交换机｜出版物、权力、学术赞助：论学术发表中的不平等问题
查德•魏尔蒙（Chad Wellmon）教授
安德鲁•派博（Andrew Piper）教授
《
批评探索》（Critical Inquiry）杂志，2017年7月21日刊出
网址：
http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/publication_power_and_patronage_on_inequality_and_academic_publishing/
学术研究发表机制中存在着权力的问题，它也涉及到学者所在的研究机构长期建立起来的学术声誉。少数几个研究机构的影响和学术权力也延展到了学术作品发表的领域，也就是说，直接影响到了知识的生产和流传层面。在所发表的高端学术作品中，如果其作者大量来自少数几个精英机构的毕业生，那就可以说，这些精英机构对相应的学术领域产生了较为广泛的影响。学术研究作品发表方面的不平等，来自于学术研究从业人员所接受训练的学术机构地位的不同等。像哈佛或者耶鲁这样的高等教育机构，富可敌国，掌控着无数的资源，对高等教育的发展起着决定性的作用，而同时，它们也对知识生产产生了巨大的影响。
两位作者先是探讨了西方近代大学兴起过程机构化与知识生产之间的历史性联系，接着以1969-2015年人文学科领域顶级的四个学术刊物（Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, PMLA, Representations）为例子，通过统计分析来探讨学术作品发表和学术机构之间的关联，并涉及到有关性别的问题。这是一桩很令人信服的知识社会学研究。两位作者最后也指出，认识到这个历史性的和现实性的问题，也许会对我们目前较为民主的媒体语境中更好地处理这样的不平等问题会有所帮助。
本文的两位作者为查德•魏尔蒙（Chad Wellmon）教授和安德鲁•派博（Andrew Piper）教授。
安德鲁•派博(Andrew Piper)，美国哥伦比亚大学博士，加拿大麦克吉尔(McGill) 大学德语及欧洲文学教授，是历史上第一次大规模以量化的方法研究小说史的学术项目“小说文本数据库挖掘”(NovelTM，网址:http://novel-tm.ca/ )的主任，并主编数字人文研究期刊《文化分析刊物》(CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics，网址:http:/ / culturalanalytics.org/ )。其主要研究方向是自18世纪以来的欧美文学及其阅读技术，集中于文学拓扑学与网络的历史、文本流传及跨文本实践、文学量化分析。已出版《书中梦想：浪漫主义历史时期文献想象力的形成》（Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age, 芝加哥大学出版社2009年出版）。其《小说信仰：皈依阅读、计算建模及现代小说》一文曾发表于由姜文涛、戴安德在《山东社会科学》期刊上主持的“数字人文：观其大较”学术专栏中，已于2016年11月份刊出。
查德·魏尔蒙（Chad Wellmon），美国加州大学伯克利分校博士，美国弗吉尼亚大学德语系副教授，已出版《成为人类：浪漫主义人类学及自由观念的缘身性》（Becoming Human: Romantic Anthropology and the Embodiment of Freedom，美国宾夕法尼亚州立大学出版社2010年出版）《启蒙组织：信息过剩及近代研究型大学的兴起》（Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University，霍普金斯大学出版社2015年出版）等两部学术著作。其《神圣阅读：从奥古斯丁到数字人文主义者》一文将发表于由姜文涛、戴安德在《山东社会科学》期刊上主持的“数字人文：观其大较”学术专栏中，将于2017年8月份刊出。
Prestige, Publishing, and Epistemic Authority
Studies such as ours suggest that the hegemony of a few elite institutions continues well beyond who gets the prized tenure track jobs right out of graduate school. The influence and power of a few institutions also extends to publishing—and so to the creation and transmission of knowledge more directly. If graduates from only a few elite institutions account for an outsized proportion of high-profile published work, it stands to reason that their work will exercise more influence in the field (though we are also aware of the complex relationship between publication and “influence,” which are not necessarily synonymous). The prestige of training continues on into the prestige of publication, as institutions like Harvard and Yale, which have unparalleled financial means to shape higher education, also have an outsized influence on what counts as knowledge.
Scholars who have studied faculty hiring patterns have drawn sharp conclusions. In their study, Clauset and his co-authors conclude that such patterns have “profound implications for the free exchange of ideas. Research interests, collaboration networks, and academic norms are often cemented during doctoral training. Thus, the centralized and highly connected positions of higher-prestige institutions enable substantial influence, via doctoral placement, over research agendas, research communities, and departmental norms throughout a discipline.”38
By framing academic hiring in terms of intellectual equity, Clauset and the authors of related studies raise a fascinating, if confounding question: What would epistemic equality look like? And is it something that ought to be aspired to?
For many in the academy today, epistemic inequality––understood here in the rudimentary sense of our data concerning disproportional institutional representation––would surely be no less undesirable than economic inequality. The more we move in the direction of the so-called knowledge economy, the more the two become linked.
Knowledge is a key form of capital. It consolidates power. And yet some might argue that prestigious universities are simply fulfilling their cultural role by filtering knowledge. Our reflexive distaste of academic inequality belies the very nature of the institutions within which we work. Universities might be thought of in this sense as akin to institutional search engines; they produce the people who produce knowledge, and thus their, perhaps undemocratic, epistemic effects help organize and sort out knowledge. Google would be useless were it to treat all links equally. According to this line of thinking, the concentration of knowledge within elite institutions is not necessarily a sign of the system’s failure; it may even be a sign of health and the power of systems of cultural capital and patronage to separate the chaff from the wheat.
And yet how can we be certain that such imagined epistemic quality is not in some way contaminated by those very networks of influence and patronage that produce it? Harvard, Yale, and other elite institutions surely train talented and highly qualified academics. (As graduates of two such institutions, UC Berkeley and Columbia, we can anecdotally attest to the acumen and talent of our colleagues and of the faculty members who trained us.) But the observed hierarchies are so pronounced that it would be naïve to assume that elite institutions are so disproportionally better at filtering knowledge than all other universities. Our assumption, unproven at this point but the real concern of our broader project, is that these levels of influence and control adversely affect the broader system of scholarly communication.
Judgments of quality, value, and merit are, as Pierre Bourdieu once wrote, “always contaminated at all stages of academic life by knowledge of the position [one] occupies in the institutional hierarchy.”39 Our findings suggest that claims about quality and excellence––which continue to perpetuate enormous institutional imbalances––may not be as value neutral as their defenders would have us believe.
What is clear from our data and other studies like it is that elite institutions continue to be the locus of the practices, techniques, virtues, and values that have come to define modern academic knowledge. They diffuse it, whether in the form of academic labor (personnel) or ideas (publication), from a concentrated center to a broader periphery. What remains unclear is the relationship of this system to the quality and diversity of ideas, indeed to the ways in which the very ideas of quality and diversity might be imagined to intersect.
For many in the humanities, it is precisely the process of Weberian rationalization, embodied above all in counting mechanisms like the REF or Google Scholar, that have contributed to the ills of the current system. Only an emphasis on the “incalculable” or ineffable nature of humanistic practices and objects of study can preserve the health of intellectual inquiry into the future.40 And yet the history of scholarly publication that we have tried to outline here tells us a different story: the recourse to measurability in exercises like the REF is not something administratively new, but part of a much longer attempt to undo ensconced systems of patronage and loosen forms of institutional favoritism and cultural capital. The recourse to accounting for publication was implemented in the spirit of transparency and intellectual openness. The urge among some humanists to resist this tradition absolutely and as a matter of principle would only retard attempts to redress long-standing patterns. The invocation of incalculability has to date served as a highly effective means of maintaining hierarchy and the concentration of power, prestige, and patronage––cultural capital of all sorts.
At the same time, our data collected from the past half-century of scholarly publication in the humanities tell us that historical and contemporary attempts to undo the effects of systems of patronage and cultural capital through systems of print and now digital publication have failed. The concentration of power and prestige within elite circles has continued, even if in different form, form the early modern republic of letters and family universities to the contemporary academy. Invoking Clauset’s and others’ notions of “free” ideas – of removing all filters from a system – overlooks the very clear ways that systems of publication always encode forms of bias and selection within them.
Knowledge has never circulated freely, unencumbered by institutions, technologies, traditions, and norms. The “free exchange of ideas” requires media––things, concepts, technologies, practices, institutions––that intervene and get in between. Be it the patronage systems of early modern universities, the bureaucratic systems of the German research university, or the mixed systems of contemporary universities, systems of communication and transmission are never “free” from mediation.
So what is to be done?
We would argue that the answer is neither a return to ideals of incalculability nor a belief in the power of free knowledge. Using new digital technologies and methods to better understand academic institutions does not necessarily make one complicit in the “neo-liberalization and corporatization of higher education” or exacerbate the “inequality both between ‘the haves’ of digital humanities and the ‘have-nots’ of mainstream humanities.”41 Wisely used, such technologies and methods can help reveal how longstanding, persistent, and intractable such disparities have been. What we need in our view is not less quantification, but more; not less mediation, but mediation of a different kind. It is not enough to demand intellectual diversity and assume its benefits. We need new ways of measuring, nurturing, valuing and, ultimately, conceiving of it. We need alternative systems of searching, discovering, and cultivating intellectual difference. We need platforms of dissemination that don’t simply replicate existing systems of concentration and patronage, just as we need new metrics of “output” and “impact” that rely less on centrality and quantity and more on content and difference.
Humboldt and other university reformers considered publication a powerful tool for dislodging the systems of patronage that beset German universities at the turn of the nineteenth century. Today, we have new tools at our disposal that can allow us to develop alternative ways of measuring importance beyond simply counting titles and citation numbers. Major strides have been made in the fields of content analysis and cultural analytics that can allow us to retool our measurements of impact to account for values like diversity and novelty rather than just power and prestige. It is time we used them.
While this is obviously a major research challenge for the future, it is imperative that we at least begin by looking carefully at the institutional imbalances that continue to surround hiring and publication in the humanities and the historical origins that helped bring this state of affairs about. The first step, as always, is acknowledging we have a problem.
38 Clauset et. al., “Systematic Inequality.”
39 “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason,” Sociology of Information 14:6: 19-47. See also, Boridieu, “The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason,” Sociological Forum 6:1 (1991): 3-26.
40 For the most extensive critique of computation in the humanities, see the special issue, “In the Shadows of the Digital Humanities,” Differences 25.1 (2014), ed. Ellen Rooney and Elizabeth Weed.
41 Richard Grusin suggests just this in “The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities,” Differences 25:1 (2014): 79-92.
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