De Honoris Numquam Satis: Reflections on Snobbery in Academia

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2024-12-22 15:30:04

One of my more endearing characteristics—or so I like to believe—is my naïveté in the face of academic reality. It is probably amusing to those who know me personally to see how I just do not ‘grok’ certain things, making me either bewildered, angry, sad, or a linear combination thereof. One of the many, many, many things that fall into this category is the tendency of some academics to, in their hunger for more honour and prestige, make devilish compromises.

Let me explain! As you might know, everyone tries to measure academic output by ludicrous indices. While this is mostly nothing but modern haruspicy, combined with a thin veneer of plausibility, some universities and stakeholders dig this stuff and lap it right up. Every year, academia goes crazy while companies like Clarivate emerge from their lairs and announce what they read in this year’s entrails. You then get the dubious honour of appearing on lists like the one of highly-cited researchers, a list that does not even include mathematics or machine learning. I guess those fields were not deemed to be scientific enough—but I digress. Suffice it to say, everyone loves to count citations as the measure of success, culminating in absurd indices like the h-index, of which much has been written elsewhere, and so I shall not start another rant on my own. The two things for you, dear reader, to understand about the h-index are, to wit:

This leads the more, shall we say, incentive-driven senior academics to adopt an interesting strategy: They will force their junior researchers to put them on any and all papers possible. Let us take another brief explanatory digression here: Science is foremost a conversation about potential facts. To participate in this conversations, budding scientists are expected to publish. Each publication has an author list, and, depending on your field, the author list conveys additional information about the relevance of each individual author. For instance, in computer science, it is typically the first author(s) who are more junior and did most of the experiments or implementations, while the last author(s) are typically acting in a more supervisory capacity. As someone who is now in the position of such a senior author, I can spill the beans and mention that when I am the last author, I typically focus most of my energies in the project on discussing ideas with students, co-writing the paper with them, critiquing their drafts or code, as opposed to coding large parts by myself. This is because I believe that Ph.D. students should be considered apprentices who are supposed to excel in their craft, meaning that supervisors need to guide them, but not leave them to their own devices.