De Honoris Numquam Satis: Reflections on Snobbery in Academia

Tags: academia, musings

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One of my more endearing characteristics—or so I like to believe—is my naïveté in the face of academic reality. It is probably amusing to those who know me personally to see how I just do not ‘grok’ certain things, making me either bewildered, angry, sad, or a linear combination thereof. One of the many, many, many things that fall into this category is the tendency of some academics to, in their hunger for more honour and prestige, make devilish compromises.

Let me explain! As you might know, everyone tries to measure academic output by ludicrous indices. While this is mostly nothing but modern haruspicy, combined with a thin veneer of plausibility, some universities and stakeholders dig this stuff and lap it right up. Every year, academia goes crazy while companies like Clarivate emerge from their lairs and announce what they read in this year’s entrails. You then get the dubious honour of appearing on lists like the one of highly-cited researchers, a list that does not even include mathematics or machine learning. I guess those fields were not deemed to be scientific enough—but I digress. Suffice it to say, everyone loves to count citations as the measure of success, culminating in absurd indices like the h-index, of which much has been written elsewhere, and so I shall not start another rant on my own. The two things for you, dear reader, to understand about the h-index are, to wit:

1. Larger h-indices are obviously directly equivalent to your worth as a researcher, and, by extension, your value as a human being.¹
2. The h-index is a function of your publications; you need $k$ publications with at least $k$ citations to have an h-index of $k$.

This leads the more, shall we say, incentive-driven senior academics to adopt an interesting strategy: They will force their junior researchers to put them on any and all papers possible. Let us take another brief explanatory digression here: Science is foremost a conversation about potential facts. To participate in this conversations, budding scientists are expected to publish. Each publication has an author list, and, depending on your field, the author list conveys additional information about the relevance of each individual author. For instance, in computer science, it is typically the first author(s) who are more junior and did most of the experiments or implementations, while the last author(s) are typically acting in a more supervisory capacity. As someone who is now in the position of such a senior author, I can spill the beans and mention that when I am the last author, I typically focus most of my energies in the project on discussing ideas with students, co-writing the paper with them, critiquing their drafts or code, as opposed to coding large parts by myself. This is because I believe that Ph.D. students should be considered apprentices who are supposed to excel in their craft, meaning that supervisors need to guide them, but not leave them to their own devices.

With the view of an apprenticeship in mind, it becomes abundantly clear to me that, if a student has their own project cooking in which I am not involved, said student can do publish their results without me. Or, in other words, while I believe my very presence in the lab to be a balm for anyone’s soul, and an inspiring presence to boot,² capable of lifting the spirits of everyone and getting them unstuck, even my ego knows its bounds. Essentially, since I picked excellent people to work with me, I should not be surprised when they come up with great ideas on their own and run with them. Hence, my dictum: As much as I would like it to be true, my inspiring presence does not entitle me to authorship.³

Imagine my astonishment when I learned that some outwardly accomplished academics force their way on the author lists, in a transparent ploy to increase their h-index but also to increase their prestige. Taken to the very extreme—and it often is by some people—this results in some academics ‘publishing’⁴ more than one paper per week. All so that they can say, presumably while pointing towards their Google Scholar page, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ Alas, they might not know the end of Ozymandias, but what is even more baffling to me is that such ‘honours’ must feel hollow, no?

I honestly do not know and understand it, and can only draw upon my native language of German, which of course has a word for this general class of behaviour, namely Standesdünkel. Some dictionaries want you to believe that it is professional snobbery, but it is actually so much more, going back to a time when nobility was everything, and commoners were nothing. In my mind, I hear professional Standesdünkel when professors, like the lords and ladies of yore, automatically consider authorship as a type of sinecure or tithes. Moral considerations notwithstanding, at which point would the folks that are doing this shake their heads and say ‘Enough is enough, maybe from now on, I will just be on papers that I actually contributed something to’? Because, make no mistake, this Standesdünkel is hurting younger academics. It is hurting the Ph.D. student who has a great idea on their own and pursues it, maybe even in their scarce free time. It is hurting the postdoctoral researcher who leads a small team of students into a new direction, without getting any input from the professor. It is even hurting younger faculty members who need to put the éminence grise on everyone of their papers, just to be then told in an evaluation that ‘Their research is not sufficiently different from the research directions of their advisers.’

So again, why behave like that? Does this honour not taste hollow? If you have reached a triple-digit h-index and a triple-digit publication list, is it not time to do without tithes?

As you can imagine, I have no answers to these questions. I just wonder where it would stop—would some senior folks believe to be entitled to authorship because they looked at a Ph.D. student once? When does the entitlement end?

In all honesty, I also have my issues with academic prestige and academic honours,⁵ but I am not willing to deviate from my principles for what I conceive to be, ultimately, a hollow win at best. Moreover, I do not believe you can ‘win’ academia. It is, for all intents and purposes, an infinite game, so the best you can hope for is that you get to keep playing.

Happy playing, until next times!