There are a few heirloom myths about professors that conservatives lovingly polish up every now and again, lest their burnish starts to dull. The two that are most frequently brought down from a high shelf to be shined, passed around, and admired are: Professors Work Only Two Days a Week, and Professors Write Too Many Books and Papers That No One Reads. Those myths boil down to two interlocking complaints. First, professors don’t work hard enough. And second, professors work too hard.
The critiques are common even among professors. Clive Bloom, an emeritus professor of English and American studies at Middlesex University, in England, grumbles that academic research is little more than the self-indulgent pursuit of esoteric hobbies, “like some highfalutin version of model-train collecting,” whose ultimate stop is an unread and unreadable book. Jeff Sandefer, of the Acton School of Business, thinks federally funded research is tantamount to looting the public till, given that it involves “writing academic journal articles that few people read.” And the research backlash surely entered its late-absurdist stage when Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press, praised—in a scholarly publication—"scholars who do not want to publish, who hardly even want to talk about what they know.”
However, the most vociferous critic of academic research has been Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University and a Brainstorm blogger at The Chronicle. Bauerlein’s argument follows a familiar track: Demands for production have encouraged a corporatist model of the university, turning professors into “publish-or-perish entrepreneurs.” This has led to an explosion of research and publication, making it impossible for professors to “read all of the works published each year in their fields.” The biggest problem, he concluded with his co-authors in an essay in The Chronicle, is the issue of intellectual and scholarly value, or quality: “More isn’t better. At some point, quality gives way to quantity.”
Let’s ignore the obvious irony of scholars doing extensive research and writing in order to argue that scholars should not be doing extensive research and writing. Like Bauerlein, most critics of academic research assume that quality is opposed to quantity. But quantity doesn’t need to be the enemy of quality. As far back as 1841, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley realized that quality can positively correlate with quantity. The more stuff you produce or acquire, he realized, the more likely some of it is to be helpful. Sibley began pressing the library to collect everything that was printed. He solicited manuscripts and books from scholars regardless of whether they considered those materials, as he said, “good for anything or not.”
Sibley understood that today’s unread detritus might spark tomorrow’s breakthrough. So, in addition to donations of books and papers of questionable utility, he even accepted otherwise trashbound ephemera (and was pleased to discover that “even the butter-firkin contained an unexpected treasure”). The library expanded so rapidly that by 1865 the Harvard Board of Overseers had grown anxious and requested that he reduce the collection. Sibley refused.
In the 20th century, the postwar economic boom spurred a proliferation of academic research. Vannevar Bush, then head of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development, released his report “Science—The Endless Frontier” in 1945. It proposed a new partnership between the academy and the federal government. As Bush wrote, basic research “creates the fund from which the practical applications of knowledge must be drawn,” and universities, he concluded, should be generating that basic knowledge.
Bush’s model was based on an awareness that we cannot know in advance what lines of research will be of enduring value. He called it “a folly” to fund scientific or medical research “at the cost of the social sciences, humanities, and other studies so essential to national well-being.” It was the production of research, period, that was important. If universities take care of producing knowledge, Bush believed, everything else will take care of itself.
Still, even if we accept the idea that research quantity is a potential boon, we all want to believe that some research must be ... well, better than other research, don’t we? This is really what critics of academic research are driving at when they complain about overproduction. But in seeking to criticize the corporatist model of research productivity in which professors become obsessed with the Least Publishable Unit, “publish-or-perish entrepreneurs,” Bauerlein and others just end up replicating that model’s Taylorist underpinnings. They exhort academics to Work Smarter, Not Harder, to Produce Quality, Not Quantity. This would be fine, except that we can’t know in advance what field-transforming research will be, nor where that research will come from.
In the early 20th century, the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto noticed that about 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by only 20 percent of the population. This proportion held in other areas as well, even in Pareto’s own garden. Roughly 80 percent of his large pea pods, he found, were produced by 20 percent of the plants. Several decades later, Joseph Juran, a management consultant, revived Pareto’s work as a good rule of thumb applicable to a number of situations. He dubbed it the Pareto principle, or the law of the few: Roughly 80 percent of the effects of any given event come from 20 percent of its causes.
If taken as a loose framework for describing events and not a serious economic law, the principle works for pretty much anything. For many businesses, around 80 percent of revenue is derived from just 20 percent of the client base. Most people spend the majority of their income on a minority of big-ticket items, like a house or a car. The concept applies to academic research as well, and it offers one explanation of why most articles and books go unnoticed: Most researchers are reading and referencing the same percentage of the scholarship pool.
As critics of so-called overproduction love to point out, most published research—anywhere from 41 percent to 98 percent, depending on the discipline—is not influential, and most of it goes uncited. As a result of being uncited, such research is generally thought to lack value, or “quality.” Performing such research, the critics assume, must therefore be a waste of time and resources.
So what’s the solution provided by Bauerlein and others? Simply stop producing low-quality research. If, as the Pareto principle would suggest, only 20 percent of research ends up being valuable, then all researchers need to do is focus exclusively on significant, field-transforming research, not time-wasting dreck. It’s a pretty simple fix, when you think about it. (The Journal of Insignificant Results and Low-Quality Studies will probably have to close up shop, but then you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.)
Proponents of the research backlash like to pretend two things. First, that they know exactly what composes that proverbial Pareto percentage—the minority chunk of research that’s genuinely useful or significant—and second, that it’s an unchanging percentage. They claim that researchers can’t possibly keep up with all the works published each year in any given field. And perhaps they’re right. But it’s strange how would-be critiques of corporatist overproduction keep getting made in the language of modern corporate production.
The rhetoric of “keeping up” mistakenly assumes that all scholarship should be read right now, as if it’s the latest Dan Brown book. But fleeting popularity isn’t a scholarly value. And research surplus isn’t necessarily a problem. The value of scholarship shouldn’t be determined by what one person can read in one year, or even in one lifetime. Just because a book or article is uncited for five or even 10 years doesn’t mean that it will be unread or unvalued forever. Look at Pareto, who had been dead for almost 20 years before Juran popularized one of his ideas.
Besides, complaining about an explosion of scholarship in your field is a little like complaining about the number of books in a library. The whole point of a library (and new research) is that it contains things that you do not know but probably should. That’s why it’s there. Unread books have value, and future researchers may yet discover worth in what we deride as “low quality” today.
There are only a few possible options. Either research matters, or it does not. Critics of academic research never claim that research doesn’t matter at all, just that not all of it matters equally—a proposition with which most people will heartily agree. Yet we cannot know in advance which projects will matter, or in what way. The easiest way to account for this uncertainty is to produce as much work as possible and let the future worry about quality or utility.
Defending a surplus of research doesn’t mean defending something useless. It just means recognizing the limitations of our own knowledge and defending the possibility that something might one day be lauded for “quality” we cannot yet see.