Taking time to think … again

None of these articles, on my reading, draws on any academic research. That's not to disparage McConvill - if he can carve out a space for himself in the marketplace of ideas, good luck to him. But it does call into question his understanding of academic research and the different styles of debate and discussion proper to journalistic op-ed and academic papers.

It's there that I have trouble with some of McConvill's key arguments. His defence of Bagaric and Clarke, and implicitly, his own claims that he might be discouraged from doing research, seem to presume that a special privilege should be given to academics publishing in the press. It should not.

Academics need to defend their position just as any other participant in public debate does, and an appeal to status is a recognised logical fallacy - the argument from authority. When I began my doctoral training, we students were required to give seminars, and questioners were incited to be as hard on us as possible. That's a recognition of the fact - known in Western universities since the scholastic disputandio which founded their tradition of debate - that your arguments can be sharpened (and refuted) by strong challenge.

Presumably McConvill would accept this as part of the academic environment. It seems precious to suggest that such criticism should not be directed against academics in the public sphere, and in fact I think a lot of the criticism of Bagaric and Clarke engaged with their ideas, rather than disparaged them as McConvill claims. That's as it should be.

The real pressures against being the sort of intellectual that Furedi hails - and it's a good picture of the sort of humanist intellectual that has been a lodestone in the past - are built into the environment of modern scholarship. They are the pressures to publish without regard for the quality of the work and its outlet; pressures to publish before you're ready; pressures to conform research subjects or results to what the market wants; and the incredible pressure on time driven more by “administrivia” and over-regulation of universities by DEST than by the demands of teaching.

A classic intellectual is characterised by an intense knowledge of a particular subject matched with a broad humanistic understanding and an ability to contextualise and communicate clearly. That's something to which academics can aspire, but it's no use saying that intellectuals shouldn't be criticised in public, lest they retreat from research altogether. Nor is it particularly helpful to assimilate controversy for the sake of op-ed publication to careful research results or theorising which might take readers where they don't want to go. McConvill should take some time to think again - about the broader culture of speed and performance which actually prevents the formation of genuine intellectuals in our universities.