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You don't have to be fixated to work here...
12 March 2009
The academy has long been a haven for obsessives, but now its emphasis on teamwork would ill suit socially inept geniuses such as Paul Dirac, writes Matthew Reisz
For Lennard J. Davis, universities are akin to licensed madhouses and obsession is the name of the game.
"If you're an academic, you had better be obsessive - that sort of behaviour is rewarded. Any academic setting will have people who are obsessive, research junkies and graphomaniacs. And most academics collect books and often get funding for it," he says.
"It's not just publish or perish, it's publish continuously. The reality of having so much 'free time' is that you are always working. I get up at 6am and go to my computer."
Davis should know. He teaches across a range of disciplines at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is also visiting professor in the department of English and linguistics at the University of Westminster. Recently he published a book called Obsession: A History.
It is an apt subject, as obsessiveness is built into the warp and weft of the academy.
"The development of the modern university system in the early 19th century was devoted to specialisation. The scientific method is about removing all the variables and looking at one particular thing. Examining one allele of a single gene is a source of a particular kind of knowledge, but it's also a strange way to spend one's life," he says.
Other core academic activities such as teaching and writing tend to attract and encourage obsessives.
"When I begin a new book," Davis explains, "I research it obsessively. I am literally possessed by the topic. Everything seems connected to the subject. It's actually a form of delusion, although that is what makes a good book. You need that single-minded drive."
But writing books also performs an essential service: preventing obsessives from becoming a public nuisance.
"Imagine if you met an author at a bar and they talked at you about their pet subject for the time it takes to read a book. Writing books stops people assaulting strangers and being the biggest bores that ever existed."
Something similar applies to teaching. "Having people listening and taking notes encourages obsession," Davis claims. "Universities allow people to pursue their obsessions in their classes or on their own - classes are a sort of padded cell for obsessives."
Obsession's argument is wide-ranging, but it starts with a disconcerting account of Davis' childhood fixations.
He writes: "I had a compulsion to swallow coins, mostly pennies and dimes, but there were the nickels as well, which I did on a regular basis, with the subsequent visual delight of seeing these gleaming circles emerge from me shiny and cleaned by the acid of my digestive system.
"When I ate elbow macaroni, I would slide each elbow on the tine of a fork, so that the utensil contained four straightened tubes of pasta, and then I would swallow each one whole. Continuing on the culinary front, I divided my food into absolute and irrevocable sections that must never mix or touch each other."
It is part of Davis' point that adult parallels to such behaviour are common - and indeed encouraged - in universities. That is what makes academic life so agreeable.
"The academics I know are a fairly happy lot," he says. "I find university a very congenial place to be. It's as if you are a kid and you can ride your bike all day or build as many model aeroplanes as you want."
Michael Fitzgerald, Henry Marsh professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, takes this argument a step further.
He has clinically diagnosed more than 1,800 individuals with autism and Asperger's syndrome, and he has written about the links between creativity and autistic spectrum disorders. Universities, he says, are "places where people with Asperger's get asylum".
Although this is a general phenomenon in higher education - "academics are not known for their social skills; many are loners, happy in their own company, and find other people an interruption" - it applies particularly to mathematics, philosophy, geology and engineering.
Fitzgerald believes that Asperger's is 93 per cent heritable and that "the genes for academic talent are the same as for Asperger's. It often makes (leading academics) egocentric as well as eccentric, but also gives them amazing focus and persistence.
"People have always known about the thin line between genius and madness. It's hard to be a good academic without Asperger's, especially in the laboratory, because you need sharp eyes for noticing things other people don't."
This view is backed up by Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham, who used to work as a clinical biochemist.
"Scientists are significantly more autistic than people in the fashion industry, for example," he says. "I once criticised a PhD student's presentation and he said: 'I don't want to be judged by how well I give a talk.' Science is often a refuge from being judged on charm, coolness or haircuts. It would be rare to find a charming biochemist."
The nature of different disciplines determines the kind of academics they require. "The life sciences are about collecting lots of data," explains Kealey, "so people in charge of labs need to run very tight ships and use technicians as machines. It's crucial to collect the maximum amount of data. Biochemists need maximum observation - and then the facts speak for themselves."
So in Kealey's view, the best people to put in charge of biochemistry labs have "slave-driving and obsessive personalities". Warm and cuddly won't cut it.
"I think you have to be reasonably obsessed to get ahead in research," agrees Rivka Isaacson, postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Structural Biology at Imperial College London. "A head of department told me that I should consider a career in academic science only if I think about science all the time.
"My sister often teases me about this. Once we were in the pub and bought pint bottles of Magners. They give you a glass with quite a lot of ice, so you can't fit all the cider in. Not wanting to carry the bottle and the glass, we were debating whether it was better to drink some of the Magners from the glass to make room for what was left in the bottle to avoid ice-dilution effects, or whether we should just down what was left in the bottle while it was still cold.
"We talked about this for too long, and then my sister said: 'See, you do think about science all the time' - and she has found numerous everyday occasions to say it since."
Harry Collins, a professor at the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, is also a firm believer in the value of obsession.
"The great insights or solutions happen when you are asleep and you wake up and have the answer. This happened to me in respect of an analysis problem just a couple of weeks ago. For two nights in a row, I woke up in the early hours with new ways to think about the problem and had to get up to try them out on my computer before I could go back to sleep.
"If you are not obsessively thinking about the stuff, this does not happen. For example, during my three-year stint as head of school at the University of Bath, the quantity of my output was not affected, but it was all pretty shallow because my head was obsessed with administrative problems."
There are, of course, dozens of stories, both funny and sad, about the sheer oddity of the great academic obsessives. Fitzgerald's books explore the lives and careers of many great mathematicians as well as celebrated figures from Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein to Lewis Carroll and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Another striking example of obsessiveness in the academy is one of the UK's greatest scientists, theoretical physicist Paul Dirac.
When not yet 30, Dirac was awarded the Lucasian chair of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (other holders of which have included Newton and Stephen Hawking). A year later, he became the youngest-ever Nobel laureate in his field. Yet he was occasionally mistaken for a tramp and was once said by a journalist to be "as shy as a gazelle and modest as a Victorian maid".
His lack of empathy and ability to miss the point were legendary. Told by a fellow guest at a meeting in a castle that a ghost always appeared at midnight, he replied: "Is that midnight Greenwich time or daylight saving time?" When his future wife sent him a mildly flirtatious letter asking what he was doing, he tabulated his thoughts and, in the words of his biographer, Graham Farmelo, "answered her queries as tersely as a speak-your-weight machine".
Dirac, says Farmelo, senior research fellow at the Science Museum in London, "was metronomic in his routine and always went for a walk on Sundays. By any normal standards he was incredibly focused. He had no other interests and a completely monochromatic personality. He would go for two weeks without speaking, even to his family.
"My biography (The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius) includes a group photograph of leading physicists where he is reading a book. He couldn't even be bothered to pose for a picture. In the normal course of things, I wouldn't have relished meeting him."
Although Dirac died in 1984, his oddities have continued to provide entertainment.
"He was considered strange, even by the standards of workaholic theoretical physicists. Dirac stories are still current - about his literal-mindedness, his extreme taciturnity, his linear way of thinking."
Yet his weirdness was inextricably entwined with his greatness. He had the depth of vision that enabled him to deduce the existence of antimatter from sheer obsessive thinking.
And his insight may have considerable practical significance. With the rise of nanotechnology, concludes Farmelo, Dirac's equation, "once seen as mathematical hieroglyphs with no relevance to everyday life", could become "the theoretical basis of a multibillion-dollar industry".
So, if universities have long been notable or notorious for obsessives, this surely ought to be celebrated. Let's hear it for the absent-minded professors, the shambling unworldly eccentrics, the mavericks, the oddballs, the researchers with collections of lizard excrement or samples of sand from all over the world.
Let us ensure that we always have places for people who want to devote years of their life to beetles, Beowulf or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If we are keen for more students from a wider variety of backgrounds to go into science, we may need to produce brochures showing that scientists can be young, worldly and attractive - but don't let's pretend that all or even most scientists would do well as chat-show hosts.
Academia is - and ought to be - about weird passions that yield strange fruit. Bob Horvitz, Nobel laureate for physiology in 2002, "spent 30 years of his life studying the 22 cells of a worm's vulva", according to his co-winner John Sulston.
One might not necessarily want someone like that as a son-in-law, but they add to the gaiety of nations and, far more important, are often the people who challenge received wisdom, shift the paradigms and make the breakthroughs - including life-saving medical ones - we all need.
Where can such characters flourish? It is generally agreed that Cambridge in the early 20th century was highly tolerant of eccentricity and provided a perfect home for odd fish such as Dirac and Wittgenstein. But has something gone wrong? Are the great academic obsessives under threat simply because today's universities don't know how to handle them?
"The real breakthroughs are made by eccentric individuals," claims Fitzgerald, "not team players. More corporate universities are a disaster for such people. They wreck the place if they become head of department."
A stress on values such as "roundedness" or "social skills" creates precisely the wrong environment for the obsessives.
As a clinician, Fitzgerald has occasionally diagnosed school-leavers with exceptional but highly specific talents and suggested that universities take a look at them. But he has seldom found admissions departments with the plasticity needed to see beyond paper qualifications. In the past, there was more flexibility. For example, Cambridge gave Wittgenstein a lectureship and fellowship in 1929 although he didn't have a degree.
Even if students with Asperger's do get in, "sometimes they drop out after the first year because they can't manage social situations - they're not good at handling small groups," Fitzgerald adds. But those lost to the academy may be some of the people it needs most.
Farmelo agrees. "The great universities have to give a very wide berth to (maverick geniuses). Einstein and Dirac weren't interested in teamwork; they wanted to play on their own."
Today, however, teamwork is so highly valued that it is taught in primary schools and constantly features on appraisal forms. The effect can be counterproductive.
"Managerialism sometimes cannot cope with the really great thinkers," says Farmelo.
"In the past," adds Buckingham's Kealey, "gentlemen scientists were allowed to do their own thing. Today, there's huge pressure on team-playing, because it creates lots of research, but great thinkers don't work like that."
As an example, he cites the case of Peter Mitchell, "a truly great genius" who won a Nobel prize for his "completely novel chemiosmotic hypothesis. Yet he wouldn't survive ten minutes in a modern university.
"It took him seven years to do his PhD at Cambridge - today he would have been thrown out and his supervisor admonished."
Although Mitchell was invited to set up and run the Chemical Biology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, professional frustrations combined with illness led him to branch out on his own and build a private lab in Cornwall.
The career of James Lovelock, who established another "experimental station" in the same area, tells a similar story. He once worked for Nasa and the Medical Research Council, but long ago established himself as an independent scientist and inventor, acting as a consultant to businesses and the security services, and even selling his blood to keep his family afloat at one point.
Although he will be 90 in July, Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and writings on climate change keep him at the centre of scientific and political debate. Yet he has achieved this largely outside the university system.
John Gribbin, one of the UK's best-known science writers and visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex, recently co-wrote, with his wife Mary, a biography of Lovelock, He Knew He Was Right. Lovelock, he says, "is the archetypal example of someone who doesn't fit into any system.
"He always had problems with hierarchy and bureaucracy. The breadth of his ideas would have made it difficult for him in the mainstream university system, where it is hard to shift sideways. The standard career path to head of department or head of lab means people do less and less research. Lovelock is iconoclastic and never accepts received wisdom."
He is anything but a conventional team player.
"That word 'impossible' was like a red rag to a bull," Lovelock has said. "Right from my earliest days in science, I never took it at face value when some senior bloke said something was impossible."
So how worrying is it that Britain's universities today often fail to provide congenial homes for brilliant but sometimes abrasive mavericks?
"Universities in the past were better at providing homes, full stop," says Gribbin. "Once you were in, you were in. The current system weeds out both ends, the mavericks as well as the deadbeats. So it's a mixed blessing, but I suspect it would be harder for someone such as Dirac to make his way now in this country."
Perhaps the most powerful argument on these lines comes from Bruce Charlton, reader in evolutionary psychiatry at Newcastle University. His recent paper in the journal Medical Hypotheses, provocatively entitled "Why are modern scientists so dull?", suggests that a stress on "perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity" has had the effect of excluding the "brilliant, impulsive, inspired, antisocial oddballs".
"In a nutshell," Charlton explains, "I think that creativity of genius level usually needs high IQ and moderately high 'psychoticism', ie, somewhat antisocial and impulsive behaviour with the ability to fluently generate rather loosely associated ideas."
Recent developments in the academy - long apprenticeships, avoidance of speculative and risky projects, selection procedures that look for hard-working, compliant and agreeable people - all work against this.
"What we need are stratospherically intelligent semi-crazies. But what is left at the end of the modern process are hard-working, moderately intelligent dullards ... If present trends continue, all our best people will emigrate to the US and we will be doomed to be a nation of third-rate research and development technicians posing as scientists."
Similar factors, says Charlton, "apply throughout the educational system" to exclude those who are "too abrasive, impatient, impulsive". This approach would have left people such as Wittgenstein, F.R. Leavis in the humanities and many of the best scientists out in the cold.
But such problems are particularly acute in the sciences, Charlton says. On the Nobel league table, "Cambridge is now below public universities such as the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Washington at Seattle - yes, these 'unknowns' really do outperform Cambridge in revolutionary science - and way behind the University of California, Berkeley.
"Places such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the California Institute of Technology and Princeton University are on a different planet from Cambridge nowadays.
"How would someone such as Dirac manage the research assessment exercise, the Quality Assurance Agency, grant applications and the multitudes of meetings? Would he change his research to get more grants? Well, he wouldn't, would he? He could never take a major chair. At best he would be a long-term research fellow living off short-term grants."
Charlton's polemic can be summed up as a demand for less "plodding perseverance and social inoffensiveness" and more "strange and luminous fools". At least for some positions, we need procedures that select for "superhuman intelligence and high creativity" but "only enough agreeableness to exclude psychotics and psychopaths".
Letting such people play with their toys - and occasionally throw them out of the pram - may sound indulgent and extravagant, but perhaps it is one of the missions universities need to embrace once again.
Readers' comments
Dear Sir/Madam, I was horrified to read this article celebrating the fact that so many academics suffer from (in the words of Bruce Charlton) psychoticism', ie, somewhat antisocial and impulsive behaviour with the ability to fluently generate rather loosely associated ideas. This is the reason we see a deluge of women leaving science after their PhDs and first postdocs. This is why there is no place for people like me in academia. Being a good teacher, being able to manage research projects and researchers are not skills that are celebrated in anyway in the Universities in the UK today. It is publish or perish.. this massive waste of talent and expertise is being sacrificed on the alter of obsession of the few. It's time for universities to wake up and to realise that you don't have to bea self obsessed boffin to be a good scientist, that there can be other science careers that don't involve working 12 hour days, changing country every three years and running PhD students into the ground. Sureley there's room for all of us. It will make University-UK a better place for everyone, more dynmic, more cutting edge and most of all more human.
A friend of mine once fondly characterised academics as "a bunch of OCD barmpots". Now happily ensconced in university life, I see nothing to conflict with that summary. Long may it remain so. The true academics are difficult to connect with, but well worth the effort it takes. Mind you, I'm fresh out of 20+ years in the I.T. industry. If you want to see how high-functioning autism can flourish and be welcomed in a corporate environment, you could learn a thing or two there.
I am amused by Ciara Kennedy's horror. The problem begins with the post-war numeric inflation of students and faculty, with the concomitant decline in the quality of both. It is compounded by the fact that universities produce a product - people with PhDs - for which they are virtually the only customers. Since they turn out ten times as many PhDs as they can consume, the great majority of would-be academics end up on the scrapheap. Because universities are closed, self-validating societies, the appointment process is uncontrolled, arbitrary, and often entirely self-serving. Those who are "in" are, after all, choosing potential competitors, and therefore select for mediocrity, not merit. I have even seen a department head manipulate the process to secure the appointment of the least qualified candidate for a professorship, so as to gain a sycophant who would be no threat to him. A colleague's opinion is that the appointment process nowadays is "essentially random". The end result is a bureaucratic mass institution composed of dullards taught by dullards, the latter mainly adept at playing the RAE and QAA game, that is to say, the Stalinist bureaucracy that pretends to maintain standards. The RAE would reject Einstein because he had no book, just a smattering of papers. The Origin of Species, in the RAE scheme of things, would be just another book, and Darwin would be considered inferior to someone who had written four of them. Darwin would in any case never be allowed 20 years to publish. I am now on the other side of the Atlantic, and despite appearances, let me assure you that is is no better here. American universities use their economic clout to hire Nobel prize winners, who did their best work 20 years ago, as headliners -- therefore they score brilliantly in the Shanghai ratings -- but are underneath just as much of a mediocracy as the British ones. In my view, the university has not only outlived its usefulness but become lethal to real scholarship as well as an unaffordable sink of public money. It will inevitably give way to a new model. Given globalization, academics can in principle make a living as free professionals, like doctors and lawyers, by hanging out their shingle on the Internet. They would be paid directly by their students, as they once were at Bologna. Sweden compensates writers by paying them salaries proportional to the sales of their books; the same system could support the less popular areas of study. A similar system of matching grants could support research. Scholars could balance their workload between teaching and research, as it suited them. Or, as Einstein once advised David Bohm to do, get "a cobbler's job", rather than waste time on academic make-work. A few aspects of the university will remain. Students will want student unions and residences for mating purposes - now their principal objective anyway - and if they are really interest in a subject, could study it with someone that they, not some bureaucrat, think is really good. Who could be in Boston, Brisbane, or sunning on a beach in the Bahamas. Lectures can be delivered by YouTube, seminars in chatrooms, essays sent by email, and the Lord hasten the day when Google puts the Library of Congress online so we are no longer chained to the university book-tomb. Labs, I suppose, are still necessary and need to be managed, but otherwise university administration could disappear entirely, and good riddance to it. I suppose one would need a professional society like a Bar Association to dish out credentials, and perhaps provide halls where students could write exams under supervision. The SCRs at universities where I have taught have invariably been deserted except possibly at lunchtime, and conversations with colleagues seem to consist of mainly malicious gossip. Real intellectual interaction takes place privately in our homes, in pubs, in electronic fora like this one, and behind the scenes at conferences (we will be free to organize professional societies and the like if we want to, no university needed, and a conference just needs booking some space). Lively discussion among intelligent people will always find a way thrive, and no-one will look at who does or doesn't have a PhD. There would indeed be a good deal more time for it were we to unburden ourselves of the university. As to teaching, a great many fond mummies and daddies would be shocked and disappointed if I were to give their little darlings the marks they really deserve -- the current system will not allow me to fail 80% of my students, with the result that the remaining 20% get degrees worth as much as a Zimbabwean dollar. Operating as a free professional, I would simply turn those 80% away, except for the traditional infusion of rich dolts able to pay my full fee, who would walk away with 2-2s and subsidize the rest. (A little corruption is unavoidable.) Freed of the oppression of academic and state bureaucracies, the community of scholars would once more become elitist, exclusive and good -- yet open to all who want (or dare) participate. Those who have nothing intelligent to say would be welcome to listen in but would probably drop off and go play computer games. Loners could go it alone, sociable people could socialize: it is idiotic, and its greatest failing, that the university has the power to exclude people on the basis of anything other than the merit of their work and the qualities of their minds. As a great community of free professionals, we would be free of that power and everything that it sucks from us. Fine minds would not be wasted on deciphering the incomprehensible scribblings of illiterates, or sitting on pointless committees, or publishing under compulsion when they have nothing to say. And when they do have something to say, as Darwin did after 20 years of cogitation, their best works would not be buried under a mountain of meretricious rubbish. The great majority of the young would be liberated also, from the need to take subjects of no interest to them just to get the devalued piece of paper. The academically uninterested could take vocational training or go directly into the workplace, as they used to before the current insanity. There they could contribute to the economy instead of draining it, would learn much more useful things than Egyptology or postmodernist drivel, and if they wanted to educate themselves, would be free to do so at their leisure. Existing academics will of course be much more horrified than Dr. (I presume) Kennedy by all this, but I am convinced that something like it will happen spontaneously over the next few decades, whether they like it or not. Academia will collapse like the Ponzi scheme it has become, and real learning will be free to re-emerge.
Stream of consciousness much, Anne? The first 8 lines and the last for 14 were good though. You need to get in the habit of editing for maximum inpact. All credit to you though: I did read the whole of your screed. Best regards. x
Edit: 'impact', not 'inpact'. Carry on...
I greatly enjoyed reading Matthew's article, and the subsequent discussion. Although there is no hard and fast rule, on the basis of thirty years in academia I would suggest that team research generally leads to the production of a great deal of paperwork (or the electronic equivalent), and frequently mediocracy in results. I find my own research to be motivated by a highly personal quest, and team activity creates entropy and distraction. In addition, 'team players' often do not contribute to the vision and may even be there simply to personally benefit by association. In my thirty years in academia the changes have been dramatic. When I look back to my formative days in the Physics Department at the University of Manchester, I cannot imagine any of the truly erudite scholars there handling today's often nonsensical systemised bureaucracy. Unfortunately all too often today's academics are 'managed' by the administrative infrastructure being, for example, provided with a 'research day' each week. From an administrative point of view there seems to be a notion that creativity can be turned on and off at will, and a complete failure to appreciate that creative research is a truly obsessive quest. UK academia has gone through yet another RAE exercise in which it is patently obvious that this type of exercise simply does not support highly creative and original research. The name of the game is to publish - but where are the questions which really try to understand how much time an academic has had to read and assimilate the content of the publishing vortex? There is a demand that scholars should 'speak' but no 'demand' that they should also be provided with the circumstances in which they can assimilate, learn and develop foundations laid by others. Certainly in physics and other areas in which I research, I note a great increase in the volume of publications, but a considerable reduction in the profundity. I firmly believe that true creativity can't be systemised, nor should teamwork be forced. I am reminded of the occasion on which George Mitchell (the designer of the Spitfire) and Barnes Wallis (designer of the R100, the Wellington bomber etc etc) were brought together to work as a team. From an administrative point of view this union must have been considered to be inspired. However within days when one of these highly creative individuals entered the common work area, the other walked out... Above all, I find the Citation Index particularly offensive. Apologies for the duration of this rant and equal apologies for ranting under my actual name - but life's too short to do otherwise.
Just following up - it's curious that the THES appears to have dispensed with paragraphs. Presumably a computer used by the THES has decreed this??
I have a great deal of sympathy with what you're saying, Barry, and it makes perfect sense to me. And yet, the funding councils delight in handing out a £4 million pound grants for setting up new research centres to encourage multi-disciplinary and collaborative work toward a single, common end prioritised by bureaucrats with their eye on some government agenda. That money might be better spent on the salaries and research costs of individual researchers, funded in the 'responsive mode', working on a greater variety of research interests, who are quite capable of networking with others in their field through conferences and communication technology. Taking a dozen postdocs who all have their own good research ideas and luring them to a research centre, because there's no other paid work available to them, to work on something they have no passion for, but which a funding council has identified as an important area of research, is a bit like taking race horses and harnessing them to pull a carriage. A very flashy, ornate and expensive carriage everyone admires as it processes down the street, with only two or three passengers on board. Then the RAE decides it's a 'world leading' or 'internationally excellent' carriage, and more money is produced for its refurbishment and a new team of horses; the old team having either bolted in the night or been shot because they can't hack it.
Oh Trudie, I wish you luck. Perhaps you have indeed landed in some remaining corner of academic heaven; I didn't. I, too, was in IT for 20+ years: there I was treated as a valued professional, paid well and treated with respect. As a probationary lecturer, I became a serf. Yes, my university was full of "OCD barmpots", but they didn't run the joint. Power was held by those who craved it, in other words, the bullies. They operated like the KGB, through secret dossiers, secret meetings and arbitrary decisions, and they made certain that the serfs were ever in fear of their lives. Of 20 members of my department when I joined, only eight remained after four years: two had retired after heart attacks, one got a better job, one retired normally, one was forced into early retirement, and the rest were hired on 1-3 year contracts that were never renewed. It was not just my department. Promotions went to cronies. HoDs were appointed from above, and the VC's preference was for "strong leaders", i.e. bullies. A female lecturer was sexually harassed by her HoD, and sacked when she complained. A professor in a clinical department was sent to Coventry, and defamatory rumours spread about him, after he caught his HoD mistreating a patient and complained. A Senior Lecturer who was diagnosed with a chronic and ultimately fatal, but in the meantime not disabling, illness was stripped of teaching and administrative duties and put on 1/3 salary without recourse to statutory health-retirement procedures. The union was of no use: since universities are "self-governing communities of scholars", the bullies were members, too. I am very glad I left that lunatic asylum, but I have compared notes with colleagues who have described similar conditions elsewhere. So indeed, "long may it remain so" - but watch your back.
"I, too, was in IT for 20+ years: there I was treated as a valued professional, paid well and treated with respect." I have to say Anne, that doesn't sound like the I.T. industry I experienced. To the list of shortcomings in your current academic environment, you could add routine verbal abuse (my parentage and species were regularly questioned at high volume in meetings and open plan offices), the occasional missile (on arrival in one department I was warned to keep my mug in my drawer for fear of having it thrown at me) and absolutely no union recognition whatsoever. Cronyism, blatant sexism and flogging staff into long-term illness, were very much the norm. I guess there will always be the stinkers lying in wait, wherever we work.
The involution lamented by other commenters that has turned universities into mass parking lots for young people and paper-manufacturing treadmills for careerists managed by bullies has not been random. It has been deliberate government policy to defuse any subversive challenges from both academics and their students after the 60s and 70s, when they switched from being stalwart supporters of the establishment to ideological opponents. Successive conservative governments of either party have then implemented policies by which they sought to severely punish or constrain the that in different ways were challenging their authority (from miners to universities) and boost those that were stalwart establishment supporters (from the police to insurance salesmen). Thus the considerable increase of time and money pressures on academics (and their students) and the transfer of power to politically reliable administrators and bullies, and the grand expansion of student numbers (very good to reduce reported unemployment numbers) and and the decrease in the funding per head. Keeping people very busy and very insecure are great ways to discourage them from being "unaligned" (whether in academia or in IT for that matter).
As an academic with autistic traits I couldn't agree more with the gist of this article. (And yes, I have managed to assimilate the fine details to establish the gist...). What I would argue, however, is that individuals with Asperger's syndrome (AS) or High Functioning Autism (HFA) do not all fit neatly into a 'box'. They display variations in character and temperament, just as do neurotypical individuals. However, the way that they differ from neurotypicals is through their superior systemising skills, which contribute to their eye for detail and their perfectionism. It is inaccurate of Bruce Charlton to suggest that common traits in AS and HFA are "antisocial and impulsive behaviour" when a great many of such individuals possess passive, avoidant traits with accompanying social anxiety. Oh yes, and Matthew (Reisz), please don't even suggest that AS and HFA are in any way concomitant with psychosis and psychopathy...
*Error* - Sorry Matthew it was Charlton who made the comment: "only enough agreeableness to exclude psychotics and psychopaths"... Actually, people with AS/HFA may be very agreeable - but to their own detriment.
Response to Bruce G Charlton: Thanks for the link, which I'll check out.
Einstein and Dirac weren't "interested in teamwork and "played on their own" because science was very different back then; what this article lacks is a historical context. In Newton's day, when we knew next to nothing about nearly everything, it was perfectly possible for complete isolationists to make great leaps. The same was arguably still true in the early 20th century, at least in theoretical physics. But today, the exponential growth in scientific knowledge makes it almost impossible. The new frontiers are at the interstices between disciplines, where no one person has all the knowledge to make the leap alone. It takes teamwork and communication skills to visualise many modern scientific problems and solve them.
The whole 'publish (continuously) or perish' system in the UK and in the US rewards those that pursue relatively dull research that is highly likely to yield something publishable fast, and not those that pursue highly original, but high-risk research. The cutthroat competition for grants and increasing lack of job security weeds out those that don't pursue whatever is trendy according to funding bodies, often decided by politicians that know squat about science. The combination of all of the above creates a system that rewards glorified R&D technicians with good networking skills at the expense of original science and in which graduate students are often underpaid technicians on temporary contracts in all but name. Scientists that might spend 10 years working on something without publishing, and then revolutionise their field, are thrown on the scrap heap. Like Anne Onymus, I find there is a high proportion of eccentrics in academia, but they're usually powerless - the ones calling the shots are the bullies and divas, and their cronies. In my experience, I've never met a more conformist bunch than American PhD students, and UK PhD students are often fiercely anti-intellectual; the technical staff are often more interesting individuals than the academic staff, especially the more senior academic staff (who are in effect ex-scientists turned into managers). I don't recognise the stereotype of science departments as havens for eccentrics where knowledge is pursued for it's own sake or for the good of humanity.
I'm enjoying this discussion thread. What Anne seems to be suggesting is starting all over agin with the university concept. I'm reminded of a speech by a VC in which he reminded us that the word "university" denoted a coming together of like minds in the pursuit of knowledge. What we all seem to be moaning about is that it is exactly that which has gone missing. universities seem to be suffering from 'feature creep' and 'bloatware', becoming too big, with steep hierarchies and strongly centralised decision-making. None of the systems work for academics, quite the other way around - "computer sez no...". Our timetabling suits neither the students, nor the lecturers, but the estates department. So, idly thinking on (and admittedly this might not be the best place for the discussion, but...) what would it take to start again?
To Don Quixote: Truth be told, universities cannot be easily changed given the economic and technological development and globalization of capital that has taken place. Which in turn has turned up the competition for the middle class and lower classes around the world. Universities have been flooded with students in order to avoid poverty and the stigmatized jobs and sectors perceived as insecure - blue collar work like trades, and other blue collar work which are constantly under threat from offshoring or importing cheap workers. While one nations middle class is rising anothers is falling, with businesses seeking out and/or creating slave labour and tension in other states. Rebooting the university would require drastic reduction in student numbers, which goes against government policy of "as many as possible should go to univesity", and the insane pay the top dogs at for profit univesities and even public universities want to get, many university students who are in university shouldn't be there but students grease financial wheels through exhorbitant tuition. Personally the whole concept of school and admissions is a bit bunk, given grade inflation is going to occur because no parent is going to want to believe their child is "doomed" to the trades or a life of manual labour.... lower classes. It's all about peoples perception of status, a persons worth and class, and anyone who doesn't think so is not very bright. Marx would have a field day with what is going on right now in the world.
AspergianKungfuMaster (can I call you AKM?) - I was being a teeny bit provocative; I don't presume universities can or want to change at all. What I was really getting at was 'how can we get back to what universities should be, possibly by starting again...?' - it would be easy to draw parallels with brewing (microbreweries are on the up, sometimes producing superior products at similar prices), niche car manufacturers (that always eventually seem to get swallowed and diluted) and so on, but the truth is that no metaphorical comparison should be carried too far- education is a different product. I've a hunch that the 'economies of scale' arguments are somewhat misbegotten or poorly applied. I wonder if you could run it almost as a cottage industry, with minimal beauraucratic superstructure. I've a feeling that the education industry has become like the ancient Persian armies, with vast mobile towns in tow to provide every home comfort. Cumbersome and lumbering, with its core opinions predicated on the assumption that becoming even more so is the only option. In the words of an old joke "..well, if you want the quickest and best way to get there, you shouldn't start from here..." I'm just asking, if one was starting again, what one would come up with. We know it would not be something that is exquisitely responsive to government policy - but is that a bad thing? ;)
So, open-source education, then...
AUTISTIC just a word that for some reason many fear to say, I am autistic and have no problem with that word but many do, I was diagnosed later in life with aspergers and until that point in time never really felt I fitted just like Lovelock, he says, "is the archetypal example of someone who doesn't fit into any system." I like to see it more as complex, interesting often brillant minded, extreme and very misunderstood individuals... to me its not about being on the autism spectrum or not, having aspergers or high or low functioning , but understanding self and being an autistic minded individual just simply means differenttly minded well to me anyway, like many of the most brilliant minds on this planet I feel preilvage to say my mind is wired like them and able to understand their inner depths.... I am a bit of a mix and many of my traits like many of us, they overlap, interact and merge at times... I sense, feel and see the world differently from others, the world is not abnormal to me, but my perceptions are often misunderstood. My words often come out in a jumbled cascade of chaos, my thoughts can be just as hectic. My brain seems to process like a computer, and can go onto auto pilot - sometimes I wish I could pull the plug, still prefer not to override as often most creative when on full power... the problems accrues when I no longer want to think, no switch! My symptoms to me are part of self, complex at times, obsessive tendencies pushing the boundaries, my moods can trigger my extremities of difference, frustrations from what’s normal to me is seen as wrong by others.... Labels we are given by professionals trying to figure us out, and then feel a need to want to change, conform us to fit into their world. But I will always have my autistic heart the very core of who I am, autism as mysteries as the universe! www.asplanet.info