Commentary: Too many authors, too few creators

[from Physics Today, April 2012]

Commentary: Too many authors, too few creators

Philip J. Wyatt
Wyatt Technology Corporation, Santa Barbara, California

A few years ago, Robert Fefferman, dean of physical sciences at the University of Chicago, made an interesting remark. He mentioned that Enrico Fermi, wanting to encourage individual creativity and innovation, required his PhD students to select their problem, solve it, and submit the results for publication in their name alone. Fermi also was aware that a multiauthor paper with one famous author might receive automatic acceptance rather than a thoughtful and thorough review. Many PhD students then and since have published their theses under joint authorship with their advisers. Unfortunately, the need among grant-seeking academics to publish and be cited often grew stronger, especially during federal funding cutbacks, the most recent example being the cuts in science budgets under President George W. Bush. When applying for government grants, an applicant team’s record of many cited publications was important to confirm that the submitted proposal had significant cachet for continuing support. A vicious cycle began.

Over the years, publication lists were increasing. Some colleagues boasted more than 300 publications and one close to 800! The number of authors associated with each published article was also increasing; single-author papers had become relatively rare. Were Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and other great scientists just lucky in finding simple ideas that one mind could understand and present? Or was technological creativity becoming so difficult that great teams of scientists were required to recognize and develop it?

Seeking answers, I made a cursory examination of some publication records of the last half century. I selected the eight publications listed in the table to the right and selected the first issue of each from January 1965 and from January 2011. To compare innovation over time, I included data on the first 100 patents issued to US applicants by the US Patent and Trademark Office during the corresponding periods. The data were gleaned from the office’s weekly Official Gazette.

The results seem truly astonishing. Although the data sets selected are relatively small, they show the downward trend of individual creativity. Most of the papers studied were written by authors in, or associated with, academia. A few came from government laboratories and some from industry.

[...]

continue reading at Physics Today

Prekäre Arbeitsverhältnisse: Max Planck setzt auf Billigforscher

[from taz.de 23.05.20121]

Max Planck setzt auf Billigforscher

Auch gestandene Wissenschaftler bekommen bei Max-Planck-Instituten keine Arbeitsverträge. Das zeigt eine Antwort der Bundesregierung auf eine Anfrage der Linkspartei.

von Anna Lehmann

BERLIN taz | Dass Doktoranden der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft gegen prekäre Arbeitsverhältnisse mobilmachen, ist ziemlich einmalig. Schließlich versteht sich die von Bund und Ländern finanzierte Gesellschaft als eine der führenden deutschen Forschungsinstitutionen. Hier zu arbeiten fördert Ruf und Karriere. Doch nun zeigt eine aktuelle Anfrage der Linkspartei: das Stipendienunwesen betrifft längst auch promovierte Wissenschaftler.

Rund 1.350 Postdoktoranden an den 80 Max-Planck-Instituten werden derzeit aus Stipendien finanziert, so die Antwort des Bundeswissenschaftsministeriums, die der taz vorliegt. Sie bekommen also einen monatlichen Grundbetrag von bis zu 1.621 Euro plus Zuschlägen und müssen sich davon freiwillig gegen Krankheit, Alter und Arbeitslosigkeit versichern.

„Dass der Trend auch bei Promovierten zu Stipendien geht, wirft ein bezeichnendes Licht auf die überkommenen Personalstrukturen in der deutschen Wissenschaftslandschaft“, meint die forschungspolitische Sprecherin der Linken, Petra Sitte. In Deutschland würden selbst 45-jährige Habilitierte noch als „Nachwuchs“ bezeichnet.

Die Sprecherin der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Christina Beck, sagte der taz, die Bezahlung der Postdocs sei innerhalb der Gesellschaft bisher kein Thema: „Der weitaus größte Teil der Stipendiaten sind EU-Ausländer. Die Frage der Sozialversicherung stellt sich für diese Gruppe nicht, da sie Deutschland sowieso wieder verlassen.“ Laut Statistik kommen 1.223 der über Stipendien finanzierten Postdocs aus dem Ausland, 126 sind Deutsche.

[...]

continue at taz.de

Don’t Become a Scientist!

[from: http://wuphys.wustl.edu/~katz/scientist.html]

Don’t Become a Scientist!

Jonathan I. Katz
Professor of Physics
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo.
[my last name]@wuphys.wustl.edu

Are you thinking of becoming a scientist? Do you want to uncover the mysteries of nature, perform experiments or carry out calculations to learn how the world works? Forget it!

Science is fun and exciting. The thrill of discovery is unique. If you are smart, ambitious and hard working you should major in science as an undergraduate. But that is as far as you should take it. After graduation, you will have to deal with the real world. That means that you should not even consider going to graduate school in science. Do something else instead: medical school, law school, computers or engineering, or something else which appeals to you.

Why am I (a tenured professor of physics) trying to discourage you from following a career path which was successful for me? Because times have changed (I received my Ph.D. in 1973, and tenure in 1976). American science no longer offers a reasonable career path. If you go to graduate school in science it is in the expectation of spending your working life doing scientific research, using your ingenuity and curiosity to solve important and interesting problems. You will almost certainly be disappointed, probably when it is too late to choose another career.

American universities train roughly twice as many Ph.D.s as there are jobs for them. When something, or someone, is a glut on the market, the price drops. In the case of Ph.D. scientists, the reduction in price takes the form of many years spent in “holding pattern” postdoctoral jobs. Permanent jobs don’t pay much less than they used to, but instead of obtaining a real job two years after the Ph.D. (as was typical 25 years ago) most young scientists spend five, ten, or more years as postdocs. They have no prospect of permanent employment and often must obtain a new postdoctoral position and move every two years. For many more details consult the Young Scientists’ Network or read the account in the May, 2001 issue of the Washington Monthly.

As examples, consider two of the leading candidates for a recent Assistant Professorship in my department. One was 37, ten years out of graduate school (he didn’t get the job). The leading candidate, whom everyone thinks is brilliant, was 35, seven years out of graduate school. Only then was he offered his first permanent job (that’s not tenure, just the possibility of it six years later, and a step off the treadmill of looking for a new job every two years). The latest example is a 39 year old candidate for another Assistant Professorship; he has published 35 papers. In contrast, a doctor typically enters private practice at 29, a lawyer at 25 and makes partner at 31, and a computer scientist with a Ph.D. has a very good job at 27 (computer science and engineering are the few fields in which industrial demand makes it sensible to get a Ph.D.). Anyone with the intelligence, ambition and willingness to work hard to succeed in science can also succeed in any of these other professions.

Typical postdoctoral salaries begin at $27,000 annually in the biological sciences and about $35,000 in the physical sciences (graduate student stipends are less than half these figures). Can you support a family on that income? It suffices for a young couple in a small apartment, though I know of one physicist whose wife left him because she was tired of repeatedly moving with little prospect of settling down. When you are in your thirties you will need more: a house in a good school district and all the other necessities of ordinary middle class life. Science is a profession, not a religious vocation, and does not justify an oath of poverty or celibacy.

Of course, you don’t go into science to get rich. So you choose not to go to medical or law school, even though a doctor or lawyer typically earns two to three times as much as a scientist (one lucky enough to have a good senior-level job). I made that choice too. I became a scientist in order to have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won’t get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else’s ideas, and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independent collaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientific job market first? The longer you spend in science the harder you will find it to leave, and the less attractive you will be to prospective employers in other fields.

Perhaps you are so talented that you can beat the postdoc trap; some university (there are hardly any industrial jobs in the physical sciences) will be so impressed with you that you will be hired into a tenure track position two years out of graduate school. Maybe. But the general cheapening of scientific labor means that even the most talented stay on the postdoctoral treadmill for a very long time; consider the job candidates described above. And many who appear to be very talented, with grades and recommendations to match, later find that the competition of research is more difficult, or at least different, and that they must struggle with the rest.

Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. They’re not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all.

What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career. This will spare you the misery of disappointed expectations. Young Americans have generally woken up to the bad prospects and absence of a reasonable middle class career path in science and are deserting it. If you haven’t yet, then join them. Leave graduate school to people from India and China, for whom the prospects at home are even worse. I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.

If you are in a position of leadership in science then you should try to persuade the funding agencies to train fewer Ph.D.s. The glut of scientists is entirely the consequence of funding policies (almost all graduate education is paid for by federal grants). The funding agencies are bemoaning the scarcity of young people interested in science when they themselves caused this scarcity by destroying science as a career. They could reverse this situation by matching the number trained to the demand, but they refuse to do so, or even to discuss the problem seriously (for many years the NSF propagated a dishonest prediction of a coming shortage of scientists, and most funding agencies still act as if this were true). The result is that the best young people, who should go into science, sensibly refuse to do so, and the graduate schools are filled with weak American students and with foreigners lured by the American student visa.

TU Munich cancels subscriptions to Elsevier journals

[from: http://www.ma.tum.de/Mathematik/BibliothekElsevier]

Elsevier-Zeitschriften, 2.5.2012

Aufgrund unzumutbarer Kosten und Bezugsbedingungen hat das Direktorium des Zentrums Mathematik beschlossen, alle abonnierten Elsevier-Zeitschriften ab 2013 abzubestellen.

Because of unsustainable subscription prices and conditions, the board of directors of the mathematics department has voted to cancel all of its subscriptions to Elsevier journals by 2013.

Harvard Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing

[from Harvard Library News]
Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained

To: Faculty Members in all Schools, Faculties, and Units
From: The Faculty Advisory Council
Date: April 17, 2012
RE: Periodical Subscriptions

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles.

The Library has never received anything close to full reimbursement for these expenditures from overhead collected by the University on grant and research funds.

The Faculty Advisory Council to the Library, representing university faculty in all schools and in consultation with the Harvard Library leadership,  reached this conclusion: major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable. Doing so would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.

It is untenable for contracts with at least two major providers to continue on the basis identical with past agreements. Costs are now prohibitive. Moreover, some providers bundle many journals as one subscription, with major, high-use journals bundled in with journals consulted far less frequently. Since the Library now must change its subscriptions and since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider the following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and communicate your views:

1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F).

2. Consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F).

3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning (F).

4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues (F).

5. Encourage professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations (F).

6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options (F).

7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals (L).

8. Move journals to a sustainable pay per use system, (L).

9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public (L).

See coverage:
Chronicle of Higher Education
Inside Higher Education
The Atlantic

Scholarships are also a sign of quality

[from http://www.mpg.de/5724370/scholarships and http://www.mpg.de/5723126/Promotionsstipendien]

Peter Gruss, President of the Max Planck Society, on PhD scholarships:

Scholarships are also a sign of quality

What is a doctoral thesis all about?

April 20, 2011

“Obtaining a doctoral degree is a confirmation of the intellect”, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg once wrote, capturing the essence of a PhD: a doctoral thesis is something you spend years working on, deeply immersed in “your” subject, which requires you to muster a great deal of motivation and develop a lot of intellectual creativity; it also teaches you the fundamentals of scientific working. A PhD is rightly considered the most authentic of all academic qualifications. As you embark on a PhD, you are still anything but a “proper” scientist; it’s during the process itself that you become a “proper” scientist. In this sense, a PhD is “an apprenticeship in the lab”, and as such it is usually not paid like a “proper” job – and this is, by and large, the practice at all research institutions and universities.

There is no denying that only some doctoral students enjoy the benefit of a contract to fund their studies and others do their doctoral degree on a scholarship. The pressure of internationalisation has changed the PhD system in Germany in many respects in recent years. For instance, the number of students from other countries doing their PhD in Germany has doubled over the past ten years. Of the 5,300 doctoral students at Max Planck Institutes, half are from abroad. Scholarships are nothing unusual for the foreign PhD students – even at the elite institutions of the US and UK, such as Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge and Oxford, young scientists generally do not do their PhD while in receipt of a full-time salary; they do it on a scholarship or a grant, with which they have to pay their tuition fees too (there are no tuition fees in Germany). The scholarships and grants made available under PhD programs are awarded in a strict selection process.

And the same is true for the 4,000 doctoral students each year in Germany who receive a scholarship from one of the twelve organisations for the promotion of young talent. What these organisations look for are not only “bright minds” who have performed exceptionally well at school and university, they also look for social engagement. Less than 20 per cent of applicants make it into the sponsorship programs. They are each rightly proud of their scholarship, given that it singles them out as highly-motivated, qualified and socially involved in areas outside their own field of study. In this respect, the accusation that the world of PhD funding is a “two-tier society” is simply off the mark – Germany’s entire system of sponsorship for the intellectually gifted is based on scholarships!

Of the 3,300 doctoral students at the Max Planck Society who are in receipt of a scholarship, 2,200 of them receive a Max Planck scholarship and the remaining third receive their scholarships from one of the organisations for the promotion of young talent, or from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, DAAD, the EU (Marie Curie Fellowship), etc. The scholarship allowances differ only marginally: they are all between 1,000 and 1,365 euros plus benefits. In other words, scholarships are the instruments of choice in scientific funding – not only nationally, but also internationally; doing away with them would be absolutely absurd and would damage the whole system of young scientist sponsorship.

The PhDnet, which represents the interests of doctoral students in the Max Planck Society, has in recent years predominantly campaigned for doctoral students at the Max Planck Institutes to receive similar levels of net income regardless of financing model. In negotiations with its funding providers, the Max Planck Society has therefore campaigned to increase its scholarship rates by being allowed to add health insurance benefits, an attractive child allowance and additional financial contributions for families. That we managed to achieve these improvements is also regarded as a success by our scholarship holders.

Many of our foreign doctoral students consider a scholarship from the Max Planck Society a special distinction that enables them to work on their dissertation freely and independently in an internationally stimulating research environment. Our young scientists come to us from 100 different countries around the globe, attracted by the renown of the Max Planck Society and the outstanding working conditions they find in our Institutes. They have the opportunity to complete a crucial stage of their career in a creative world in which the interdisciplinary and intercultural views and mindsets of bright minds really have an effect.

And that brings us back to the very essence of PhDs: the intensive support of young scientists is above all intellectual and not financial in nature. More than ten years ago, the Max Planck Society, in cooperation with the universities, got a successful model of internationally-oriented graduate education off the ground in Germany in the form of the International Max Planck Research Schools: in addition to the Max Planck Institutes and the German partner universities, foreign universities and research institutions also contribute to the study programs. The doctoral students value the very good support they receive, as well as the training in soft skills. After all – and this is something we must recognise – only some of them will stay in academia. That’s no bad thing: the most successful form of knowledge transfer is the training of outstandingly qualified young people who can go on to play leading roles not just in science, but in business and society too.

‘Predatory’ Online Journals Lure Scholars Who Are Eager to Publish

An article by Michael Stanford in The Chronicle of Higher Education on questionable Open Access publishers like OMICS, who has become infamous for how it recruits editorial board members.

Such abuse is becoming more prevalent, Mr. Beall said. On his blog Scholarly Open Access, he keeps a running list of what he calls “predatory” open-access publishers. Mr. Beall said he uncovers one new predatory journal or publishing company about every week, and his list now totals more than 50 publishers and individual journals.

Mr. Beall defines a “predatory” publisher as one whose main goal is to generate profits rather than promote academic scholarship. Such publishers, he said, “add little value to scholarship, pay little attention to digital preservation, and operate using fly-by-night, unsustainable business models.”

OMICS has earned Beall’s “predatory” distinction, along with other open-access publishers like Insight Knowledge, Knowledgia Scientific, and InTech. Also on the list is Bentham Open, which attracted attention in 2009 when it accepted for publication a nonsensical article that had been written by a computer program and submitted by a graduate student who questioned the journal’s claims of peer review.

The Cost of Knowledge: Elsevier drops support for the Research Works Act

The media echo of protesting researchers (“Cost of Knowledge”) eventually led to a phenomenal success: after Elsevier dropped its support for the Research Works Act, the bill’s co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives declared the legislation dead.

Academic publishers have become the enemies of science

A good summary of the debate and possible implications of the new US Research Works Act (RWA) by guest author Mike Taylor was published in The Guardian, 2012-01-16.

I also liked a comment suggesting to “send off your work to a presitgious, peer-review journal which has paywalls. Have your article peer-reviewed and accepted for publication. Withdraw it from the journal, and post it online yourself along with the acceptance letter. That way you get free dissemination of your work along with a rubber-stamp saying it has been peer-reviewed.”

—————-

Academic publishers have become the enemies of science

The US Research Works Act would allow publishers to line their pockets by locking publicly funded research behind paywalls

This is the moment academic publishers gave up all pretence of being on the side of scientists. Their rhetoric has traditionally been of partnering with scientists, but the truth is that for some time now scientific publishers have been anti-science and anti-publication. The Research Works Act, introduced in the US Congress on 16 December, amounts to a declaration of war by the publishers.

The USA’s main funding agency for health-related research is the National Institutes of Health, with a $30bn annual budget. The NIH has a public access policy that says taxpayer-funded research must be freely accessible online. This means that members of the public, having paid once to have the research done, don’t have to pay for it again when they read it – a wholly reasonable policy, and one with enormous humanitarian implications because it means the results of medical research are made freely available around the world.

A similar policy is now being adopted in the UK. On page 76 of the policy document Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth the government states that it is “committed to ensuring that publicly funded research should be accessible free of charge”. All of this is great for the progress of science, which has always been based on the free flow of ideas, the sharing of data, and standing on the shoulders of giants.

But what’s good for science isn’t necessarily good for science publishers, whose interests have drifted far out of alignment with ours. Under the old model, publishers become the owners of the papers they publish, holding the copyright and selling copies around the world – a useful service in pre-internet days. But now that it’s a trivial undertaking to make a paper globally available, there is no reason why scientists need yield copyright to publishers.

[...] view full text at The Guardian

If passed, the Research Works Act (RWA) would prohibit the NIH’s public access policy and anything similar enacted by other federal agencies, locking publicly funded research behind paywalls. The result would be an ethical disaster: preventable deaths in developing countries, and an incalculable loss for science in the USA and worldwide. The only winners would be publishing corporations such as Elsevier (£724m profits on revenues of £2b in 2010 – an astounding 36% of revenue taken as profit).

Since Elsevier’s obscene additional profits would be drained from America to the company’s base in the Netherlands if this bill were enacted, what kind of American politician would support it? The RWA is co-sponsored by Darrell Issa (Republican, California) and Carolyn B. Maloney (Democrat, New York). In the 2012 election cycle, Elsevier and its senior executives made 31 donations to representatives: of these, two went to Issa and 12 to Maloney, including the largest individual contribution.

[...] view full text at The Guardian

The bottom line for scientists is that many publishers have now made themselves our enemies instead of the allies they once were. Elsevier’s business does not make money by publishing our work, but by doing the exact opposite: restricting access to it. We must not be complicit in their newest attempt to cripple the progress of science.

Dr Mike Taylor is a research associate at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol

 

 

Doktor Wenn und Doktor Aber

Ein scharfsinniger Essay zur universitären Welt, in der das Prinzip Guttenberg systemimmanent geworden ist, in der “inzwischen 98 bis 99 prozent allerakadmischen Textproduktion in der [...] Erwartung des parteillen oder völligen Nichtlesens verfasst werden.”

[aus: Der Spiegel, 49/2011]

Doktor Wenn und Doktor Aber

Die Figur des Hochstaplers gehört ins Zentrum der modernen Kultur. Von Peter Sloterdijk

Man darf unterstellen, Thomas Mann hätte sich im Stillen ganz außerordentlich über die Affäre erheitert, die im Februar 2011 die Bundesrepublik erschütterte, als man einem damaligen deutschen Minister, einem gewissen Herrn zu Guttenberg, eine beeindruckende Fülle von unmarkierten Übernahmen langer und kurzer fremder Textstücke in seiner Dissertation zu einem verfassungsrechtlichen Gegenstand nachwies. Er hätte sich sicher fürstlich amüsiert bei dem Gedanken, dass ein Mann mit einem so gutentwickelten Krull-Faktor es bis an die Spitze des Verteidigungsministeriums eines mächtigen Landes bringen konnte; eines Landes, dessen Armee noch ein gutes halbes Jahrhundert zuvor die Welt in Furcht und Schrecken versetzt hatte. Ja, der aktuelle Krull war gerade rechtzeitig ins Amt gekommen, um in Übereinstimmung mit der außenpolitischen Lage der Nation die Truppen zu verkleinern und um im Einklang mit dem Geist der Zeit auch für Soldaten im Kampfeinsatz den fälligen Übergang zu postheroischen Orientierungen zu vollziehen.

[...]  Volltext: Der Spiegel, 49/2011

Man müsste sehr naiv sein, wollte man annehmen, dass die Studierenden und Lehrenden von heute beim Betreten einer Universität aufhörten, Kinder ihrer Zeit zu sein — und die Zeit weist alle Merkmale eines Trainingslagers für krullsche Subjektivitäten auf. Der akademische Raum kann sich hiergegen nicht einfach immunisieren. Es gehört zu den Feinheiten der deutschen Hochschulsprache, dass sie das Ansammeln von beglaubigten Leistungen im Lauf eines Studiums geradeheraus als Scheinerwerb bezeichnet — was insofern als terminologisch wertvoller Hinweis zu würdigen ist, als zwischen einer authentischen Kompetenz, was immer das sein mag, und einer umfassenden Simulation derselben Kompetenz kein essentieller Unterschied nachzuweisen ist. Man könnte dies an einigen bekannten Beispielen von falschen Ärzten illustrieren, die jahrelang täglich mit gutem Erfolg schwierigste Operationen durchführten, bis sich eines Tages herausstellte, dass sie hierzu nicht qualifiziert waren.

Um die spezifische Differenz des akademischen Plagiats von allen sonstigen Fällen der Missachtung “geistigen Eigentums” zu erfassen, muss man die unverwechselbare Eigenart der akademischen Prozeduren in den Blick nehmen. In äußerer Sicht erscheint die universitäre Welt als ein Biotop, das auf die Hervorbringung von zumeist bizarren und durchweg unpopulären “Textsorten” spezialisiert ist. Die reichen von Seminarreferaten und Semesterarbeiten über Diplomarbeiten, Magisterarbeiten und Examensarbeiten bis hin zu Dissertationen und Habilitationsschriften, um von den Gutachten, den Forschungsanträgen, den Memoranden, den Struktur- und Entwicklungsplänen und dergleichen nicht zu reden: allesamt textuelle Gewächse, die ausschließlich im Binnenklima der Akademia gedeihen — hochalpinen Kriechpflanzen vergleichbar, die jenseits der Baumgrenze überleben und die in der Regel einer Umpflanzung ins publizistische Flach- und Freiland nicht fähig sind. Die Gesamtleistung der akademischen Schriftsachenproduktion besitzt einen schlechterdings unfassbaren Umfang, sie hat geradewegs Tsunami-Charakter — um die zurzeit plausibelste Massenmetapher zu benutzen. Mit ihrem jährlichen Output von Milliarden und Abermilliarden bedruckter Seiten stellt sie einen paradoxen Tsunami vor, der keine sichtbare Küste überschwemmt, sondern ausschließlich im Inneren der intellektuellen Institution tobt, von der Mitwelt so gut wie unbemerkt.