Looking for freedom in contemporary universities: What is educational research for?

After seven intense years as President of the University of Lisbon, I had the opportunity to spend the last academic year in Brazil.

It was an extraordinary experience that allowed me to live, in loco, the reality of another continent and to understand that the issues that affect us are the same, on both sides of the Atlantic, everywhere in the world.

Throughout the year, while preparing this keynote address, I gained a better understanding of the insanity that is transforming our academic world. ¹ The signs are not new, but they are extending, day after day, before our malaise, but also before our resignation; as if things were inevitable, as if there was no alternative. The time has come to say ‘no’.

This year we celebrate the centenary of the Great War. It is worth remembering that it took place, like all wars, not so much because of the bellicosity of some but rather the consent of many, a general consent of people whose victims they were going to be. ²

‘We see, we hear, and we read. We can’t ignore’ – these verses by Sophia de Mello Breyner, sung during the struggles for freedom in Portugal, explain my decision to use the time granted to me at this Conference not for a ‘conventional’ keynote address, but rather to join my voice to the appeals and manifestos that are fighting against the dominant trends in universities, that are fighting for a new organization of academic life.

We see, we hear, and we read. We can’t ignore

What have I seen, heard, and read, and that I can’t ignore? The list is long, but I leave you with just four examples; very simple yet very elucidating.

First

I saw the news about the hoax that was set up by John Bohannon. He managed to publish several versions of a fake scientific paper in 157 open access journals, involving those from prominent publishing houses like Wolters Kluwer, Sage and Elsevier.

The question is: Why do we accept having to pay significant fees for publishing our work in such a flawed publishing system? Why do we concede to this insanity? What is happening to us?

Second

I heard Nobel winner Randy Schekman declaring a boycott of leading academic journals, like Nature and Science, because, according to him, they are distorting the scientific process and they represent a tyranny that must be broken.

The question is: Why don’t we take action against this publishing industry which so damages science? Why do we allow our work and priorities to be defined by this harmful agenda?

Third

I read the story of Haruko Obokata, the young Japanese scientist accused of fabricating images in a stem-cell study, a story that looks like many other stories that have taken place in recent years.

The question is: Why do we accept the pressures of this ‘publish or perish culture’? Why do we accept the dominance of our lives by impact factors and blind ‘productivism’? Why do we consent? Why do we resign ourselves ?

Fourth

Recently, I saw, I heard, and I read the news regarding the evaluation of the Portuguese scientific system, conducted through an agreement between the Portuguese Foundation of Science and Technology and the European Science Foundation. The agreement stated that half of the research units should be eliminated. ³ In the case of Educational Sciences, more than 70% of the units were excluded from the second stage. The evaluation was conducted in the worst possible way, using absurd metrics, without the slightest knowledge of the country’s reality, without a site visit to the research centers, without discussion with the researchers… and I can’t ignore the fact that some members of the evaluation panel are educational researchers!

The question is: Why do we accept to participate in these panels, with these absurd methods and political injunctions? Why do we accept to collaborate in the destruction of our own scientific field? Why do we accept the unacceptable? Why?

These are single stories from the past nine months. I could share many others with you. For example, this extraordinary story of a computer program created by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that randomly generates nonsensical text in the form of computer science research papers. The program is available on a website, and the articles generated were accepted for publication by important publishing houses, like Springer, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and many more.

These stories do not interest me per se, but rather as signs, as symptoms, of a deeper malaise affecting the academic and university life. These signs have multiplied at an alarming rate in recent times; they are symptoms of a corrosion of universities and research that we cannot ignore.

The deterioration of the university climate in the context of a meaningless academic productivism undermines any effort to provide coherence and a sense of future to educational research. That’s why I have decided to make this plea for a different academic life, an appeal to our personal and collective responsibility. Enough is enough!

I recounted four stories – about John Bohannon, Randy Schekman, Haruko Obokata, and the evaluation of research in Portugal – and I ask four questions, which, in fact, come together as one: Why do we accept? Why do we consent? Why do we collaborate? Why?

Obviously, these are rhetorical questions. We all know very well the answers to them. It is a struggle for survival in the academic jungle; but we need to problematize these answers in the context of dominant trends in the university space, all around the world, but particularly in Europe after the Bologna Process.

Maybe these trends can be summarized by comparing two famous ideas:

• The first belongs to Eliot Freidson, in an article published in 1986: ‘Universities are remarkable inventions for subsidizing social work that does not have immediate commercial value’; ⁴ and

• The second belongs to Nicholas Barr, an economist who had a prominent role in higher education policies in the UK: 50 years ago higher education was not important in economic terms, today it matters, it is necessary to pay attention to the economic value of universities. ⁵

Just twenty years separate these two quotations. But they represent a huge change in the way universities are seen and understood. The importance of knowledge for social and economic development isn’t at the forefront anymore. No. What counts now is the economic value of the universities themselves.

In an over-simplified argument, maybe we can illustrate this ideology with three E’s plus one. These E’s are toxic concepts, because our immediate survival depends on breathing in this lethal atmosphere, even if it condemns us to a slow death.

The words that I am going to say are not guilt-ridden. The problem is not in the words. The problem is in the ideologies of ‘modernization’ that they serve, ideologies that look above all to the ‘economic value of universities’.

Ideologies of ‘modernization’? Three E’s plus one

My first E stands for Excellence

Excellence is the most pervasive concept for defining universities and, above all, for defining the so-called ‘world-class research universities’. ⁶ Obviously, no one can be against ‘excellence’. But behind this concept there is a call for a rise of productivism that is undermining the foundations of the academic profession.

The ‘publish or perish culture’ is directly linked to forms of teacher evaluation and international rankings that dominate universities, granting tremendous power to the publishing industry.

‘Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world?’ – asks George Monbiot, an English writer and journalist. ‘Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? While there are plenty of candidates, my vote goes not to the banks, the oil companies, or the health insurers, but – wait for it – to academic publishers.’ ⁷

We all work for free for academic publishers, as authors or reviewers, but they charge outrageous fees to access research that has been mainly paid for by public funds. ⁸ Something is not right.

Even one of the richest universities in the world, Harvard University, issued a memorandum, two years ago, saying that it couldn’t afford journal publishers’ prices. ⁹ And, in that same year, 2012, the mathematician Tim Gowers, a Fields medalist, launched a movement against the exorbitant ‘cost of knowledge’, advocating a boycott of Elsevier journals and encouraging alternative routes for academic publishing. ¹⁰

We are facing a situation that pushes forms of productivism which lead to the trivialization of unacceptable practices, like auto-plagiarism, self-citation, or slicing of papers. There are even those who boast of having published hundreds and hundreds of papers in the course of their lives. Is this a crown of glory or one of insanity?

Every day we publish more. Every day we read and discuss less. There are increasing pressures for imposing a culture of productivism. We cannot comply with this corruption of science and universities that is destroying academic life. It is time to say “no”.

My second E stands for Entrepreneurship

What does it mean? On the one hand, it means the entrepreneurial university, the emergence of managerial practices that treat universities as if they were business

Please allow me to acknowledge the Manifesto for Universities That Live Up To Their missions, launched in 2012, criticizing the mantra of current modes of governance, built around ideas of efficiency, profitability, and competitiveness that are eroding academic freedom. ¹¹

In fact, one of our main problems is the increasing separation between management practices and academic life. Within universities power is shifting from academics to managers and bureaucrats.

On the other hand, entrepreneurship means a spirit characterized by innovation and risk-taking. No one can be against it. Unfortunately, this is leading to an acceleration of time and to the adoption of metrics that narrow the scientific scope. We are witnessing a technological drift with deep consequences for the evaluation of academics and for the financing of research.

This is exactly what was denounced by our colleagues that launched, in 2010, The Slow Science Manifesto, where they write: ‘Science needs time to think. Science needs time to read, and time to fail. Science does not always know what it might be at right now’. And that is why they conclude with a last demand, addressed to the public: ‘– Bear with us, while we think’. ¹²

Maybe the best way to oppose entrepreneurship is to use the French word désintéréssement, noticeably difficult to translate into another language. It does not mean disinterest, rather a higher interest, well defined by Jacques Derrida in The University Without Condition, that is, the university of unconditional freedom. ¹³

The slow science movement is part of a larger action against the entrepreneurial tendencies that are suffocating universities and research. It is time to say ‘no’.

My third E stands for Employability

This is the most pervasive and toxic concept in European debates, always followed by another concept, even more toxic, of ‘lifelong learning’. Throughout the 20th century, the right to education has been inscribed in social struggles and movements, with a strong participation of teachers and educationists. Now, with the regurgitation of lifelong learning, education is not a right any longer, but a duty – the duty to be a lifelong learner in order to stay employable.

Universities have been incorporating this concept, losing sight of their educational and cultural missions to focus primarily on training and employability. By accepting these tendencies, we become responsible for our own destruction, as stated in an important document, the Charter of Dis-excellence (Charte de la Désexcellence), recently issued by a group of European scholars. ¹⁴

It is critical to measure our role, even if only through silence, in the adoption and development of ideologies that are conditioning universities, constraining our academic life, and redefining research priorities. It is time to say ‘no’.

I intentionally decided to describe the three E’s by always confronting them with movements and forms of resistance that are growing in the university world: the Harvard University statement, the boycott proposed by Tim Gowers, the Manifesto for Universities That Live Up To Their Missions, the Slow Science Manifesto, the Charter of Dis-excellence… ¹⁵

It is my way of calling upon our own responsibility, as professors, as researchers, as educationists, as members of the European Educational Research Association.

In the beginning, I said that I would present three E’s plus one.

My last E stands for Europeanization

After decades of ‘Europeanization’, Europe is as it is. I will not speak of it. But I want to expose the divides between North and South, between center and periphery, which are being exacerbated by the European Union’s scientific policies.

We like to emphasize the importance of knowledge in contemporary societies. That is the main argument for raising the European budget for science. Horizon 2020 now has a budget of 79 billion Euros.

Curiously enough, no one questions the ‘competitive funds’ strategy that regulates European policies in science. It is the best example of the triple-E ideology. The result is self-evident: the strong get stronger, the weak get weaker. After almost three decades in the European Union, Portugal is still a net contributor for European funds for science. Ironically, one could argue that the citizens of less developed European countries are paying for science that is being done in the most developed countries. What a strange Europeanization.

And then we have stories like the one I told you before, about the evaluation of research centers in Portugal. Everything is done under the auspices of the European Science Foundation, with the complicity of some of our colleagues. Needless to say – everything is legitimized through languages of excellence, innovation and competitiveness, languages of entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer and technological merit, languages of outputs, productivity and impact. Needless to say – each member of the evaluation panels believes that he or she is doing his or her work, in the best possible way, when, in fact, they are lending themselves to policies that reproduce fractures and divisions in Europe. Always in the name of Europeanization. It is time to say ‘no’.

Four times ‘no’. To excellence. To entrepreneurship. To employability. To ‘this’ Europeanization. Not because of the words, but because of the ideologies that lie behind them.

Let me be totally clear: I have no academic nostalgia; but this doesn’t force me to adhere to these ‘ideologies of modernization’ that are destroying our academic life, our intellectual freedom. What interests me is to emphasize how these ideologies are impoverishing research, in particular with regard to educational research. That is what I will try to explain in this talk’s last section.

What about Educational Research?

Again, I will leave you with three ideas, plus one.

First –instead of ‘excellence’ we need an all-inclusive research

Instead of an ideology of ‘Excellence’, we must state the inclusiveness of educational research. For a long time, before the emergence of ‘scientific’, ‘technocratic’, and ‘applied’ biases, democratization was at the forefront of educational research.

We must reestablish this lost tradition, against the myth of the “objective expert”, which is behind an exhausted peer-review system, which is behind bibliometric evaluations and impact factor tendencies.

It is necessary to rebuild a culture of discussing and debating, of reading each other’s work and engaging in meaningful intellectual conversation. We cannot yield to the tyranny of numbers, of ‘quantitative’ evaluation mechanisms that are destroying imagination and freedom. We must reinvent research as an open collective praxis.

Second –instead of ‘entrepreneurship’ we need a far-convergent research

The entrepreneurship ideology tends to narrow research in terms of technological developments or policy-oriented work. Furthermore, it leads to tendencies of enclosure and confinement of educational research.

Our best tradition relies on multiple approaches and ways of thinking. It is strange that precisely nowadays, when the most inspiring research is looking for convergence and cross-fertilization, some educational researchers are worried about issues of identity and ‘disciplinarization’.

That is why I believe that we should broaden the scope of our work, also in terms of methods, as stated by Michel Serres:

Devoted to the search for truth, we do not always reach it; if and when we arrive through analyses or equations, experiments or formal proofs, but also through experimentation, sometimes, and, when experimentation doesn’t get you there, let the story go there, if it can; if meditation fails, why not try narrative? ¹⁶

The point is to enrich, to deepen and to diversify our understanding of educational matters. There is no simple way to accomplish this goal. We can’t hope to reach a consensus on how to organize and to conduct research in education. But we can engage in an intellectual dialogue in order to achieve convergence and trust.

Convergence, because we can’t afford to close ourselves inside a “discipline”; we need to be interdisciplinary, to work across disciplines. Trust, because it is the only way of escaping quantitative and bureaucratic evaluations; and nothing will be achieved without time, collaboration, and collective commitment.

Third –instead of ‘employability’ we need a wide-open research

I share the irony expressed by David Labaree, while addressing emergent scholars in the field of educational research: ‘Be wrong, be lazy, be irrelevant; and think of your work as an effort to balance the values of truth, justice, and beauty’. ¹⁷ It is a provocative statement against the “utilitarian turn” that is invading universities and also educational research. Yes, I believe that we need a wide-open research and this means two important movements.

The first, aimed toward considering our own positions and dispositions as researchers. If we lose this dimension, we are forced into precepts of alienation and productivism. David Labaree is right: ‘Academic writing can be and should be a medium for personal expression and artistic creation’”. ¹⁸

The second movement, aimed toward opening research to a wide public. We need to “go public”, to connect our research with public purposes and expectations. One of the main problems of education research has always been the fact that everyone knows about education. ¹⁹ It is true that this makes it more difficult to legitimize a research-based knowledge, but it is also true that it makes it easier to form a close relationship between knowledge and society. And this is crucial for research in contemporary times.

Here are my three answers to the question – What is educational research for? But I promised you three answers, plus one. My last answer is related with Europe. If we believe, as we like to think, that education and knowledge are the central elements of development, then we cannot accept the way European science funds are being managed and allocated. The cynical argument that funds are distributed according to the quality and merit of research teams, infrastructures, and proposals cannot be accepted.

The rhetoric of Europeanization is at the service of deeper fractures and divisions in Europe. We cannot continue to play this game, naively, as if it has nothing to do with us. We cannot comply with this, neither at the level of our responsibility as academics, nor at the level of an association like the European Educational Research Association.

It’s time to end this travel – this is not a keynote address – by university matters, academic life, and educational research. I hope I have succeeded in bringing together these many different pieces, to unveil dilemmas that affect us all.

I started with a poet from Oporto, Sophia de Mello Breyner. Let me finish with a writer from Lisbon, Vergílio Ferreira: ‘We cannot think outside the possibilities of the language in which we think’. ²⁰ In the same way, we cannot know outside the possibilities of the science in which we know. That is why we need to extend the repertoire of our science. To enlarge it theoretically, intellectually. To broaden the spectrum of our ways of thinking and talking about education. To deepen our commitment to inclusion, to education, and to culture. That is why educational research is a worthy endeavor.

All my words can be summarized with a single word – freedom. Recent developments in the academic world, especially the dominant forms of organization and evaluation of professors, are strongly constraining our professional lives and our research practices. It’s time to rebuild educational research with a broader sense, with a freedom without condition. Because freedom is everything, and everything else is nothing.