Connect: 'Future ages will look back with astonishment and contempt on the amount of wasted labour in the production of unread academic work," Prof Colin MacCabe wrote in the Observer newspaper a fortnight ago. He's right: a generation of young scholars, neither dimmer nor brighter than their predecessors, is doomed to produce short-term work for unread journals.
It's absurd, really, and everybody in higher education knows it. Of course, specialist academic work is, by definition, of interest only to specialists. Monographs on Cabbalistic symbolism in the poetry of WB Yeats or on the production of isobutylene polymers or on . . . whatever, may fascinate interested individuals but will never, of course, threaten mass circulation publications.
Mountains of unread "research", though no doubt sometimes produced for their own sakes, are far too often generated as proof of industriousness. An Alp of unread "research", preferably "peer-reviewed", which might mean four readers or even fewer, is generally necessary for young academics to advance. It's not their fault that a "never mind the quality, feel the width" approach dominates.
Indeed, it's scarcely the fault of their older colleagues either. It's as if the system has become so voracious that the notion of "publish or perish" has accelerated to a point where it's out of control. (It's not just in higher education that mania for ever-increasing "productivity" has become absurd. It's in most areas of life now, even in those, like academia, where its applicability is dubious.) Still, it's vital to be fair and to acknowledge that over the years some academics have been conspicuously lazy. There's been a lack of accountability - especially since academics have been subsidised by taxpayers, most of whom have, at best, benefited only tangentially from others' higher education - so some form of measurement of performance is probably required.
However, it's practically impossible to guarantee probity in such a process. A top-down approach cannot avoid prioritising at least some of the processes - including the out-of-control "publish or perish" absurdity - that likely helped to get the measurers to their position in the first place. Yet no government or institution will stand for a serious measuring approach from below.
Nonetheless they'll all stress collegiality while adopting the hierarchy of a business corporation. Perhaps that's unavoidable but it's important that people know where they stand in all of this. (Consider what's happening in academia as a metaphor for what's happening in the wider world of work. Whatever job you're in, you'll almost certainly see similar totalitarian tendencies.)
In his Observer article (arguing for the privatisation of Britain's universities!) MacCabe noted that "everybody in higher education is now engaged on filling in bits of paper which bear very little relation to reality". It's pretty much the same in Ireland as the sector becomes a bureaucracy in which mountains of unread academic work are not the only waste of time.
Indeed, it's as if some spiteful controlling force insists on filling up the time of academics with the production of unread research and the filling of countless forms. The problem is that thought - useless thought, stupid thought, brilliant thought - simply cannot be quantified in this manner.
"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it," said Albert Einstein.
He had a reasonable idea of what he was talking about but there is a hell of a difference between absurd ideas and absurd practices. In their desire to quantify everything (or at any rate their acquiescence with those who would control everything) the controlling powers of higher education seems determined to ban absurd ideas and to increase absurd practices.
These notions are hung upon the fact that the country's biggest university - University College Dublin - agreed this week on a radical restructuring. Its 11 faculties will be replaced by five new colleges; its 90-plus departments by 35 schools. Passed by a 32-3 vote of the university's governing authority, the restructuring should, in fairness, eliminate some duplication of resources.
Yet in more assiduously centralising power, UCD is increasingly likely to ban absurd ideas - the lifeblood of real advances. The likely truth of the restructuring is that some existing disciplines will thrive, after a fashion, and some will shrivel. With budgets increasingly centralised, less popular disciplines and those with limited financial applications are clearly most at risk.
The move, spearheaded by college president Hugh Brady, changes the relationship of higher education to the rest of Irish society. It makes it more consumer-driven and thus in line with overall Government policy. It will likely take a few years before any assessment of its success or failure is possible. One thing is certain, however: Irish higher education has been changed forever.
Perhaps the bureaucratisation of the universities, their absurd production of unread work and their consumerist ethos makes them increasingly "relevant" to society. If so, however, it's at the expense of the individualism supposed to characterise this age.
It's telling that Einstein worked outside academia - as a patents clerk - when his big, absurd, breakthrough ideas began to arrive.