This is one of a series of position statements developed following a conference on ‘Building the Post-Pandemic University’, organised on 15 September 2020 by SRHE member Mark Carrigan (Cambridge) and colleagues. The position statements are being posted as blogs by SRHE but can also be found on The Post-Pandemic University’s excellent and ever-expanding website.The author’s statement can be found here.
It is no longer our classrooms as creepy treehouses, but our universities have become creepy. This paper argues that in the post-pandemic, we are faced with the creepy university. The new normal of medical surveillance, social surveillance, involuntary publicity, and worse, combined with imposed technological choices and related issues, transforms and expands the creepy treehouse phenomena to encompass the whole university. The post-pandemic university is creepy. Beyond that level of creepy, it is surrounded by various zombies perpetuating its creepiness.
Contemporary ‘neoliberal’ universities in the post-pandemic are a shambling, groaning mess of dead bureaucratic impetus driven by the pandemic institution’s expired demands. The trajectories of the pandemic shamble onward through the action and inaction of non-faculty governance. Combined with that is the zombified information of dead lectures with their im/precise and de/contextualised knowledge published to various media sites by universities, professors, and students alike. They are the life of the occasionally found document, speaking their situated pandemic knowledges only when stumbled-upon. The post-pandemic university is full of mobilized knowledge that is perpetually escaping through a spectrum of fantastically good to fantastically horrible possibilities. As such, creepiness exudes, choices forced, choices unforced, have remade elements of the university outside of itself, dragging along as part of its new zombified self.
A creepy treehouse is when a faculty member chooses a technology they prefer because of their history with it and forces the students, against their comfort, to use that technology in the classroom. The technology almost always has elements that creep the students out, such as invasions of privacy, surveillance, cultural difference, or otherwise. The creepy university is the future of the university.
It is evidenced by the pervasiveness of the pedagogical form of life we find in our digital university environments, especially in Zoom environments. The Zoom Zombie, a person who is there, but not there; there is only the appearance of presence. Zoom has become the killer app of the university’s remote administration, and shortly after it; it was introduced as the killer app of online lecturing. Anyone who has participated in enough classrooms has seen classroom zombies, students who are completely turned off. Similarly, Zoom zombies are prevalent both in online Zoom classrooms and in other meetings. The manifestation of this human response as not being ‘there’ in the face-to-face classroom has been extended to not be there in zoom meetings.
Nevertheless, Zoom Zombies are not the only elements of zombification of the university. Neoliberal zombies are present along with their professional representatives. But that is another argument. I want to present a few other forms of zombies. One is the professorial zombie, the professor or instructor who is physically and mentally exhausted, overburdened with their increasingly excessive responsibilities such that their capacity to act beyond the minimum necessary is limited. Their passion has waned, as has their reasoning combined with their capacity to perform their job due to increased workload and stress. The professorial zombies’ numbers are increasing, and they are not increasing equitably or fairly. As one would expect, this zombification affects some minorities much more than others, and with that zombification, an increasing number of faculty are lost. Zombified faculty exist; you probably meet them every day. They learned to blend in, to hide their zombified state long ago, likely in graduate school.
Another type of zombification mentioned above briefly is the lesson or teaching period as zombified knowledge. The knowledge produced and shared by the faculty is usually distributed online, out there and dead, but alive. It might be outdated, it might have errors, it might be well done or not well done, it might be produced by the university, by the faculty member, or recorded by the students, but in any case, this knowledge is on the internet available for people to use and see. Zombified knowledge almost certainly exists out of the context of the whole course. It certainly exists outside of the maintenance and correction by the professor in the course. It is knowledge mobilized, not autonomously but by the public who find it, learn it and use it. It represents the university, much as the faculty member is some representation of the university.
Teaching, as almost everyone knows, is a performance that relies on its audience for feedback. When we consider the zombies defined above, we can quickly see that the form of online education became creepy long ago. The university is full of zombies, and the zombies are creeping along stuck in their modes of existence, unable to do anything but what the zombie has done. This situation creates the creepy university, the post-pandemic university because it will take years to recover from the pandemic. It will follow many faculty until they retire, stories will linger even after all of the retirements, and the university’s relations to its members will never be the same. The post-pandemic university is one of overwork, surveillance, bureaucratization, automation, and in each of those a lack of consent by those participating in the form.
As more people are forced to participate in more uncomfortable and creepy experiences, more people become zombies. The professor becomes a face on a screen, perhaps a recording, the students are becoming a recording, or otherwise performing as a recording, a zombie. The online university needs to reconsider technological choice and inclusion more deeply to avoid becoming a creepy university full of zombies.
Jeremy Hunsinger is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His research is in critical internet studies and the politics of knowledge. He has been teaching university students online and off for over twenty years.
People on both sides argue passionately about what they see as the
biggest change in their working lifetimes. The present situation is flawed, but
some believe the best way forward is to work within the system for continuing
improvement. However others believe with equal passion that the best way is to
crash out, with no deal for the big unaccountable bureaucracy on the continent.
The European Commission is heavily involved. The debate has run for years, but then
the powers that be announced that they would implement a phased transition to completely
new trading arrangements. Battle lines were drawn and both sides dug in for a
conflict which so far shows no sign of resolution.
Plan S is higher education’s version of Brexit. It may not have
generated quite as much media coverage as that unreal thing, but it has its
full share of intransigent minorities, suspicion on all sides, special pleading,
accusations that the elite is merely looking after its own interests, and
claims that a voiceless majority will be the ones who suffer the most.
Everyone is in favour of open access,
in much the same way as everyone is in favour of free trade, but it turns out
that neither concept is as clear-cut as it first appears. Academics’ guerrilla warfare campaign against what they saw
as the exploitative practices of some publishers has now led to some major
cancellations of contracts, the biggest and best-known being the decision by
the University of California system to cancel its
contract with Elsevier. Such
legal opposition runs alongside illegal but massive file-sharing operations,
the biggest being the Eastern-European based SciHub. Meanwhile the launch of
open access journals such as PlosOne
has not dented the supremacy of the major publishers: such journals may already
have peaked with a very small proportion of the total publishing market.
Hence Plan S, an
initiative by 13 European funders, the European Commission and charitable funders
including Wellcome and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This group,
known as cOAlition S, want all scientific publications
arising from research they fund to be published in compliant open access
journals or on compliant open access platforms from 2020. They launched a
consultation on their proposals which generated a huge worldwide response from
academics and academic publishers.
The UK entered the field early with the 2012 Finch
Report (see SRHE News 9, July 2012), which controversially led
government to choose Gold Open Access (OA) as its primary route, with the REF
embodying this requirement. This means that ‘article processing charges’ (APCs)
have to be paid up front, whether by the author(s), the institution or the
research funder. It was envisaged that APCs would fall over time thanks to
competition between publishers, but in fact there has been a 16% rise since
then, as David
Kernohan reported for WonkHE on 20 February 2019. The last-but-one HE Minister Jo Johnson
asked Sussex VC Adam Tickell in 2016 to advise further – thatadvice and an Open Research Data Task Forcereporthave
now been published. Kernohan reported that: “the UK hit 54% of
outputs as OA in 2016, up from 15% in 2012. We are firmly on track to achieve
the target. And there is substantial evidence that OA articles are downloaded
more, cited more, and used more than their non-OA counterparts, both from
journals and repositories.” The upfront cost of
Gold OA is a clear disincentive for many researchers despite REF requirements:
grants may not cover publication costs and research may be unfunded. The
research councils currently provide block funding for APCs, but this is
unlikely to be permanent, and Kernohan suggests total expenditure on APCs could
triple in real terms from the 2016 figure, to £818million by 2028 if gold OA
achieves 100% take-up. Something has to give, and a policy initiative is keenly
awaited.
Robert Harington (American
Mathematical Society) asked ‘Plan S: what about researchers?’ on the LSE
Impact Blog on 17 January 2019. On 21 January 2019 University College London (UCL) said Plan S was
“heavy-handed”, the Plan S coalition should engage more with universities and
researchers, and the requirements of individual subject areas need to be more
precisely understood, as Ashleigh
Furlong reported for *Research on 21 January 2019.
Jeffrey
Brainard wrotein Science on 25 January
2019 that scientific societies supported by journal
subscriptions describe Plan S as “an existential threat … Many journals now
follow a hybrid model, publishing individual papers open access for a fee but
deriving most of their income from subscriptions … Plan S’s requirements will
disproportionately hurt the journals that many societies publish … Such
journals typically have high [APCs] … and the societies typically have lower
profit margins than … commercial publishers … The largest, Elsevier, based in
Amsterdam, publishes more than 2500 journal titles; scientific societies each
publish at most a few dozen.”
Steven Inchcoombe of Springer Nature said
Plan S might put Nature out of
business, as Rachael
Pells reported in Times
Higher Education on 13 February 2019: “All the focus [of Plan S] is on the
supply side and we think a lot more focus should be on demand – by which I mean
the researchers themselves, and other funding agencies that are not yet signed
up with Plan S”. Springer Nature then resorted to special pleading, saying titles
such as Nature should
be treated differently under Plan S: the cost per article of in-house
professional editors and the high refusal rate means average APCs are between
€10,000 and €30,000 (£8,770 and £26,300), which would be “very difficult” to
recover via an article processing charge.
Without carefully paced transition to allow for the emergence of new
titles, is there a risk of unusual constraints and disjunctions in publishing
opportunities in affected subjects?
Might restructuring the spread of well-cited papers have unplanned
contingent consequences?
How can the shift to Gold Open Access and associated APCs be managed
equitably to protect the positions both of unfunded researchers in G20
economies and of a wider spread of authors in emergent research regions, especially
given the collaborative nature of academia?
There
are many small publishers, including those linked to learned societies, who
publish an important part of the Plan S funded output in serials central to
their discipline. Will transition be more difficult for them and, if so, can this be
managed effectively but flexibly?
Jon Tennant (independent) wrote for
The Impact Blog on 5 March 2019: “The whole point
of Plan S was to disrupt the status quo and transform the world of scholarly
publishing. If it yields to those who it is trying to disrupt, at the cost of
the greater good, than that’s not exactly progress. Open Access is not a
business model, so let us stop treating it as such. I believe that science can
help us shape the world to be better, and can help solve the enormous problems
that our planet currently faces. I do not believe that having it under the
control of mega-corporations and elite individuals or institutes helps to
realise this, or is in the principles of fundamental human rights.”
Richard Poynder(independent), who has been called the “chronicler,
conscience, and gadfly laureate” of the Open Access movement, wrote for The
Impact Blog on 6 March 2019: Plan S and the Global South – What do countries in
the Global South stand to gain from signing up to Europe’s open access
strategy? He noted that “Plan Sraises challenging
questions for the Global South … To succeed, Plan S will need other countries to commit
to the initiative. To this end, Plan S architect Robert-Jan Smits spent
considerable time last year lobbying
funders around the world. But should countries in the Global South sign up? Perhaps not … legacy
publishers would have little choice but to replace current subscription
revenues with article-processing charges (APCs) … Plan S would lead to a near
universal pay-to-publish system. APCs range in price from
several hundred to over $5,000 per article. This is unfeasible for
the Global South and so researchers would be excluded in a different (but more
pernicious) way than they are under the subscription system: free to read
research published in international journals but unable to publish in them.”
Clearly Plan S poses a host of
difficult moral, ethical and financial challenges for all learned societies,
including SRHE. Like most societies SRHE joined in a collective response from the
Academy of
Social Sciences response in February 2019, to which
SRHE Director Helen Perkins contributed significantly. That response said:
“3. The AcSS supports the principle of open access as an
important public benefit. A key question though is how best to implement this
principle, and how to balance it against other principles (academic excellence,
autonomy and freedom). Balancing open access is not just a question of
balancing one principle against another but considering how in practice open
access can be broadened, while not undermining the conditions for producing
excellent research and ensuring that an appropriate degree of academic autonomy
is supported.
4. Like many other respondents, the Academy of Social
Science has concerns about the method and speed of implementation proposed both
by cOAlition S and, in the UK, UKRI. We are concerned that these plans are
still accompanied by little detail in many important areas, and little
empirical evidence about possible effects on the wider systems and structures
within which academic research in produced (as well as consumed), or of the
effects on different disciplines. We do not believe that ‘Gold’ access is the
best solution in all cases; we think that Green (and hybrid) journals are capable
of meeting aspirations for wider access.
5. We believe that cOAlition S, and in the UK, UKRI and
others, should engage more widely with a range of stakeholders to consider
relevant evidence about systemic effects, looking also at distributional effects
(between early career and established researchers; research in different parts
of the world; and researchers from different disciplines) and a range of
possible
unintended consequences, including the effects on the social sciences. This
should inform proposals about how to implement aims to improve open access, but
would require changes to the timetable announced by cOAlition S.”
The British
Academy response in February 2019 was blunt:“ … our
initial response … set out our concerns about Plan S’s antipathy to hybrid
journals … these concerns are not allayed by the new Guidance. … cOAlition S’s
hostility to all forms of hybridity will have precisely the opposite result to
its stated intentions.” Meanwhile Euroscepticism persists in Brussels, with
Robert-Jan Smits, described as the European Commission’s ‘open access envoy’
declaring there is ‘something
fishy’ about publishers setting up mirror journals to
get past Plan S proposals about hybrid journals, while publishers protest that
mirror journals are simply a necessary part of hybridity.
Echoing Brexit, it seems the divide between the proponents of Plan S and the defenders of the status quo has not diminished, and the initial response to the deadlock may well be to extend the deadline. Elites may be divided, but no doubt they will still emerge unscathed; the price of any change will be paid by marginal communities in the North and the global South. With Brexit many academics, bolstered by overwhelming academic belief in the rightness of their cause, have seized on every shred of evidence to dismiss the alternative. Will Plan S be able to exploit its superficial appeal to the evident rightness of open access, or will academics be willing to engage with the difficult ethical and moral questions which Plan S poses? It may be time for the Creative Commons to take control.
Rob Cuthbert is Emeritus Professor of Higher Education Management, University of the West of England and Joint Managing Partner, Practical Academics rob.cuthbert@btinternet.com.
This note compares the citation rates for publications written by the author alone with (i) those written by the author and fellow colleagues and (ii) those written together with undergraduates. Although the citation rates for publications written by the author alone, or with colleagues, are higher than those obtained for papers written with undergraduates, the data suggest that some teacher-student papers can make a substantial contribution to the research literature.
Introduction
As an academic author I often wonder whether or not my papers with undergraduates are cited as often as my papers with colleagues. On the one hand, colleagues are often more experienced and generally more familiar with academic writing and publishing than undergraduates. On the other, undergraduates in the UK sometimes author papers arising from the research that they carried out in their final year supervised by academic staff. To answer this query I used the website Google Scholar to examine a sample of how often my single-authored publications were cited with respect to (i) those written with colleagues and (ii) those written with undergraduate students. Continue reading →
There is much debate in the scientific literature about whether or not two authors are better than one – where ‘better’ usually equates to receiving a higher number of citations. Most of the contributors to this debate do indeed conclude that co-authorship leads to more citations than does single-authorship – but not always (see for example Gazni and Thelwall, 2014; Hartley 2016; Hartley and Cabanac, 2016a; Hartley and Cabanac, 2016b; Thelwall and Sud, 2016).
However, few, if any of these studies, keep one author constant and compare the citation rates for that author writing alone with the citations he/she acquires when writing with one or more co-authors. The focus is more on the number of citations awarded to papers written by single, dual and joint authors.
I joined my current university mid-career. Having begun my teaching career as an English teacher, I ended this phase of my working life 20 years later as a headteacher of a closing school. I used this formative experience to set up an educational consultancy company, supporting the development of schools in challenging circumstances. Consultancy provided me with the opportunity to put into practice what I had learned as an educational professional. I was secure in my professional identity and felt confident and purposeful. In 2009, on joining a School of Education at the University of Hertfordshire, I was excited by the opportunity to develop my expertise in a new sector. However, the first year in my new role proved very challenging. I found it difficult to understand how the organisation worked or my role within it. The culture of the university, its language and structures were all alien to me. I was now an ‘academic’ and had no idea what that meant. I felt professionally disempowered and unsure of my way forward.
I was interested to discover that others felt this way too and that for many this alienation stemmed from their feelings about academic writing. Many colleagues appeared to place themselves in one of two camps – Continue reading →
Peer review has been in the news recently (well, what counts as news in our business): which perhaps isn’t surprising considering the effect it can have on academic careers – and much more besides.
Richard Smith, when editor of the BMJ, conducted an experiment by deliberately inserting errors into a paper (presumably one written specially for the occasion – this isn’t made clear!) and sending it to reviewers who were in the dark about what was going on. (A university ethics committee would have had fun with this.) None of the chosen reviewers apparently spotted all the errors: from which (along with other findings) Smith concluded that “peer review simply doesn’t work” (THE, 28 May 2015). But one of the reviewers, Trisha Greenhalgh of Oxford University, presents the same facts in an interestingly different light (THE, 4 June 2015). She spotted a couple of serious errors early in the paper, concluded it was rubbish, told the BMJ so, and read no further. So, for her, peer review was working just fine.
As mooc mania approached its peak, the president of edX Anant Agarwal claimed in his video launching the platform on 2 May 2012 that ‘Online education for students around the world will be the next big thing in education. This is the single biggest change in education since the printing press’.
The claim was repeated many times and indeed had been anticipated 15 years earlier in 1997 by the management guru Peter Drucker who claimed: ‘Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive. It’s as large a change as when we first got the printed book.’
That seemed improbable since university lectures have been as important in the five and half centuries since the invention of printing as they presumably were for the three and a half centuries before Gutenberg. Continue reading →
