It’s a busy time here, with George Mason University graduation and also moving to Rhode Island soon, but I had to share this shocking story.

The Scientist article (free registration required)
The Bioethics Blog post
Nature.com Writeup of the incident

Scientific publishing giant Elsevier put out a total of six publications between 2000 and 2005 that were sponsored by unnamed pharmaceutical companies and looked like peer reviewed medical journals, but did not disclose sponsorship, the company has admitted.

Elsevier is conducting an “internal review” of its publishing practices after allegations came to light that the company produced a pharmaceutical company-funded publication in the early 2000s without disclosing that the “journal” was corporate sponsored.

The allegations involve the Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, a publication paid for by pharmaceutical company Merck that amounted to a compendium of reprinted scientific articles and one-source reviews, most of which presented data favorable to Merck’s products. The Scientist obtained two 2003 issues of the journal — which bore the imprint of Elsevier’s Excerpta Medica — neither of which carried a statement obviating Merck’s sponsorship of the publication.

So Merck, a pharmaceutical company, paid Elsevier, a huge publisher of legitimate peer-reviewed journals, to publish what essentially was an advertisement in the form of a real journal. The only possible goal in doing that would be to sell more Merck drugs. Which is the job of Merck’s marketing department.

Elsevier, however, has a reputation to maintain as a publisher of rigorous research. They are already disliked for keeping copyright on the articles they publish and making it expensive to access those articles, and now this just exemplifies their greed.

This news is extremely disappointing for all parties involved, and certain casts a pall on Elsevier’s reputation. Which is disappointing because one of my journal articles is published in an Elsevier journal It also does no favors for Big Pharma either.

Mark C. Taylor begins his New York Times Op-Ed article End the University as We Know It quite provocatively:

GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Taylor goes on to make some interesting points. Click on the link to read the whole article, but I had some thoughts of my own. His thesis is that academia has become too niche-driven. In order for faculty members to gain tenure, they must publish a lot, and in order to do that, they must carve out their own niche. Sub-fields upon sub-fields of research. I buy that – it’s why academics are holed up in their “ivory tower.” So what do we do about it?

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

An interesting idea, and not entirely new. Interdisciplinary research is all the rage, and I certainly have no arguments against it. Taylor then goes on to explain what he would replace the academic department with.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Certainly an interesting idea. But you obviously cannot have a team of researchers just researching “Mind” – you would either have too many faculty in each project or else you’d have to pare down the number of faculty you hire, and neither is desirable. Of course, you could split “Mind” up into sub-projects. But then you start heading towards people finding their research niche and losing sight of the big picture. Only this time, the niche is inter-disciplinary.

I find #3 silly:

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff.

I suppose one University is just going to announce “We give up at mechanical engineering! Someone else take that over. But we get to keep physics.” No way. You can work across universities just like you can work across disciplines, but now you are shrinking the size of universities past the point of comfort (fewer faculty for each interdisciplinary project, and fewer academic departments per university). And no great university is going to willingly let another university take over and be “the authority.” If that were the case, we’d just be left with the Ivy Leagues.

#4 strikes near and dear to my heart since I just completed a big, long dissertation:

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. [content edited out] For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

Of course, if a history student does his dissertation in film, how do you judge it? Quality alone? Does creativity play a role? What if the website is not web-standards compatible? Does an English major need to learn how to program to make a video game? Writing, while boring and not new-fangled and shiny like video games, is one skill every academic must have. A dissertation shows that a student can lay out his or her ideas logically and in a comprehensible manner.

#5 is actually at the core of the program that I am about to graduate from, Human Factors and Applied Cognition (HFAC):

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

HFAC at George Mason puts a huge focus on preparing students for jobs outside of academia. I do think it’s important to give students a more practical view of the knowledge and to understand how their research can help the world at large. A lot of our PhD graduate go into industry, and our faculty do not have a problem with that. In fact, they support it, and I totally agree with this point.

Finally, #6 is something that I generally agree with, though since I’m not a professor, I can’t speak too much about it.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. [content edited out] Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

Doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me, really.

And there you have it. By the way, the New York Times about the author blurb says Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, so take that as you will. His points are valid, constructive, and thought-provoking, but the likelihood of them being implemented? Unlikely at best, in my opinion.