So, welcome back to installation #2 in The case for independent scholarship, the new series where I explain why you should quit assuming that scholarly research needs to be limited to the university system. In fact, independent scholarship provides a number of advantages over the standard model.

Today, we’re going to focus on the administrative bloat that has overcome the university system. Specifically, I want to draw your attention to statistics on the California State University system. These data have been collected and written about by Ralph Westphal, a Professor in the Computer Information Systems Department at California Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Before I show you the statistics, though, I want you to ask yourself, how many administrators and other, non-academic professionals does a university need for each faculty member? What would be a reasonable ratio of academic to non-academic employees?

Clearly, there is a certain amount of support required to maintain facilities, to manage offices and accounts, and so on. But how many, would you say? Here are the numbers (from this document) for the entire California State University system for the 1975-76 academic year:

• Faculty (all ranks): 18,406
• Service and maintenance: 3,260
• Skilled crafts: 883
• Technical and paraprofessional: 3,246
• Clerical and secretarial: 6,920
• Managerial and professional: 3,800

He said administrative functions will be reviewed and probably pared, but he rejects the argument that significant cuts can be made in that area. “The lights have to stay on, and someone has to maintain the computer system,” he said. “These are people who work very hard and have to be properly compensated.”

So, as regular readers already know, I have recently founded a nonprofit institute that is dedicated to supporting and promoting independent scholarship — that is, scholarly research outside of the standard system of research universities and government laboratories.

(Sounds cool, right? Want to know more? Drop by the webpage of the Ronin Institute.)

Why do we need to promote independent scholarship? Well, there are a lot of great reasons, and they’re the topic of my new series: The case for independent scholarship, where I’m going to break those reasons down for you. But, for those of you who can’t wait to read about all of those compelling reasons in detail, here’s a précis of the coming argument. Whether you are a scholar yourself, a financial supporter of scholarship, or just someone who believes that things should be done better in the future than in the past, here is why you should be looking beyond the standard academic model.

• Independent scholarship is cheaper and more efficient. Research universities and government laboratories support huge, bureaucratic infrastructures that must be fed by siphoning funding away from research.
• Independent scholarship is more democratic. Along with the bureaucracy of large research institutions comes hierarchical structures that can limit academic freedom.
• Independent scholarship is more humane. The independent-scholarship model avoids many of the problems of the traditional academic lifestyle, which is often at odds with other goals, such as being an involved parent. Independent scholars can set their own hours to accommodate other priorities, and are not as geographically restricted as traditional academics — thus avoiding the academic “two-body problem.”
• Independent scholarship is more transdisciplinary. The departmental structure in universities — or whatever bureaucratic structure exists in a particular institution — tends to create artificial barriers to exploration and collaboration. Some institutions have taken steps to encourage interdisciplinary research, but the independent scholar is naturally situated to pursue the most interesting questions without any artificial constraints.
• Independent scholarship can exploit untapped intellectual resources. In the United States alone, there are tens of thousands of people with PhDs who are not making use of their PhD training. The independent-scholarship model allows people with training in and passion for a subject to contribute to their field, even if only in a part-time capacity.
• Independent scholarship does not need to be profit driven. Increasingly, hiring and tenure decisions at universities are driven by funding considerations. Independent scholarship can be driven by important questions, rather than by the need to develop and justify large research budgets. 
• Independent scholarship honors donor intent. For philanthropists who support research, donations to universities are always problematic, since the fungibility of funds means that donations rarely go 100% to support the program(s) that the donor cares about. Independent scholarship can be structure in a scalable way, so that donations translate directly to increased support for those research projects that are most important to the donor.
• Independent scholarship is more open. The independent-scholarship model aims to break down the distinctions between the ivory tower of academia and the broader population of intelligent, educated individuals who are eager and able to contribute to scholarly discourse.

So, this is reposted from the Ronin Blog, presented here for you to enjoy in the default Blogger font, rather than the default WordPress font:

Buongiorno Ronineschi!

I had two opportunities to speak on the radio about the motivation and goals of the Ronin Institute this week.

Yesterday, I was on WBUR’s Radio Boston, along with Victoria Blodgett, Associate Dean and Director of Career Services for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Yale. If you’re interested in listening, you can find the segment here.

On Monday, I was interviewed on New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word of Mouth (listen here). The WBUR segment is about 25 minutes, while the Word of Mouth segment is something like 10-12. 

The WBUR segment was called “nice and didactic” on twitter, which I choose to interpret as a compliment.

So, yesterday I posted about the white paper that Sam Arbesman and I wrote about fractional scholarship for the Kauffman Foundation. Well, we also wrote a piece for Wired, which Sam has posted there now.

The best part is that it features a picture of a statue of Ben Franklin, and right under the picture it notes that the article was co-authored with Jon Wilkins (me). Go read it. Go!

So, I’ve been working with the incomparable Sam Arbesman to write up some thoughts on the concept of “fractional scholarship.” Basically, the idea is that there are a lot of people out there who have the expertise and the interest to contribute to scholarly research, but for whom, for whatever reason, the seventy-hour-a-week academic lifestyle just doesn’t work. We need to develop mechanisms that will allow people to participate in research at ten, twenty, or thirty hours a week, and to get paid for doing it.

Obviously, someone working only ten hours a week would get paid a lot less than a university professor, which is part of what makes this such a powerful model. Keep in mind that a typical university professor probably does not spend much more that ten hours a week actually doing research anyway, what with all the personnel-management and bureaucratic tasks that take up so much of their time.

Basically, all the people out there (and there are tens of thousands of them) who got a PhD, but then dropped out of academia (e.g., to have kids) represent a vast underutilized intellectual resource that is trading well below its actual value. Tapping in to that resource is one of the things that we hope to do with the Ronin Institute.

Check out the full white paper at the Kauffman Foundation website, here.

So, there’s a nice little op-ed piece up at the Chronicle for Higher Education. (For the non-academics out there, it’s sort of like People magazine, but with History professors instead of Kardashians.) It was written by Jon Bardin, a current PhD student at Cornell Med School, who is planning to abandon the canonical academic path. Unfortunately, it’s behind the Chronicle paywall, but basically he argues against the idea (much hyped, recently) that there is an over-production of PhD students. At least in the sciences.

He mentions the common complaint that graduate school has become a sort of pyramid scheme, where huge numbers of PhD students enter, with the implicit promise of a tenure-track position waiting at the other end of the tunnel, while there are not nearly enough such positions available.

This is true, but he argues that we should look at the situation from a different perspective.

First, he argues that there are many alternative careers for PhDs. Of course, we all knew this already. After all, Starbucks is almost always hiring. But, actually, he argues that the skills that you develop in grad school are widely applicable. He talks specifically about the humbling experience of having his first manuscript rejected:

Through this and subsequent experiences, I learned to absorb the sting of harsh rejection, to ingest criticism, to accept its value, and to turn it to my advantage. These are life skills, not scientific skills, and rejection was only the beginning. Since then, I have had to devise and adopt quick, practical solutions to unexpected problems, to communicate clearly and concisely in front of crowds, to think on my feet in response to an unexpected question, and to pick my battles within my own research group. Perhaps most important, I have learned to approach problems by reducing them to their component parts and solving them one by one.

These are experiences and skills that will carry me through many dark days as a writer. But the same skills would have benefited me if I were leaving for the pharmaceutical industry, or for consulting, or to open a microbrewery. Everyone needs a problem solver, an articulate communicator, a thoughtful arbitrator. If graduate students can learn to approach their education as a series of learning opportunities rather than a five-year-long job interview, I think many who choose to leave would find that they had not wasted their time but rather that they had learned a great deal in a safe environment, while being paid, to boot.

These are great points. Now, the availability of funding varies a lot from field to field, but, at least in the sciences, I think the typical graduate student stipend is somewhere on the order of $30,000 per year. Now, that’s not huge money, but it is enough to provide a comfortable living. Add in the fact that grad school is a great social environment (at least, it is if you’re a dork, and you like hanging out with other dorks, which, if you’re reading this, you probably are, and probably do), and you’ve got the makings of a pleasant and rewarding five years.

The trick, of course, is to find an advisor who’s not a jerk, but that’s a topic for another post.

The other point that Bardin makes is that the problem is not one of the availability of a certain type of job, but of the perception that the tenure-track path is the only honorable one. What is needed is a change in attitude, from the students themselves, and from the advisors responsible for them. In Bardin’s words:

Such a change in attitude should start with graduate advisers, who must fulfill their role as true mentors, helping students explore the range of opportunities that their training has enabled, both inside and outside the box. Crucially, they must make it clear that leaving academe does not suddenly brand them a waste of their mentor’s time; graduate students—and their older siblings, the postdocs—by virtue of being cheap, productive labor, are anything but a waste of time.

In a way, maybe we need to start viewing graduate school more like undergrad. After all, professors don’t resent teaching undergraduates who are smart and engaged, but who are going to do something other than academia.

Or, rather, most probably don’t. I’m sure there are some who do. (Those are also the ones you want to avoid when choosing an advisor.) But, they probably also resent the students who are going to follow in their footsteps, just for different reasons. What are you going to do? Resenters gonna resent.

Reposted from the Ronin Blog.

h/t to Ronin Kristina Killgrove.