Done some thinking on the bus the other day. Started with this question: is the current system of distribution of income in US universities in the humanities justified? (generally higher pay for researchers over teachers and bonuses given for those who research, or rather, publish more often)
I think it’s not. That in turn led me to two related questions about to what degree it’s justified or what elements are justifiable, which in turn opens on to why paying for research/publishing (specifically in the humanities) is justified at all.
What justifies funding for academic research in the humanities?
Here’s four that don’t satisfy:
1. a right to income.
2. importance of the research
3. utility in teaching
4. advancement of the field
I think 1+2 fail for the same reason, in that they’re true but would not work as an objection to cutting funding provided funding went to something else for which those justifications could be given. 1 is particularly weak, since that right is so often not respected. 2 also doesn’t work because the importance is likely to be either intrinsic to the activity or limited to a small community of folk. 3 is better I think but it’d have to be shown that the material actually enhances teaching (this also presumes teaching is a good, which I do - I realize that’s another argument but I’d like to just assume it for now). 4 fails because the advancement of the field requires justification itself (I’m not willing to presume the importance of that in the way that I am for teaching).
One answer I can come up with is akin to the pay received by the writers of airport novels and by pop stars: the pay is the result of an institutional framework which it would be bad to meddle with. This isn’t particularly clear, but something like - mucking about with publishing and bookselling and the music industry would have some negative effect. Something like this. I’m having trouble phrasing this clearly, which unfairly makes it a weaker justification, but I’m also having a hard time presenting it because I think it ultimately fails. What I mean here is some justification analogous to the following:
“A hospital with a union may have the occasional nurse working who doesn’t do a particularly good job and the union may help preserve this situation.” In that case, this is not an objection to having a union (the same conditions obtain in non-union hospitals except under management’s prerogatives so it’s not clear this is a real downside of unions, even if it was there are benefits to unionization for employees and patients which outweigh any downsides).
I don’t actually want to get into a discussion about that particular example, I only raise it as a parallel - in that example, and I realize this is unfair, academic publishing/research occupies a position analogous to the nurse who doesn’t do a particularly good job - where the point is that a given institutional arrangement is a positive thing and the particular activity (pay for research) is included in that arrangement in such a way that there’s no way to change that issue without having a worse institutional arrangement over all. That doesn’t mean the activity itself is justified. To go with the unfair analogy, the nurse who does a poor job and gets paid is not justified, even though there’s no better justifiable institutional framework or justifiable manner in which to eliminate this unjustified activity.
Even if this were the case with research, that it’s ineliminable for similar reasons, and I’m not sure it is, that doesn’t satisfy. That’s not a positive justification of funding for research so much as it’s a justification for not cutting funding - the research occupies some position akin to a necessary or ineliminable evil or a morally neutral element (akin to paint on the wall or something).
It’s probably obvious by now that I doubt that pay for academic research is justified at all in a substantial way (one that is specific to this sort of activity and under anything like our current type of society), but I’m trying not to pre-judge the question. I also should say, as someone who works in a university I’m not making any claims about reforms that should happen - in the current climate I doubt that any positive reforms are likely - and I’d be happy if I were personally to benefit from what I think is the unjustified current arrangement. (It’s like the lottery in a way, it’s probably not a justifiable institution but if I won it I’d certainly keep the money.)
justification is equivocal here isn’t it? Are you saying “current justifications for academic research?”? Or justification as legitimation?
Is academic research for pay legitimate? Yes. Its work like any other on that level, isn’t it? In particular, I think those who pay (perhaps too much) to go to school or taxes to maintain institutions of learning, expect it: both in the sciences and the humanities and arts. I’m not saying that this justifies it, but perhaps you are asking what non-arbitrary reasons are there for the public to expect humanities research.
What are the reasons for it not being justified? What about the sciences: what is the difference between a physicist working on anti-matter and an archaeologists being paid for unearthing ruins?
Comment by tzuchien — September 26, 2008 @ 7:32 am
Hey Nate,
This stuff has been coming up at my university. The graduate school used to distribute blocks of funds to different departments for graduate research, but it recently took the distribution of those funds out of the hands of the departments and centralized the process, so that it could be more selective about the projects it funds and exercise more control over the use of its money. It’s made graduate research funding competitive across disciplines and even across the divisions of the college of arts and sciences, so there is competition for funding between graduate research projects in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Naturally this led to a lot of discussion about how to justify a research project and write a winning grant proposal, which bears on the issues you raise. The competition for research funding at my university is basically just an “applied” version of the questions you raise at the beginning of your post. And it’s been particularly hard on students in the humanities.
As I understand it, pretty much everyone agrees that 1) the right to an income, is not a good reason to fund research. Although I believe in a right to subsistence and I think it’s beneficial to fund younger scholars or projects which are in earlier stages of their development, it’s hard to make the case for funding any particular scholar or any particular project on the basis of a “right” to income. No institution is obligated to respect that “right” in the last instance, so they all just shift the responsibility on to the next institution. If the graduate school doesn’t award you funding for your research, it tells you to seek external funding. If you’re denied by one external funding source, you’re told to apply to a different source. So, even if researchers did have a “right” to an income or projects had a “right” to be funded, there is no institution which is obliged to provide that funding, just as a matter of fact.
I think points 2) importance of the research and 4) advancement of the field are better reasons to fund research than you give them credit for. I think most institutions that actually fund research take these reasons very seriously. While, to some degree, I also suspect the degree to which research funding distribution is actually “meritocratic,” I think it’s possible, at least in principle, to justify the importance of a research projects and give convincing reasons about why it would advance a particularly field of research and deserves funding. Even if its value is, as you say, intrinsic to the activity or only valuable to a small number of specialists, you can make an argument that the research serves a larger purpose or a greater good, which might be of some scientific or social value. Grant proposals make those kinds of arguments, and funding sources use them to discriminate between projects they will fund and projects they will not fund.
It’s interesting to consider your example of the union nurse in this context. It may not be the case that all research funding institutions are beneficial. There are some despicable institutions out there and they fund despicable research. On the other hand, there are institutions which have real value, because they fund important research, which might help to advance an entire field or might have great scientific, social, or pedagogical utility. Those institutions will make bad judgments and fund projects that were badly planned from the start, or they will fund researchers who, for whatever reason, don’t do as good a job as they should, and that will happen with some regularity. If they can continue to get money to distribute to various researchers and projects, it doesn’t really matter whether the results underperform. In that case, we’re talking about airport books and pop music, as you suggest. But if the projects they fund do perform and do produce results, then we’re not necessarily talking about airport books or pop music. We could be talking about something with real value. Certainly that’s not always the case, but it’s at least possible.
I think the trick is to be able to make arguments that justify even the most particular, specialist projects and persuade or convince an intelligent, general audience of non-specialists, like the people who review grant proposals. I don’t think that’s impossible or that non-specialists will automatically dismiss the intrinsic merits of a project in a field in which they are not directly involved. That will happen In some cases. But in other cases, you can find ways of talking that persuade or convince an audience of grant proposal-reviewers or potential research-funders, that a project is important or that it will advance a field or that it will have a certain kind of scientific or social utility.
This might go beyond what you had in mind. But I think I’ve hit most of your points. It’s unfortunate that 1) is such a weak argument. I think 2) and 4) are stronger arguments, but they depend on a capacity to persuade or convince an audience of the importance of the project or the degree to which it will advance a field. That may be difficult, but it’s not impossible. Finally, 3) utility in teaching is only one of the many kinds of utility that helps to justify research. There are other kinds which have recognized values, so I don’t think 3) is inherently more convincing than if you replaced “teaching” with “scientific knowledge” or “social justice” or some other term which would appeal to some institution with money to spend funding research.
Comment by Coin — September 26, 2008 @ 8:11 am
hey gents,
Colin, sorry about the problems with moderation of your comments. I still don’t understand the logic of how the blog automatically moderates stuff.
Tzuchien, I’m interested in the ways academic research gets legitimated (or doesn’t), but I’m more interested in real reasons for why it should be funded - as you put it, non-arbitrary reasons, I’d want to say genuinely good reasons (so, “this will helps us perfect interrogation techniques” and so on which might be argued by some to not be arbitrary would be out). As for what differentiates the humanities from the sciences, I don’t really want to get into that largely because I don’t know anything about the sciences.
Colin, you mention various types of utility, that helps me. I’m interested in justifications for things with no clear extra-academic utility. For instance, my research on workmen’s compensation will only be read by academics, almost exclusively historians. I care very much about that topic and it’s intrinsically important. Should it be funded? If so, why? (Of course I want it to be, but that’s not an argument.) A parallel argument could be made for funding people to write interpretive dance routines, or other cultural products without widespread audiences. What I’m getting stuck on are justifications which don’t boil down to “well, people want to buy it, so …”
To be clear - a good society would include the right to spend time producing material of this and other sorts, or just taking it in (like a right to get paid to just read books and listen to music and so on).
Maybe some general examples would help. Why should faculty get paid to write books on things like faith and despair in Kierkegaard, symbolism in Joyce, religious themes in 17th century Dutch painting? (Assuming those are legitimate pieces of scholarship, I think they are, if y’all don’t think they are then let’s pick new ones.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — September 26, 2008 @ 10:27 pm
They simply eliminated my field in the late-80s. the answer is ‘contribution to increasing the rate of profit.’
Comment by Chuckie K — September 28, 2008 @ 4:38 pm
Hey Nate,
You and I are asking similar questions, I think. And, to be honest, I can’t believe I got funding to go see whether there’s any indication that “critique of pure reason” is marked as a title in any of Kant’s correspondence from the 1770’s. The only grounds for funding my research was 1) I wrote a persuasive proposal and 2) it was a clear project with a clear outcome. That value of that clear outcome was defined by the proposal, relative to my research in general, but not to the greater good of humanity as a whole or anything. My conclusion is probably naive, but I think some people like the humanities, and are willing to spend money on it. Why, again, I’m not totally sure. The problem isn’t that there is no reason, but that there are many, none of them seem terribly convincing as arguments, and none of them seem to justify huge expenditures of wealth on obscure research.
Comment by colin — October 1, 2008 @ 8:06 am
hi Colin,
Yes, and the “some people will pay” doesn’t really satisfy in that it’s not really a reason at all - a reason would be “why _should_ this be paid for?” whereas “some people will” just restates the fact that humanities research is paid for (well, some).
To be clear, I think it’s great that you got funding, and I’ve got no axe to grind about graduate student funding (no wait, I do, but not because we’re _over_ funded but quite the opposite). My real interest is in research funding for professors, more specifically faculty who do nothing but research or mostly research. It seems to me odd that such positions exist, and that they’re usually paid more than positions which are only or mainly teaching positions. That’s the real thing I’m interested in criticizing.
Gotta run, teaching in 15 minutes and need to do some last minute prep.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 1, 2008 @ 9:56 am