IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022 - 10

Editorial
Impact of impact on universities
The main impact of Aleksander's work, for example,
by his own modest admission and in spite of his
outstanding scientific achievements, is to cause and
encourage other academics and other academic institutions,
to take subjects further. In this case, one role of
a university is to nurture new discoveries which have
an impact on other researchers, who in turn develop
and deepen yet newer discoveries, and thus grow
the scientific culture and the " body of knowledge. "
Moreover, the fact that the significant advancement of
any research area usually requires collaborative work,
to which many researchers contribute either directly
(through funded research projects, which presumably
produced a credible impact statement to get funded
in the first place) or indirectly, by publication in the
scientific literature and the knowledge dissemination
and social network development system otherwise
known as " conferences. " This is increasingly true of
systems subjects such as signal processing, control,
and computing.ii In these cases, another important
role of university research is to train and support young
researchers to participate in such activities, and so
build and sustain an expert research community.
It might be inferred that to fulfill these roles, the
university sector would show robust and responsible
stewardship, in nurturing the scientific knowledge
ecosystem-including both ideas and people.
Instead, universities in turn seem to value and prioritize
this intangible impact, or rather the profit that
might be derived from it, and try to filter out everyone
except the " giants. " Universities, in the form of
Sandel's [19] grotesque " sorting machine " reinforcing
failed ideas of meritocracy, often operate against
the common good of staff, as well as students, society,
and science. Rather than creating a vibrant and
inclusive working environment, the experience
of many academic researchers in the current economic
and postpandemic situation is one of distraction,
a squeezed middle, " McResearch, " monetized
publication, and conflicts of interest.
Distraction takes two forms.iii Two responsibilities
of an academic position are " research input "
iiIn computer science research, alongside a traditional elevation of single-authored
papers as the pinnacle of achievement, there was a joke that publications in physics
had author lists that were longer than the actual paper. This is no longer necessarily
the case: see, for example, [18], which has 42 authors.
iiiFurther discussion of the U.K.'s Research Evaluation Framework (REF) as a
distraction, requiring every U.K. academic to write an " impact statement " for each
of their submitted papers, is omitted; but one does have to wonder if the shorttermism
induced by forcing people to work within a five- or six-year event horizon
discourages risk-taking, creativity, exploration and innovation; and to wonder if ever,
in the field of human research, has so much time been wasted by so many people
on anything so utterly pointless. And this includes alchemy.
and " research output. " Research input, in science,
technology, and engineering, usually requires a portfolio
of grants: getting such grants funded requires
writing proposals. As has been discussed, a proposal
entails a scientific research plan and an impact
statement. Allowing for acceptance rates of between
5% and 10%, this means that most of what is proposed
becomes nothing anyway, and half of all that
becomes nothing was pointless, meaningless, and
intrinsically useless (the ideas in the scientific plan
can always be presented as a position paper at a
workshop: if there is any merit to them, the ecosystem
will propagate and develop them anyway).
This is one form of distraction. The other is to overload
the academics with so much supervision of students,
the banality of procedures, and the constant
need to switch contexts that they barely have time to
concentrate on research anyway. In Vonnegut's [20]
dystopian science fiction story Harrison Bergeron, he
describes a world in which people wear earpieces
connected to government transmitters, and the
higher someone's intelligence, the more often piercing
noises are transmitted to the earpieces to prevent
dangerous trains of thought developing. It seems to
be like this for academics: the U.K. University College
Union (UCU) recently reported chronic levels of overwork
which leave staff overwhelmed [21], and this is
before even factoring in the adjustment and readjustment
of working practices to deal with the disruption
caused by its the pandemic and its effects (especially
dealing with long-COVID). For all their much-vaunted
staff well-being programs, staff well-being still seems
to be very low on university priorities. It is often wonderfully
embraced, but seemingly in theory only and
not in praxis: there is much noise and esthetics about
care and concern, but little material progress.
Moreover, this distraction occurs in the context of
a typical squeezed middle. The drive to increase the
numbers of students in tertiary education, which for a
skills- and knowledge-based economy is in principle a
good thing, has resulted in increasing numbers of students;
but some of them, being told to see themselves
as consumers, treat their education as transactional,
instrumental, and credentials. Consumerism creates a
sense of psychological entitlement within our education
spheres: as a result, there is a tendency for students
to think of and treat their teachers in almost the
same way that they would a shop assistant.
Furthermore, the increased number of students
and number of taught courses has not been met with
10
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2022
