Governments award money (take), research is produced (make), which - unless a patent facilitates private ownership for a short time - becomes part of the scientific commons (waste).
“All over the country, meanwhile, students were and still are being upbraided, reprimanded, given F’s on papers, flunked in courses, and expelled from universities for doing this plagiarism thing, this indefinable thing.”
“The job of the scholar is to contribute to society, and if they are not doing so, they are not successful.” And here, we will agree but with one vital amendment.
And yet, this framing of quality science has rarely been taken up in earnest, particularly in how science is evaluated or valued in broader society. The dominant understanding of “quality” science – especially in public and policy discourse – is
I wonder, will you be content to donate your labor to subsidize the salary of a Revenue Acceleration Manager?
They are a mode of academic conversation – a practice of exchanging ideas and reflections – but they enjoy the benefit of being unbounded by the constraints of the academic journal article.
For was it not academia that had given me the space-time to pursue my scholarly becoming? Academia had given me the opportunity to make this transformation happen.
One that once claimed to ‘pursue and venerate knowledge and learning as a manifestation of faith in what it means to be a human being.’
And with them, what cultural and ideological imports are we quietly welcoming into how we conduct our research, how we produce knowledge, and how we relate to knowledge itself?
With the ever-growing emphasis on communicating knowledge through written publications, we are increasingly experiencing a transactional relationship with knowledge: one that prioritises storage, circulation, and standardisation.
We produce and discard knowledge like the way clothes get produced, consumed, and discarded in fast fashion.
And trusting that curiosity will lead somewhere meaningful.
