LIST MAGAZINE, a fake space of liberty for public research?

A new magazine for internal communication ("LIST MAGAZINE" , password: gir) has recently appeared. The general tone is one of mock-friendliness typical of the modern anglo-saxon marketing culture, based on the “participation” and “fun” of people who are implicitly considered immature enough to need both constant encouragements to keep working hard and strict rules cleverly devised by a enlightened ruling elite to keep them from straying. Catchy phrases like “help us to have fun” sum that up very potently. Or the chance to win an ipod by proposing a name for the magazine.

The CEO will judge wisely and recompense generously. Really ! To recompense the good son or the good daughter, however, is only half of patriarchy. So I wonder what forms of chastisement for disobedience will be practiced at LIST.

A couple of pages into the magazine, one gets the chance to read an interview with the ERIN manager of the new FNR funding program for PhD students called PRIDE. The first paragraph summarises for the reader the goals of the PRIDE program itself. I cannot resist paraphrasing it (the original is probably somewhere on the FNR website as well: I will not reproduce it here because every line of it is obnoxious to me). There we go.

“The objectives of PRIDE are to

·               reduce the amount of work for the FNR staff by assessing in one go a large batch of PhD thesis roughly held together by a flimsy “scientific theme”, while pretending to promote excellence.

·               sacrifice further on the altar of “critical mass” scientists' freedom and leeway by forcing them to integrate a research consortium artificially put together for the sake of reducing one's own evaluation work (see point above), instead of leaving them the choice to integrate ONE PhD thesis to a particular project when they feel the need to and recognise a self-contained and interesting subject adapted to a young researcher.

·               go as far in laziness as to even sabotage the idea of defining a serious strategic orientation and organising research along a coherent line by accepting all kinds of trash proposals (I could read two of them. The authors of both were trying so hard to pose as visionary pioneers and to present a hotch-potch of research topics as a coherent and well thought-out strategy it was comical) as long as they comply with superficial quality criteria.

·               help accelerate the “PhD bubble” where project PIs virtually delegate all scientific work to the PhDs while they busy themselves weaving new consortia, or simply pretend to be busy correcting other people's articles (of which they will be co-authors) or attending conferences,  invited talks or strategic meetings.

·               help debase further the idea of peer training by encouraging this type of user-used relationship between mentor and PhD student, and contribute to undermine the concept of honesty by presenting such a blatantly selfish and self-serving administrative program as fostering “excellence”.

I'll also paraphrase the citation in the interview of the DTU coordinator of the ERIN department (his favourite, apparently). The original, attributed to a George Mallory, goes like this “Why climb a mountain ? Because it's there! Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and no man has reached its summit. Its existence is a challenge. The answer is instinctive, a part, I suppose, of man's desire to conquer the universe”

Here's my version “Why climb a mountain just because it's there? Not to enjoy the quietness there, or the changing landscape as one climbs upwards. Everest is the highest mountain in the world, and I want to make it mine by climbing it because I am so alienated that I cannot feel any joy unless I possess all that I want (and I want all that I see). I rationalise this pathological need to ingest the entire world as “instinctive”, because that saves me from the unconscious feeling that there is another, productive way to live, based on existing instead of having, and that modern man's desire to conquer the universe could be replace by his desire to live in and grow with the universe.”

All this is very far away from the humanist message carried once by scientists such as Einstein. There seems to be an increasing number of modern Midases in science, people who change everything they touch into a dead and useless mass of gold.

I found another article presenting a project that was accepted in the program Horizon2020 of the European Union quite enlightening. A full page was dedicated to the history of project development and was also meant as some kind of cookbook recipe of project proposal writing with its dos and donts, and there was not a single sentence explaining what the project will be about (“use new technologies to better understand and reinterpret our history” sounds potentially very dangerous, and I would have liked to know more) ! I fear that's not just incidental, but betrays the enormous and stifling space devoted to writing project proposals in the modern system of science funding, and the way it progressively intrudes upon our minds. In the end, what counts is to get the money and a maybe a good evaluation mark (because that's becoming even better for one's reputation than scientific articles no one ever reads anyways) for a document that in the end in nothing more than a tedious work plan description. There was also a sentence I found devastating in which one of the project leaders was declaring that the project had to be “aligned” to the call. I suppose the original idea of specific calls was to steer science in given strategic directions. I think that's wrong, but alright. What happens in practice however is that this alignment will be mostly either formal by paying lip service to the call's terminology and goals, or minimal by adding a small work package addressing vaguely the said goals. How perverted is that? How perverting is that too? And do I see Midas again waving from a window of the European Commission?

Pablo N