William Poole believes action is needed to raise academic quality

A senior research fellow of All Souls recently published a landmark protest against the Drift of Things in the academe. Our basic problem, he pointed out, is overproduction.

Academics are now pressed to write and publish so much material that on the one hand the sheer economic cost of all this is threatening to break the system, and on the other hand it is having a horrific effect on academic standards.

No one can read enough; most is not worth reading. Academics are communicating to fewer and fewer of their peers, and most of us are now confined to our own tiny intellectual back-waters.

The proposed solution from All Souls is not without its problems, but, like the best wit, it takes the form of a joke so penetrating it isn’t a joke.

The advice is that academics should be awarded bonuses for not publishing, and be fined for publishing. At the most, academics might be required to produce three pieces of quality publication — in their own judgment — every 10 years. Now we can get back to real work.

This may strike some as a lazy paradise. Not so; and consider the alternative, which is where we are: we are being turned into specialists who never generalise, ever-multiplying communities of ever-smaller populations babbling mutually incomprehensible tongues.

Arts funding bodies have ‘got science’ and think that it’s all ‘collaboration’ and research ‘groups’, with ‘themes’, ‘outputs’, even the prize-winningly stupid criterion of ‘impact’: but these gestures at inclusivity are counterproductive, usually serving to trivialise rather than deepen the thinking they seek to promote. It is becoming a case of ‘of course you can research what you want — as long as it is one of this year’s approved themes’.

Can we break out of this? Not while the policy-makers remain hypnotised by a strictly mercantilist view of academic production, and not while university politicians think their job is to tell the university what the Government wants, and not the other way around.

My own hot fantasy is that if the leading universities simply told the Government that ‘thanks, but no thanks’ will be the agreed reply to the next imposition of governmental research assessments, then that would leave the Government in a tricky place.

It would amount to a threat to go independent if the Government did not stop its intellectual vandalism. I think some governments would rather enjoy ‘breaking’ Oxbridge-and-mates on such a pretext. But would this one? Will the Coalition wish to go down in history as the administration that was personally presented with divorce papers by the elite of the tertiary system?

Come on, Gownsmen, it’s time to tough up. While we stand by we are all being reduced to a herd of nervous frauds.

Friendly Townsmen! Take pity on your poor Gownsmen! For, as you peer into their haunted eyes, you may spot the guttering flames of a once honest breed gradually being turned into a pack of liars. Some of us want no part in this.