bs2Jan 9, 2024
> Saying that the science slowdown is inevitable because our predecessors already grabbed all the good ideas might blind us to the possibility that science is slowing down because we’re actively mismanaging it, directing researchers away from the best uses of their time and the most crucial research and toward small incremental papers that keep funders — and tenure review committees — happy.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/1/11/23549993/science-research-progress-studies-disruption-technology-artificial-intelligence-biotechnology
#HistoryOfScience #DisciplinedMinds
/HT @22
Disruptive scientific research is slowing — and threatening progress

Science is the engine of society, and the decline of truly disruptive research is a warning sign for all of us.

Vox
bs2Nov 29, 2023

> 各大学が独自の履歴書と業績書を持っていて、同じ内容でもその書式に合わせ全てを書き直さないといけなかったり、担当したこともない講義のシラバスを作って15回講義の全てに予習と復習の内容を書かなければならなかったり。とにかく書類が膨大なんです。
短期的な成果求められる風潮　大学教員も疲弊
>　苦労して書類を作った結果を見て、コネクションで採用されたのではと感じる人事もありました。膨大な書類作成作業をやり続けることが苦痛になってきました...
> 「ブルシット・ジョブ」がなぜあんなにうけたのかって言うと、大学教員がその内容にしっくりきすぎたからじゃないかと思うんですよ。
>　組織が大きくなると、それを管理したり評価したりするための書類が膨大に増え、元々の意味を失って形骸化したものが増えますよね

https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASQ6661FHQ5TULEI00G.html

#磯野真穂 #田渕紫織 #ブルシットジョブ #大学 #シラバス #DisciplinedMinds by #JeffSchmidt comes to mind.

「ブルシット・ジョブ」との決別　大学をやめた学者が語る学びの作法

　文化人類学者の磯野真穂さんは2年前、大学の常勤職から離れ、独立研究者となりました。始めてみると、「すぐには役に立たない」学びのニーズが予想以上に高く、驚いたと言います。最近では、企業の新商品や新事業…

朝日新聞デジタル
Brian SmallApr 9, 2023

I saw this piece in an edition of Toward Liberal Educatioxn and wanted to remember a few sentences from it...

.> I believe that college students are now beginning to find new ways to become active politically, and hence responsible humanly.> I do not think it is the primary task of education to prepare students for their later occupational roles, or, indeed, any narrowly specialized roles, nor to teach them to enjoy work regardless of its quality and meaning. Rather, the relation of education to later life should be a dialectical and critical one. If, however, one result of going to college is to become alienated from work per se and defeatist about the possibility of altering one’s relation to it, then it seems to me one ought to re-examine academic institutions themselves and see whether anything in them, or in one’s own attitudes, or in both might be changed..> ... the very emphasis on family life, which is one of the striking and, in so many ways, attractive qualities of young people today, is an implicit rejection of large organization. The suburban family, with its garden, its barbecue, its lack of privacy in the open-plan house, is itself a manifesto of decentralization, even though it makes use of centralized services such as television, clinics, chain stores, and House Beautiful. .> ... the fact that much work is meaningless per se, save as a source of income, prestige, and sociability, but it also indicates, as I have already implied, that people too readily accept their work as it comes, without the hope of making it more meaningful..> ... the conception that work in organizations requires surrender of independence of judgment, if not of integrity... one can find hucksterism (often hypocritically veiled) among academic people in search of reputations, grants, and promotions, as well as among market researchers and other businessmen..> ... Sometimes students complain about the prerequisites of a department, which serve its monopolistic aims or protect its mediocre teachers from boycott rather than serve any defensible pedagogic aims..> ... students, they have often told me that it doesn’t pay to be too interested in anything, because then one is tempted to spend too much time on it, at the expense of that optimal distribution of effort which will produce the best grades... I am convinced that grades contaminate education — they are a kind of currency which, like money, gets in the way of students’ discovering their intellectual interests
- The Atlantic Monthly: 1961

#DavidRiesman in #TowardLiberalEducation on #College #CollegeGeneration #EducationAims #AimsOfEducation in a society of #BullshitJobs and #DisciplinedMinds in #Academia
#Grades and #Grading

Where Is the College Generation Headed?

<em>After teaching and practicing law,</em> DAVID RIESMAN <em>became in 1946 a member of the staff of the College of Social Science at the University of Chicago, and thereafter a member of the Committee on Human Development and of the Department of Sociology. In 1958 he was appointed the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, his alma mater. With a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Dr. Riesman investigated the problems of higher education discussed in this article; his observations originally appeared in the</em> CHICAGO REVIEW <em>for January, 1958, and have since been amplified and brought up to date for the</em> ATLANTIC.

The Atlantic
Show threadbs2Jan 30, 2023
I bet #JeffSchmidt's book #DisciplinedMinds on graduate school and #professionals probably offers a lot that is useful for thinking about why there is so much bullshit and why people put up with it. It's probably a status thing, and a money thing. I'll have to find my copy soon.. In the meantime here's #BertrandRussel in 1931:
> The rich would think it beneath their dignity to have such #knowledge, and #ignorance has become the hallmark of social eminence.
https://russell-j.com/MEDITATE.HTM
バートランド・ラッセル「黙想の衰退」 | アメリカン・エッセイ

bs2Sep 7, 2022
#BarbaraEhrenreich on #Health, #Poverty, #WageSlavery... with an example of #professional #DisciplinedMinds.
http://www.healthpacbulletin.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/1988-Vol-18-4-Winter.pdf
bs2Jul 5, 2022
> The #professors here symbolize the tragedy of all employed #professionals who started out as students loving their subjects. Such students submit themselves to the process of professional training in an effort to be free of the marketplace, but instead of being strengthened by the process they are crippled by it. Deprived of political control over their own work, the become alienated from their subjects and measure their lives in the #marketplace.
#JeffSchimdt's #DisciplinedMinds #FacDev