[nfais-l] NFAIS Enotes, September 2010

[Jill O'Neill]

NFAIS Enotes, September 2010

Written and Compiled by Jill O'Neill

 

Scholarly Endeavors, Part II 

 

In August of 2010, the Apollo Group put out a position paper entitled Higher
Education at a Crossroads. If you are unfamiliar with the organization, the
Apollo Group is the parent company of for-profit educational institutions
such as the University of Phoenix (U.S.) and Meritus University (Canada), as
well as other proprietary entities aimed at offering degrees to working
adults. The position paper emphasizes that the educational models in place
at these proprietary institutions are better suited to a non-traditional
student population (older, self-supporting, balancing work and dependents,
etc.). It further underscores the idea that for-profit institutions are
absolutely necessary to enabling the United States to build an appropriately
educated workforce. Page 22 of the report states that in order to meet
President Obama's national education goal, "the system will need to
accommodate 13.1 million graduates. At a time when states are having
difficulty even maintaining budgetary resources for higher education and are
cutting both faculty positions and student enrollment capacity, how can
states afford to educate tens of millions of additional students and produce
13.1 million additional college graduates?" The report comes up with a
figure of $794 billion in federal, state, and local support that would be
required to meet the need for the educated workforce referenced by Obama in
his speech on economic growth at Texas A&M on August 9. The President had
noted that "Over the next decade, nearly eight in ten new job openings in
the U.S. will require some workforce training or postsecondary education.
And of the thirty fastest growing occupations in America, half require at
least a 4-year college degree."  (See Higher Education at a CrossRoads: 

http://www.apollogrp.edu/Investor/Reports/Higher_Education_at_a_Crossroads_F
INALv2[1].pdf
<http://www.apollogrp.edu/Investor/Reports/Higher_Education_at_a_Crossroads_
FINALv2%5b1%5d.pdf>  and Restoring America's Leadership in Higher Education
(Remarks by President Obama to Texas A&M, August 9, 2010)

http://www.politico.com/static/PPM169_restoringamerica.html).

 

When the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the publication of the
position paper in the context of a negative report from the Government
Accountability Office on recruitment practices by for-profit educational
institutions, an interesting discussion broke out in the comments (see:
http://chronicle.com/article/With-Statistics-Heavy-Report/124101/).  Some
respondents believed that the for-profit entities were justified in putting
forward a case for their existence, while others criticized the quality of
education provided by those institutions in training potentially at-risk
students (see the GAO at http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d10948t.pdf). This is
an old debate, one that suggests both a defensive posture on the part of
traditional institutions of higher education (IHE) that are seeking to avoid
any siphoning-off of revenues received through federal and state subsidies,
and an overly optimistic posture on the part of the for-profit entities.
There are rigorous constraints on budgets for most IHEs, just when the need
for a more educated work force is being stressed as integral to growing the
economy. And because of those constraints, one also sees discussions
questioning whether research activities should be funded (or dispensed with)
across these institutions. 

 

A random tweet took me to a Georgia Tech faculty blog posting that asked why
universities should do research (see:
http://wwc.demillo.com/2010/07/05/why-universities-do-research/). Rich
Demillo, Distinguished Professor of Computing and Management at Georgia
Tech, noted that for many universities it was a losing proposition, noting
that one provost told him that for every research dollar coming in, they
were spending $2.50 due to an imbalance between man- hours spent on
instruction vs. man-hours spent on research. He noted as well that the hope
of commercializing and licensing intellectual property for most institutions
was equally unprofitable. Institutions are motivated to aspire to become
Carnegie I schools more out of "institutional envy" than any other motive,
even though innovative IHEs may find other ways of thriving. His point
(amidst Georgia's significant educational funding crisis) was that
differences between teaching universities and research universities should
be recognized and funded appropriately without penalizing the institution
for being one or the other.  

 

Another academic (also from the Georgia Tech community) noted in January
that perhaps there were, in fact, things that the for-profit educational
institutions could do more successfully and/or more economically than
Georgia Tech (see:
http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2010/01/29/an-educational-extinction-event/).
If the role of the university is to educate, socialize and aid students in
building effective professional networks, then the University of Phoenix
might well be more suited to doing that in an online environment while the
likes of Georgia Tech refocused its attention on research and innovation. 

 

In an article in Forbes discussing the potential of online learning for
higher education in the US, Taylor Walsh noted that the University of
California had announced a pilot project for a "large slate of online
introductory courses across its ten campuses. If they pass muster at the
culmination of the pilot, these Web courses could eventually be used to
teach the universities' own undergraduates or expand the UC student body by
appealing to new audiences, easing bottlenecks in crowded campuses or
providing a desperately needed revenue stream." She concludes that until
prestigious institutions such as Yale and the University of California find
a way to fully embrace online distance learning, their economic models will
be questioned (see:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/01/online-classes-internet-technology-opinions
-best-colleges-10-walsh.html).

 

Why are universities clinging to what appears to be something of an
out-moded economic model? According to an op-ed appearing in Inside Higher
Ed, "the main reason is that universities do not want to admit to the public
that student dollars and state funds are spent on other things than
instruction and related research. As many professors have told me, they do
not believe that the public would support the research mission of the
university, so the university has to hide how it spends its money"  (see:
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/04/samuels). 

 

Lest you think that this is primarily a U.S.-centric concern, European
entities are also thinking about the problem. Frank Gannon, Director General
of the Science Foundation Ireland, the major funding agency fueling research
in higher education in Ireland, ruminated on issues of appropriate funding
when he referenced the mythical Roman deity, Janus, and the necessityof
mixing corporate and government funding of research in universities (see:
http://frankgannon.wordpress.com/2010/08/26/society's-janus-view-of-research
ers/). The duality, as he points out, leads to mixed public trust in
scientific results, contaminated as such findings may be by commercial
interests or political ideologies if either funding source is permitted to
dominate.  

 

Within the framework of scholarly publishing, it is understood that the
formal auspices under which any research is done tends to influence how
results from that research will be framed, disseminated, and publicized to a
broader audience. That understanding is less wide-spread outside the
information community.

 

During the month of August, I noted a higher-than-usual volume of noise
about the concept of peer-review and its purpose. There were articles in the
New York Times and in the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as entries
by various contributors to the Scholarly Kitchen blog.  What made me sit up
and pay closer attention however was a screed that appeared in the UK
science and technology publication, Spiked. Two authors of a somewhat
controversial book, The Spirit Level:  Why Equality is Better for Everyone,
had responded to three semi-professionally published critiques of their work
and then announced that any future discussion of the book's findings would
only receive response if such discussion were published in a peer-reviewed
journal.

 

The Editor of Spiked called that "an extraordinary condition on future
debate about their book."  His editorial made the point that peer-review was
(strictly speaking) not a judgment made by the author's peers of whether a
finding was the final word on a subject. It was rather an indicator of
whether or not the primary investigator had done a proper write-up of a
research inquiry fit for publication - that is, found to be grounded in the
literature, performed through a proper protocol or methodology, with
findings that had not been fabricated. "There is a censorious dynamic at
play here, as a divide is erected between those who are peer-reviewed and
those who are not, between those who we should listen to and engage with and
those we should look down our noses at - in effect between those who say
mainstream, acceptable things and those who spout off-the-wall, experimental
stuff" (see: http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/9383/). 

 

It is the phrase "censorious dynamic" to which I would draw your attention,
not because it conjures up the notion of censorship (likely the author's
intent), but because there is always a conflict between those whose
investment of time and study gives them the elevated status of authoritative
credentials and the resentment of those who know themselves to be
less-well-educated on a topic, but who don't believe themselves to be
incapable of understanding, if offered the opportunity to learn.  The
expectation is that there will be an interactive exchange in order for both
sides to understand.

 

That conflict is at the heart of our concept of the Academy and the
investigative process.  Like so many social processes, peer review is a
series of human exchanges, hampered by social ineptitude as much as by
professional reticence. Kent Anderson on the Scholarly Kitchen blog put it
most bluntly when he wrote about recent instances where bad science was
published in ostensibly respectable publications. He said "The entire
scientific publishing genre is losing credibility with the public, putting
the article, the journal, and the peer review process at risk"  (see:
http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2010/08/02/left-handed-cancer-box-springs
-scientific-american-branding-and-trust/).

 

The conflict is evident not just in discussions of science and peer-review,
but also in discussions of the roles of libraries in the Digital Age. How
much does society need gateways and guardians? And at what point in the
process, ought such filters to be introduced or withdrawn? 

 

At some point, I was directed to a research project known as the Liquid
Journal (http://project.liquidpub.org/). The project is funded by the
European Union and supported by a variety of international entities
including the commercial STM publisher, Springer Science. The founders
believe that the production processes surrounding the creation of scientific
knowledge is inefficient, with specific reference to the need for creating
formal written materials (articles) and the peer-review process required to
vet those materials. Essentially the project wants to take the creation of
scientific knowledge out of the realm of the formally published article as
formed in a print environment, and into the realm of something more closely
approximating a real-world laboratory where data and simulations are made
re-usable. The organization calls for the development of "novel services and
business models" (see a useful descriptive paper at:
http://www.almaweb.unibo.it/all/doc/upl/s1/pdf/WOAPAPERSITO/6/8.7.%20Camusso
ne%20Cuel%20Ponte.pdf).

 

The entry pointing me to the Liquid Journal project was from the BMJ Group
Blog where Richard Smith, a Public Library of Science Board Member, praised
the initiative, but recognized that its success would be hampered by the
scientific community's conservatism, the reward system that connected
high-impact publications with tenure, and by the collective inertia of the
publishing community itself (commercial publishers as well as scientific
societies; see:
http://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2010/08/05/richard-smith-enter-the-%E2%80%9Cliquid-
journal%E2%80%9D/).

Smith believes that a pre-publication peer review process is no longer
effective, and believes (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the most effective
peer-review process happens after an article has received maximum exposure
within the knowledge community. "Much better to have posted the paper on the
Web and let the world decide its importance or lack of it and for the
reviewers to have got on with researching."

 

Post-publication peer-review is not always satisfactory, either. UCLA
Professor of Emergency Medicine, David Schriger, wrote in The British
Medical Journal that "The solution to the absence of effective
post-publication reviews does not lie within its mechanisms; it requires a
fundamental reworking of what research is performed, how it is presented,
and how it is assimilated into current knowledge. We need fewer papers that
are of higher quality and importance. We also need a change in culture to
value public discussion if we are to re-engage the medical research
community in the kind of post-publication review process that patients
deserve."  That is a call to action difficult to resist (see:
http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c3803.full). 

 

I sense a number of questions arising for which there are few available
answers, but which have significance for the services offered by NFAIS
members: 

 

*	Has the economic model of education and research housed and funded
within a single institution been exhausted?
*	Ought the two functions to be separated for purposes of ensuring
that both remain economically viable across a range of institutions?
*	How might societies (i.e. governments) best re-allocate funding
resources for instructional and research efforts across the spectrum of
available providers? 
*	If instruction and research become divorced, what will the cascade
effect for information providers be? 

 

That we have to frame such questions suggests that the process by which the
Western world generates research and subsequent authoritative knowledge is
near to being re-engineered for greater efficiency and productivity. 

 

However those questions may get answered, the markets will continue to
shift.

 

 

*******************************

 

Early bird registration discounts for the 2011 NFAIS Annual conference end
on January 7th.  Until then savings of up to $100 off the full registration
fee are available and NFAIS members registering three or more staff at the
same time receive even greater savings (for details see the registration
form at
http://nfais.brightegg.com/page/295-register-for-2011-annual-conference).

 

2010 SPONSORS

Accessible Archives, Inc.

American Psychological Association/PsycINFO

The British Library

CAS

Copyright Clearance Center

CrossRef

Data Conversion Laboratory

Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC)

Getty Research Institute

H. W. Wilson

Information Today, Inc.

Office of Scientific & Technical Information, DOE

Philosopher's Information Center

ProQuest

Really Strategies, Inc.

Temis, Inc.

Thomson Reuters Healthcare & Science

Thomson Reuters IP Solutions

Unlimited Priorities Corporation

 

 

 

Jill O'Neill

Director, Planning & Communication

NFAIS

(v) 215-893-1561

(email) jilloneill at nfais.org

 

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