4. If universities do not exist primarily to teach, but to research, and teaching is just a sideline, then they should tell that to prospective students, rather than claiming to focus on teaching. It seems universities want to have it both ways. To extract money from students and donors, they claim teaching is their sole focus, but when someone criticizes their teaching, they claim they exist to research, not teach. They cannot have it both ways. They need to decide on one or the other and admit that is their goal. The current practice seems markedly dishonest.

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POSTSCRIPT

This is hardly the first time I have written about the government damaging education. On lower levels, read "You Don't Drown in a Glass of Water - Vouchers Revisited", "Why Vouchers are not the Answer", "Never Ascribe To Evil, A Discussion of Education", "Reforming Education", "Why Private Schools Win", "A Contradiction" and "Skeptics? Really? I Beg to Differ". And for other harm done at the university level, take a look at "The State Versus Universities", "When Help Hurts", "Professional Education" and "The Failure of Peer Review".

POSTSCRIPT II

By the way, I do realize that evolutionary biology suggests snakes would have an atavistic walking behavior. However, is that the proper area of research for a professor in human psychology? What would be the possible benefit of this study to human behavior? To understand how we were influenced by atavistic memories of our atrophied appendix? To understand how our psyches were changed by memories of once having had a tail? It seems a stretch to apply such research to psychology, unless one is a herpeto-psychologist.

DISCLOSURE

In the interest of full disclosure, I must say I am employed by a large university. However, as I am quite critical of universities in this post, it should be clear my job has had no influence upon my thinking on this matter.