In academia there is an adage that says disputes among professors are bitter precisely because the stakes are so small. The statement has been attributed to various people, including Henry Kissinger and Woodrow Wilson. In print the more general conception is known as Issawi’s law of social motion, specifically: “In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue. That is why academic politics are so bitter.” I question the generalization that high-stakes issues lack intense feeling, but the more significant point is what exactly is the nature of the stakes that the adage refers to and whose stakes are we talking about?
Much has been written by academics about why the disputes are so bitter and the answer generally is the golden handcuffs of tenure. Working in a profession that lacks tangible rewards, professors crave status and recognition, but they are cooped up like rats or chickens with the same coworkers for decades. “Married without the possibility of divorce,” says one commentator, “angry faculty members exhaust themselves in petty battles over ancient personal resentments that pretend to be principles.” [1]
The protection of tenure and academic freedom, says another, gives some professors “license to behave with little regard for civility or collegiality.” [2] In business, this writer points out, one can move on to another company, thus minimizing the irritation of disagreements with fellow workers, but in academia, where the ease of going elsewhere becomes more difficult with the number of years beyond tenure, the distress of every resentment and annoyance grows until it erupts into volcanic acrimony. To outsiders a dispute over who gets a new $100 office chair may seem small, hence the expression, but to the participants in the dispute the stakes loom large. Why?
The disputes are not often over tangibles, such as new office chairs. They may be over class scheduling, the elimination of a favorite course, or, more seriously, who gets hired, promoted, or tenured. This last brings up comparisons of competence. The willingness to hire, promote, or tenure someone who is better than oneself—for example, in teaching, service, or scholarship—requires a strong, self-sufficient ego.
The following statement by former General Electric chief executive officer, Jack Welch, and his wife, Suzy Welch, former editor of the Harvard Business Review, is one not shared by many academics:
Seek out people who are better, smarter, and in every way more talented than you are. They'll push the organization to new heights of performance. And we guarantee your career will follow. [3]
Instead, rationalization upon rationalization, if not outright hostility, will be flung into the discussion to justify why such a person is not qualified. The rigors of scholarly logic disappear where personnel and other administrative decisions are concerned. Protecting one’s turf—and frail ego—becomes paramount. A frail ego with low self-esteem cannot tolerate the prospect of a better colleague gaining (perceived) position and power. The stakes, psychologically speaking, have become huge. This does not take into consideration the fact that the stakes for the person being considered for employment, promotion, or tenure are equally huge. The adage about academic life is ambiguous in this respect.
Not every academic, of course, suffers such a low level of self-esteem, but enough seem to populate campuses around the world to justify the expression. The disputes of the academic world have no tangible effect on tenured professors. To outsiders, therefore, the privileged professors are still tenured and still have their jobs; so what if they have to teach a different schedule or work beside colleagues who are better than they? It is impossible for an outsider to think anything other than that the stakes are small. Psychologically, however, the privileged ones find it intolerable to have anyone change their comfortable schedules or to have someone new come in and expose their shortcomings. Envy, jealousy, and resentment move to the forefront, while rationality goes out the window.
So if one has sufficient self-esteem not to get upset over a schedule change or over colleagues who are better than they, how does such a person cope with those who fling the rationalizations and hostility and, more generally, throw tantrums in department meetings? Ms. Mentor, a.k.a. Emily Toth, columnist for the Chronicle of Higher Education, encourages young and old professors alike to view the events of academia from a literary perspective, as a play, as it were, albeit with “atrociously bad actors”:
There are serfs; there are dragons; there are definitely bats in belfries. Ideally, you find teaching exciting and mind-stretching (if you don’t, you should leave the profession). But sometimes the longitudinal study of your colleagues—Oliver Awkward, Sara Surreptitious, Barnaby Bluster—is the most entertaining, and the longest-lasting show of your life.
Ms. Mentor urges you not to miss a minute of it. [4]
It is this perspective, I admit, that I need to work on!
In my book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism I treat favorably a number of ideas from philosopher John Dewey, which may come as a surprise to admirers of Ayn Rand. The key to understanding why I do so is to see Dewey as an Aristotelian who rejects intrinsicism without resorting to skepticism or subjectivism.
During his years at Columbia University, Dewey came under the influence of Aristotelian scholar F. J. E. Woodbridge, major figure in the early twentieth century school of realism and naturalism. When Dewey was asked by students how he should be classified, he replied, “That is easy. With the revival of Greek Philosophy.”*
Intrinsicism is Ayn Rand’s term for the doctrine that essences and values inhere intrinsically—eternally and immutably—in concretes, and that the mind is a passive mirror or spectator of these essences and values. The doctrine originated in Greek thought and has plagued philosophy ever since. Both Dewey and Rand reject it. Reality, for Dewey, is the Darwinian world of evolutionary change, not the Greek or medieval world of immutable, eternal forms or essences (or biological species) that exist intrinsically in reality. Knowledge—forms, essences, concepts—are constructions of the mind based on the human animal’s participations in, or interactions or transactions with, the world in which he or she lives. When Dewey speaks of the “spectator theory,” he means the doctrine of intrinsicism.
With this background in mind, I would like to demonstrate in this post how two quotations of Dewey in The Ominous Parallels by Leonard Peikoff take on a different meaning when put into full context. On page 124 of the paperback edition, Peikoff states that, according to Dewey, we cannot know facts “antecedent” to the mind, that it is not a function of the mind to know facts, and that the mind is not a “spectator.” Knowledge in particular, quoting Dewey, is not “a disclosure of reality, of reality prior to and independent of knowing. . . .” (from The Quest for Certainty, p. 35).
These statements and quotation sound quite subjectivist, but the full context is the so-called problem of value created by physical science’s failure to find anything resembling value-in-itself or intrinsic value. Here is the context; the original quotation is italicized:
. . . There are two rival systems that must have their respective claims adjusted. The crisis in contemporary culture, the confusions and conflicts in it, arise from a division of authority. Scientific inquiry seems to tell one thing, and traditional beliefs about ends and ideals that have authority over conduct tell something quite different. The problem of reconciliation arises and persists for one reason only. As long as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of reality, of reality prior to and independent of knowing, and that knowing is independent of a purpose to control the quality of experienced objects, the failure of natural science to disclose significant values in its objects will come as a shock. Those seriously concerned with the validity and authority of value will have a problem on their hands. As long as the notion persists that values are authentic and valid only on condition that they are properties of Being independent of human action, as long as it is supposed that their right to regulate action is dependent upon their being independent of action, so long there will be needed schemes to prove that values are, in spite of the findings of science, genuine and known qualifications of reality in itself. For men will not easily surrender all regulative guidance in action. If they are forbidden to find standards in the course of experience they will seek them somewhere else, if not in revelation, then in the deliverance of a reason that is above experience.
Rephrasing Dewey in terms of the doctrine of intrinsicism: “As long as the notions persist that knowledge is a disclosure of [intrinsic essences], of [intrinsic essences] prior to and independent of knowing, . . . the failure of natural science to disclose significant [intrinsic] values in its objects will come as a shock.” It should be noted here also that Dewey uses the term “value” as presupposing a “to whom and for what purpose,” as does Ayn Rand.
The next quotation in The Ominous Parallels immediately follows the previous one: “The business of thought is not to conform to or reproduce the characters already possessed by objects” (from The Quest for Certainty, p. 110).
This quotation arises in the context of the premise that all knowledge is experimental or operational in origin. “The test of ideas, of thinking generally, is found in the consequences of the acts to which the ideas lead, that is in the new arrangements of things which are brought into existence. Such is the unequivocal evidence as to the worth of ideas which is derived from observing their position and role in experimental knowing” (pp. 109-10). In other words, all knowledge and thought is for the sake of action. Photographs of intrinsic essences, however, since intrinsic essences do not exist, provide no guidance for action. The full context reads, with the original quotation again italicized (pp. 110-11):
In the previous chapter, we saw that experimental method, in reducing objects to data, divests experienced things of their qualities, but that this removal, judged from the standpoint of the whole operation of which it is one part, is a condition of the control which enables us to endow the objects of experience with other qualities which we want them to have. In like fashion, thought, our conceptions and ideas, are designations of operations to be performed or already performed. Consequently their value is determined by the outcome of these operations. They are sound if the operations they direct give us the results which are required. The authority of thought depends upon what it leads us to through directing the performance of operations. The business of thought is not to conform to or reproduce the characters already possessed by objects but to judge them as potentialities of what they become through an indicated operation. This principle holds from the simplest case to the most elaborate. To judge that this object is sweet, that is, to refer the idea or meaning ‘sweet’ to it without actually experiencing sweetness, is to predict that when it is tasted—that is, subjected to a specified operation—a certain consequence will ensue. Similarly, to think of the world in terms of mathematical formulae of space, time and motion is not to have a picture of the independent and fixed essence of the universe. It is to describe experienceable objects as material upon which certain operations are performed.
The bearing of this conclusion upon the relation of knowledge and action speaks for itself. Knowledge which is merely a reduplication in ideas of what exists already in the world may afford us the satisfaction of a photograph, but that is all. To form ideas whose worth is to be judged by what exists independently of them is not a function that (even if the test could be applied, which seems impossible) goes on within nature or makes any difference there. Ideas that are plans of operations to be performed are integral factors in actions which change the face of the world. . . .
Rephrasing: “The business of thought is not to conform to or reproduce the [intrinsic essences or properties] already possessed by objects but to judge [the objects] as potentialities [to serve the purposes of my professional or personal life] through an indicated operation.”
Dewey did not like the term “pragmatism” and did not use it to refer to his philosophy. He preferred “instrumentalism,” in the sense that thought is an instrument of action. Dewey, indeed, was no Objectivist, nor was he a capitalist, but he does have interesting ideas. Admirers of Ayn Rand who carefully read Dewey as an Aristotelian should be repaid for the effort.
* Walter B. Veazie, “John Dewey and the Revival of Greek Philosophy,” University of Colorado Studies, Series in Philosophy, no. 2, 1961, p. 3. Raymond Boisvert has analyzed Dewey’s metaphysics and concluded that it is Aristotelian.
Socialism, and more broadly collectivism, as Ayn Rand pointed out, died as a moral ideal in 1945. As a practical ideal, socialism died with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Yet socialism and the principle that government might is required to make right is still with us. How can that be?
Answer: epistemological errors of Enlightenment thinkers, specifically their failure to identify the true nature of consciousness and thereby describe reason’s method of knowing reality, allowed irrationalism and collectivism to take root and grow into today’s spectacle of a virulently absolutist and nihilistic postmodernism.
Stephen Hicks’ 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault chronicles this process with brilliant simplicity. Beginning with an overview of the contrast between modernism and postmodernism, that is, the Enlightenment’s pro-reason, pro-individualist, pro-capitalist philosophies and the postmodernists’ rejection of those views, Hicks essentializes the ideas of the major players in this evolution.
Cashing in on the errors of the Enlightenment, Kant and Hegel were among the first (Rousseau preceded them in opposing fundamental Enlightenment values) to narrow the effectiveness of reason—in order to make room for faith and religion—and to devalue the autonomy of the individual. As the nineteenth century progressed, subsequent philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, declared reality a subjective, contradictory creation known only through feeling or instinct and the individual’s identity a function of group membership. Contempt for reason was their conclusion. Heidegger in the twentieth century elevated morbid, anxious feelings to the role of guides to knowledge and declared war against the entire Western tradition based on the law of non-contradiction. When logical positivism and linguistic analysis failed to correct the Enlightenment’s errors, the path was cleared for the postmodernists—among them Foucault, Lyotard, Derrida, and Rorty—to take over.
When reason and reality are gone and feelings, especially those of anxiety, dread, and alienation, guide action, and when the group defines the individual, “group balkanization,” as Hicks observes, “and conflict must necessarily result.” A “nasty political correctness”—arising ironically in an age of relativism—became the tactic for accomplishing political goals (p. 82). And those goals are all of a socialist hue. The problem for the postmodernists, though, is that socialism has suffered a number of setbacks. The proletariat has not rebelled spontaneously, nor has capitalism collapsed. Indeed, Hicks cites six dramatic failures of socialism that have led to various reincarnations. The postmodern variety resulted most particularly from Khrushchev’s revelations of 1956. The postmodernists moved socialism away from its traditional emphasis on need, wealth, and science and technology to the form we see today: egalitarianism, the notion that wealth is bad and environmentalism good (that is, the shift from “red” to “green”), and from universalism to multiculturalism.
Epistemological trends of the past 200 years, plus the failures of socialism, have culminated in the virulent absolutism of political correctness. Socialists have always advocated the coercion of government might to achieve their goals, but the postmodernists today are academics who realize that past revolutions have failed and capitalism has not collapsed. As a result, they are left with the only weapons they know how to use, namely words. Thus, they use words—not facts or overt force—as their means of swaying others and the words express hostility at Enlightenment values and despair about the present and future.
Cynical and envy-ridden, as Hicks points out in his grippingly eloquent conclusion, the postmodernists are the Iagos to the Enlightenment’s Othellos. The postmodernists’ goal is no longer revolution; their goal, like Iago’s, is to inject doubt into modernity’s values and “let that doubt work like a slow poison” (p. 200).
I must emphasize that this brief post cannot do justice to the clarity and persuasive power with which Hicks’ 200-page book exposes the insidious deviousness of postmodernism. Some reviewers have said the book is scary, but I find it inspiring and encouraging, if for no other reason than the fact that Hicks makes the reader want to go out on a limb to predict the next failure of socialism. The more significant reason for being encouraged is the negativity of postmodernism; negative programs never last.
But allow me to make that prediction. Ayn Rand said that collectivism had to fail precisely at its height because its claims to intellectuality and idealism were both frauds. I think the same point must eventually be applied to the environmental movement—those “reds” who have become “greens”—especially the global warming crowd. And it seems like everyone is going green today. However, when a Harvard psychologist writing in the New York Times Magazine acknowledges that the numbers about curbing carbon emissions “don’t add up” and science staffer John Tierney on the same newspaper makes fun of the exaggerated predictions routinely made today in the name of environmental “science,” establishment media would seem to be moving in the direction of more openness to facts and less blind acceptance of the red/green litany.
The antidote to postmodernism is better ideas and those ideas are making their way through our culture. Will I see postmodernism overthrown in my lifetime? Perhaps not, but my daughter might.
A favorite pastime of today’s teachers, especially college professors, is the trashing of their students.
“My students are terrible,” is the common complaint. “They can’t write, they can’t calculate, and they can’t think. They are woefully ignorant! They just don’t measure up to the standards of the good old days when I was a student.” And those “good old days,” depending on the age of the critic, could be the 1940s, the ‘60s, or the ‘80s. Exaggeration aside, the complaint is that students today are not receiving the education that their predecessors did.
The facts, however, are a little more difficult to discern. Consider first of all that teachers have always complained about their students—“shop talk” style not unlike the complaints of sales representatives about their customers or employees about their bosses. Harvard Business School faculty in the 1950s complained about the math skills of their liberal-arts trained graduate students and a Harvard report in 1894 complained about grade inflation (quoted in Kohn).
I, too, have expressed complaints about my students’ skills, especially the handling of decimals, but my A students do know where the decimal point goes and the others have a variety of reasons why they don’t know or don’t care to demonstrate that they do know. Interest or desire, after all, is a major factor in determining what people learn. Some, perhaps many, students just may not be interested in the subject of the complaining teachers’ courses.
In my “good old days” of elementary school in the 1950s, it was common to have Jesuitical style contests at the chalkboard to see who could solve arithmetic problems the fastest. I was usually in the top three, but in a class of thirty-five students that leaves thirty-two who did not handle the math as well. Similarly for spelling. So what? Well, almost all of those thirty-two students at the time likely did not go on to college and some may not have graduated from high school; today, most of their counterparts are sitting in college classes.* Whatever one thinks of the normal curve as it applies to intelligence (or motivation), the lower ends of the curve are now in college and probably affecting test scores and grades (not that I think much of either) and demonstrating lesser knowledge and skill than I had back in those good old days.
This phenomenon could explain declining SAT scores (not that I think much of the SAT—it’s no longer referred to as an aptitude test and it predicts little about college success), as well as the lack of broad scale grade inflation that everyone assumes to exist. If grade inflation exists, it probably has occurred at the more elite institutions, the greater influx of weaker students in less prestigious schools keeping the grade point averages level or even declining (1). As education and social critic Alfie Kohn has said, “No one has ever demonstrated that students today get A's for the same work that used to receive B's or C's. We simply do not have the data to support such a claim” (2).
What about the change in curricula? Curricula change all the time. Teaching and understanding of the Greek language in ancient Roman schools declined in the latter part of the Empire (and, no doubt, teachers of Greek back then complained that their students didn’t know anything!). In the early nineteenth century US, the university core curriculum consisted of math, Latin and Greek language and literature, and a strong dose of protestant Christianity. Science and history did not appear until the last third of the nineteenth century. And western civilization courses did not appear until the 1920s. (Term projects, the attempt to give students some individual choice and initiative in education, are products of the progressives.)
I would, of course, like my students to be better informed about American and world history, but then again, I took two American history courses in junior and senior high school and at least one course on world history, but I only remember what I learned in college—when I was much more interested in the topic. And, oh yes, I was also taught, among other myths, that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River. When I finally saw the Potomac as a young adult, I concluded, “Man, the Kansas City A’s sure could have used GW’s arm!”
And then there’s the “cacophony of teaching” that Lawrence Cremin (pp. 51-83) talked about in 1990. Teaching is everywhere, not just in the classroom. More so today with the Internet. That Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the early 1960s (p. 35) was seen on television by more people in one night than had seen it since it was first performed in 1600 should make English teachers everywhere praise television, not just condemn it.
Bottom line: it’s not easy to compare today’s students with their grandparents, especially when most of the grandparents did not attend college (or have television or the Intenet) and may have quit high school to go straight into a blue-collar job. (And most of my students’ grandparents attended school, if at all, in Mexico, China, or Vietnam.) It is also important for teachers to introspect about their own motivations for complaining about students. Are teachers just patting themselves on the back for being smarter than their students?** Or are they genuinely concerned about teaching and, if so, why don’t they focus on the minds they are presented with and work to stretch them as far as the minds are capable. In the course of a year, one or two of the minds just might get turned on to the subject or method of the teacher and become eager to learn more.
After all, was it not one or two teachers that turned on the present teachers to become teachers? That’s how it happened for me. Inspiration, interest, motivation, method. Those are the fundamentals of a good teacher, not any particular subject matter. Get the light turned on in the student first. The subject matter will follow.
* Only 1.6% of the US population aged 15-24 was enrolled in college in 1900, 12% in 1950, and 38% in 2000 (1, 2). Other calculations indicate that 69% of high school graduates began college studies right after high school in 2005, whereas only 49% did in 1972—the implication being that the percentages were correspondingly smaller in earlier years.
** Teachers are motivated to learn. That’s why they become teachers. They love their subjects and tend to expect everyone else to love it the same as they do (an unrealistic expectation). And, because of their motivation, most were good students, perhaps very good students, but the normal curve again, in motivation—never mind intelligence, means that many of today’s students are not going to give a hoot about what the teacher is teaching. I think the critics delude themselves if they think their classmates in the good old days learned the multiplication tables or correct spelling or history, etc., as well as they did.
Sound judgment means sensible—i.e., rational or considered, not impulsive—decision making. Many parents and teachers value this process as a primary skill that children and students should possess upon reaching adulthood.
In contrast, independent judgment, which presupposes sensible decision making, is not often cited as a valued goal of either education or adulthood, yet this is the personality and character trait that should be exhibited by all citizens of a fully free society. Independent judgment, and its practical consequence, independent action, should be a fundamental aim of both parenting and education. What is independent judgment and why is it not encouraged by parents and teachers?
Independence is the more common term that parents and teachers use to describe what they think children should achieve as adults, but this usually means the ability to pay one’s own bills, by providing one’s own food, shelter, and clothing without parental help. The mental act of asserting something as fact and doing so entirely on one’s own is independent judgment. The willingness to act on what one has judged to be right, in the face of disapproval and opposition, is independent action. True independence is the ability and willingness to see and say that the emperor has no clothes.
In history, both Socrates and Galileo exhibited this true independence, both to their detriment. Socrates (1, 2) could have bowed to the will of the majority and stopped upsetting the Athenian elite, but he chose not to and was put to death for his independence. Galileo (1, 2) did capitulate to the Inquisition, but nonetheless was put under house arrest for the remainder of his life. In literature, Henrik Ibsen’s Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People (1, 2) stood steadfastly to his judgment while one by one losing nearly all who were supposedly his friends. Independent judgment and action are not well tolerated by those who are not themselves independent.
Some advocates of sensible decision making may argue that Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann, by stirring up the hornet’s nests in which they were trying to work, were not being reasonable. But there are two issues here: are the advocates of sensible decision making saying that these three men should have given up their judgments in order to conform to the majority? or are they saying that independent judgment does not require sacrifices when under duress? The principle of self-defense indeed does say that it is morally equivalent to fight or flee when threatened with force. Rejecting self-sacrifice as a noble ideal, as I do, Socrates probably should have escaped to live in exile. Ibsen’s Stockmann remained to fight partly because he assumed that many of his so-called friends were on his side but mainly because fighting was the right thing to do. Giving in as a pretense, which is what Galileo did, is a third option. Abject conformity or sacrificing one’s independent judgment was not considered by any of these men.
The problem with sound judgment as a goal of education is that it often becomes interpreted as conformity or conventionality. A free society requires rebels—people like Socrates, Galileo, and Stockmann whose independence leads them to see and say what the majority cannot. People with independent judgment are the innovators and entrepreneurs who move economies and societies forward. They rock boats, not necessarily on purpose, but because they see things others do not. The challenge is, can independent judgment be taught? and can every person possess such a trait? My answers are: indirectly and yes.
Independent judgment is first and foremost the correct perception of reality that is not influenced or contaminated by the perceptions of others. Misinformation is not a goal of education, so teaching facts is a start, but encouraging children and students to pursue their own goals and ideas without commands, criticism, and ridicule is better. This will enable them to develop the conviction that they can do anything they set their minds to—regardless of what others say or do. Freedom and nurture in the learning process, not coercion or neglect, are two requirements for instilling an independent and confident spirit in the child and student.
So can everyone in adulthood possess this childlike independent and confident spirit that says “the emperor has no clothes”? Why not? That many adults today do not possess such a spirit indicates only that something is terribly wrong with our educational system such that it kills the spirit.
By about the fifth grade, according to John Holt (p. 263).
This lament is often heard today about medicine and education, among other fields. Business, however, is the last thing medicine and education have been turned into. Bureaus of the government would be a more accurate description. Why the confusion between bureaucracy and business?
The simplest answer is that most people do not understand the difference between the two. A bureaucracy, as Ludwig von Mises points out, is an organization dominated by methods of managing the affairs of government, whereas a business is dominated by the goal of making a profit through customer satisfaction.
Bureaucracy, or rather, bureaucratic management, is a set of rules and a budget handed down from a higher authority to guide the running of a government department, such as the police, the courts, or the military. A business may have guidelines, usually called policies, and each department within the organization may have a budget, but the ultimate yardstick by which business activity is evaluated is profit-making by producing need- and want-satisfying products. When market conditions change, meaning customer needs and wants have changed, policies and budgets must be adapted lest the company fail to keep up with the competition and go out of business. Bureaucracy has no such ultimate yardstick. That is why the rules and budgets of government offices often ossify leading to the familiar refrain of the bureaucrat: "Rules are rules, fella; I don't make 'em, I just enforce 'em."
When bureaucratic rules, in the form of laws and regulations of business, intrude on the marketplace, businesses that are regulated will take on the characteristics of bureaucracies. This is because the laws and regulations of our mixed economy deflect attention away from profit-making through customer satisfaction to compliance with the rules of the bureaucracy. And the rules almost never coincide with what is best for the market. Ossification sets in and a "rules are rules" mentality eventually takes over. To the extent that a business is regulated by the government, to that extent it will be bureaucratic. Small businesses, except for local zoning ordinances and licensing requirements, usually escape regulation, that is, until they grow in size to a certain number of employees or level of sales; more rules, then, kick in.
Bureaucracy does not mean a large, hierarchically structured organization, such as General Motors or the Department of Justice. This is the popular misconception given by the media and management professors. General Motors is a private business that is highly regulated by the government; bureaucratic intrusions into the profit-making, customer-satisfying operation of the company are what make GM today seem so bureaucratic, not its size or structure. The Department of Justice makes no pretense at being a private business; it was founded as a bureaucracy.
The postal service, on the other hand, does pretend to be a business by mimicking the operations of private enterprise, such as subtracting costs from revenues and conducting market research surveys. But the post office is so thoroughly regulated and controlled by the government—it is a quasi-governmental agency under the executive branch—that it is a joke to consider it anything other than a bureaucracy. Public schools and state universities are government entities, making them bureaucracies by definition; private schools are highly regulated by the education czars and so are nearly as bureaucratic. Almost all operators of both types of school abhor the prospect of making a profit or of having to satisfy paying customers.
Yet occasionally the trustees of these institutions will demand that expenses be accounted for or that pay be tied to merit. This is when the screams of faculty are heard to say that education is just being turned into a business. More accurately, the demands are the bureaucracy trying to mimic business accountability by imposing additional rules on the system. The result is a stilted, heavy-handed decree of arbitrary edicts administered by a "rules are rules" mentality. (And pay tied to merit becomes a political popularity contest.) Add to this the fact that education today, which once was controlled at the local and state level, is rapidly becoming nationalized by the US Department of Education and you have education as a bureau of the national government.
The same attempts at mimicking business accountability can be seen in medicine with the cartel-imposed cost constraints of the insurance industry and Medicare. Medicine is hardly a free market today, nor was it prior to the current health-maintenance-organization/Medicare era. In the early twentieth century, the licensing monopoly of the American Medical Association drastically reduced the number of medical schools and hospitals and continues to keep that number low (1, 2, 3). The mess that we have now is just one bureaucratic monstrosity piled on top of the previous model. Calls for cost containment and accountability are not the calls of free enterprise. They are the panicked cries of bureaucrats who have no clue what they are doing.
But they do have their rules and the rules must be enforced.
In a previous post, I argued that academic peer review is a gatekeeping process brought about by the post-World War II growth of government involvement in research and scholarship. Though it may control quality in a narrow, conventional sense, one significant consequence of this process is the suppression of innovation. The present post takes a look at the underlying ethics and epistemology of peer review.
Medical researcher David Horrobin, whom I quoted in the previous post, says that critics of peer review “are almost always dismissed in pejorative terms such as ‘maverick,’ ‘failure,’ and ‘driven by failure.’” Lest those epithets be ascribed to me, I hasten to say that I have had some success in the process and that I am not denigrating anyone who uses it to advance his or her career. The process nonetheless does have serious flaws.
Most significant of its flaws is the view that peer review must be blind in order to maintain objectivity, that is, to prevent bias from entering the process. However, as the British Medical Journal, which has not used blind peer review since 1999, points out, “A court with an unidentified judge makes us think immediately of totalitarian states and the world of Franz Kafka.” Objectivity is the fallacy-free perception and communication of what the object of cognition is, and bias means that some other factor, such as irrelevant preconceived notions, whether formed by emotion or by reason, interferes with this perception and communication. Lack of objectivity stems from a failure to perceive reality accurately.
Neither blind nor open peer review can guarantee this accuracy. Indeed, anonymity removes the need for care and responsibility when commenting on someone else’s work. How many ill-mannered or ill-thought-out remarks would be made about submitted papers if reviewers knew that the papers’ authors will know their names and how to contact them? Being allowed to hide behind anonymity is an invitation to scurrilous behavior. This is why the objectivity of legal systems in free societies demands that witnesses, whether supporters, accusers, or expert testifiers, be identified. Contrary to the conventional wisdom of peer review, objectivity requires at minimum that the process be open.
Objectivity, at root, is an epistemological concept and the failure to perceive and communicate accurately is a function of how one uses one’s mind in the processes of perceiving and communicating. Neither anonymity nor openness will improve this. The most important requirement of objectivity while reviewing someone else’s work is a constant awareness of one’s preconceived notions. The most significant one to watch out for is “This is not how I would have written the paper; it should therefore be changed to . . .”
As one journal editor said, no doubt with some exaggeration, all of his reviewers of so-called empirical papers recommend rejection and those of theoretical papers insist that the papers be “recreated in the reviewers’ own images.” And another editor complained that reviewers have turned into wannabe co-authors, requiring extensive revisions and writing comments that are sometimes as long or longer than the original articles. Clearly, decentering, to use Piaget’s term, meaning the ability to consider other points of view or to appreciate the perspectives of others, is needed by some, perhaps many, reviewers.
Once it has been established that a paper meets a journal’s editorial guidelines and philosophy, that is, that the topic of the paper is appropriate for the journal, then it is the author’s objective that should guide evaluation. Decentering in reviewing, or editing or criticism, means accepting the premises of the author and recommending improvements in execution. The reviewer’s personal preferences on the topic, including agreement or disagreement with the author’s basic premises, should be set aside. The author’s paper is the reality to be adhered to in the reviewing process; interference from irrelevant, previously formed emotional associations and intellectual beliefs destroys the objectivity of the process.
A reviewer, of course, may strongly disagree with the editorial guidelines and philosophy of a journal or with the objective of a paper, but then such a reviewer should either decline to be a reviewer or come to terms with the principle of objectivity. Much suppression of innovation in the peer review process probably stems from the failure of reviewers to distinguish their personal philosophies and preferences from those of the authors they are reviewing. When reviewer and author disagree, the reviewer either demands conformity or recommends rejection.
The issue of objectivity in reviewing (or editing or criticizing) is similar to the so-called problem of taste in art. Is this work of art bad art or is my reaction to it just my taste? Artists have an aim for their art and their execution of that aim makes it either good or bad art. Whether one likes a particular work of art, though, depends on many other factors, including emotional associations and intellectual beliefs. Therefore, as Ayn Rand points out, it is not a contradiction to say “This is a good work of art, but I don’t like it,” and vice versa. The same can be said in reviewing scholarly work, namely, “I don’t like or agree with this paper, but it is well done.”
The reviewer, editor, or critic who can make this last statement is one who exhibits objectivity. When looked at from the standpoint of epistemology, whether the process is blind or open is beside the point.
This blog comments on business, education, philosophy, psychology, and economics, among other topics, based on my understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and Ludwig von Mises’ economics. Epistemology and psychology are my special interests. Your remarks are welcome, although I prefer that you sign your real name, first and last. Note: I assume that ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism are morally and economically unassailable. My interest is in applying, not defending, them.
