Academic words are a sick fetish

Evening all,

Every once in a while a post of the existential binfire once known as twitter grabs my attention, and today's post will talk about one of those times. Also, fair warning- this post is intended to provoke, but I'll happily die on this hill. Be warned, I'm full entrenched, have e multiple artillery emplacements, and I'm a (rhetorical) killing machine who will steal the watch off your corpse.

Anyhow, enough colourful banter- onwards. The twitter post I refer to is this one:

I've suffered through a few of these in my time, and I've always found it mystifying. And the question is on point- if someone is just going to read a text, why would I sit there and listen? Just give a handout or send a link- it's easier and cheaper for everyone involved. Even the argument that one interlocutor offered, that the audience get a sneak peek at a forthcoming paper and the presenter gets a free review- as with many meetings in higher ed, this could be an email folks.

But then, down thread, I came across this- I honestly can't say whether it is brutally accurate or marvellous satire.

The thing is, it rings with a certain truth, no? Now, do I think historians are reveling in words to an extent that the words have no relation to reality? No, I don't. But having seen many, many, academics who both punish "poor" expression, and overly reward "good" expression in their marking, it strikes me that the relationship between written work and reality is...strained.

When I think of a 1st year student entering uni, I'm seeing a high school student- which they essentially are. We then throw them into enrolment and Orientation week, Academic Integrity modules and what have you, then three weeks later we expect them to have digested the preferences of a group of academics who might stand at the start line, marking rubric in hand, shouting "Write like an honours student.....NOW!" Meanwhile, academics also get confused between insisting to students that their ideas are what's important, while severely punishing them if they are not yet able to express those ideas well. Although I generally fall into the camp of "AI opponent", I can certainly see use cases for the silicon behemoths in this regard. A friend, Kelly Webb-Davies, encourages her students to use AI, but only after they've generated ideas in class, put them down on paper, in concrete as it were. In a world where text is virtually infinite and free, it strikes me that getting students to actively think before punishing them for crap writing is something to admire. So to is de-emphasising writing over thinking, and demonstrations thereof.

I do wonder whether a lot of this comes back to the belief that "writing is thinking." Frankly, that strikes me as an idiotic thing to say, but certainly people who have spent years or decades writing and thinking in tandem might think that. In my view they are just stating a preference for a specific style of thinking, one that they like and are successful at reproducing. But at a certain point these preferences become fetishised, imbued with magical powers (in the mind of the beholder)!

And so I think it is with writing. To me that explains why entire disciplines would stand up in front of each other reciting every-word-off-the-page, like an automaton. Seriously, if you're going do that, just invent an AI avatar with a better reading voice than yours and do it online.

Meanwhile, back in reality, you might consider how best to identify where and how students are actually thinking and learning, rather than running the red pen through their undergraduate words- or worse, the output of an LLM which perfectly replicates a tired and broken form of academic work. I would agree in a situation such as an interactive oral that it's clear when a student knows nothing, but that's a pretty low bar. We used to base entire degrees on written work, it's a hard habit to break, clearly. But I'm currently worrying that we simply do not know how to get a clear picture of where students start at, how and what they are learning through their 3 or 4 years with us, and whether they actually meet the learning outcomes as we say they do. But I do know that continuing to fetishise what used to work in the vain hope that it still has relevance or meaning isn't the way to work that out. Just as we say to students, academics need to do "the work of learning" too.

In the meantime, for the stream of folks who will no doubt take great exception to my views on their paper recitals, this is for you. My one concession is that the best piece of academic advice I ever got was from a lecturer (and former football teammate) Drew Cottle, who encouraged me to "write early and write often." It's advice I still use today, but the times , they are-a-changin'.

Until next time,

KM