Notes on the Academic Climate
The recent Arday affair has led a lot of people to claim that academia is “rotten” or “broken” or “coasting on past glories”. This is inaccurate. Academia is doing just fine. When people assert this, they are both badly misunderstanding what makes academia good, and they are unfamiliar with the work that academia presently produces.
For starters, academia is not really one thing, any more than Black people or Hungarians are. There are somewhere on the order of 15 million people involved in instruction around the world. The failure of some part of it does not make the whole rotten, because they are scarcely connected to each other. The Arday affair is an indication that the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge have low standards and do not produce useful work. We should also be skeptical of those journals which published him and work like his, and we should be skeptical of those departments which have similar opinions as to good scholarship as the Faculty of Education. But does the poor quality of his work have any bearing on the good work that is done elsewhere in the university?
I do not think so. I am only an expert on my corner of the world, economics. I will not attempt to evaluate the other departments. But I am extremely confident that economics is in a very good state. It’s the best it has ever been. People are producing work answering important questions with great data and the best possible methods with enormous practical consequences for public policy and individual action. This includes his colleagues at the University of Cambridge – I would highlight in particular the work of Florin Bilbiie, and of Vasco Carvalho.
That is all that academia need produce. What matters is the very best work, not the average. The costs of bad work are the taxes needed to pay them, and pulling the person out of whatever other line of work they would have done. (You’ll note that this indicates the harm of Arday was really rather small). Something which is of poor quality is read by no one and influences no one. Something which answers a good question well can introduce a new technology, or change public policy, potentially creating millions or billions of dollars in value.
Even within disciplines, it is fine to hire mediocrities. People do not necessarily know their quality going into a program. If they turn out to be a lemon, then faculty hiring down the ladder is insurance. It’s all part of paying for breakthroughs, and if paying for bad work is part of a system which produces great work on the whole, then it is worth paying.
If education departments are bad, it is not because they produce bad work, but because they produce no good work. I do think this is true, because they choose to use methods which have no chance even in principle of creating an advancement of the public’s knowledge. Sociology is the same way. To the extent that they are able to advance the knowledge of the public, it is when they embrace hypothesis testing and empirical falsification.
I certainly agree that Arday should have been fired, that it was wrong to protect him, that threatening critics with libel lawsuits is wrong (and a problem with Britain in general), that the Faculty of Education is a bad institution, and that producing fraudulent research is bad. I just don’t see what that has to do with academia as a whole.
