I recently read an article written by a political science professor. Professor Liu Jianjun makes a compelling case for his disillusionment with his discipline. Being a former academic myself, I struggled with the same thing before I eventually dropped out. Reading his account, I related to it deeply. I meant to write about my disillusionment when I moved into an industry position, but I just couldn’t bring myself to it. Prof. Liu’s article made me write this post so many years after I left academia.
I was, and to some extent still am, struggling with my perception of failure. My former colleagues tell me it wasn’t a failure, that I could have gotten tenure had I stayed. My publication record also speaks for itself; I know I was guaranteed tenure in my first job. I did publish well and in good places. Yet when I was done with academia, I knew that I didn’t have it in me to publish more. I felt that writing about my gripes — with what I thought science would be, and what I ended up doing instead — would sound too much like whining. Like sour grapes in Aesop’s fable.
A mentor once told me that a good Information Systems (IS) paper published in an A-tier journal needed to have three things: Theory, Data, Methods. It wasn’t enough to execute these with excellence. To merit publication, one needed to innovate as well. This meant that there never was any accumulation of knowledge in my field. The methods constantly shifted, almost like fashion. You never could compare coefficients. No one had time to replicate any hypothesis testing either. You needed a new angle to the theory for every paper. Hence, there wasn’t much theory building either.
So when I read Prof. Liu talking about complicating simple issues to produce theory, I was thrown back to my PhD student days. How I was encouraged to abandon theories that applied to the context directly in favor of expanding theories that were tangentially relevant. Because theories that explain the phenomenon are obvious, there is no theory contribution there.
When I read “countless students tormented by these texts, finishing them only to remain just as confused,” I can see myself in it. Looking back, this confusion went back to my master’s degree. I published my first articles in an A-tier journal out of my master’s thesis. At the time, I felt like the confusion I had was because the educational institutions in my home country were limited. I wanted to do world-class research. I went looking for it, and into a school that was rated in the top 10 of the Financial Times list.
My confusion only grew as I progressed through years in the PhD program. On the one hand, I was learning the trade of publication from the most well-published scholars in my field. On the other hand, what we did conflicted with what I learned about scientific method. I remember making a presentation about Feynman’s “Cargo Cult Science” to our theory class. My physics envy grew with my confusion.
Towards the end of my academic career I was getting burned out. No matter what analysis I conducted, I did not believe my own results. The more I worked on the theoretical foundations, the less convinced of my hypotheses I grew. Prof. Liu writes: “the more I read, the more confused I am, the more hollow I feel, the more ignorant I become, and the less interesting it all appears.” I felt like there was a base truth out there, a truth I was interested in talking about, before I complicated it to the degree it became publishable in a journal. At that point, I was alienated from anything I was interested in. I knew there was a way to get to that truth, but it just would not be worth doing because it would never be published anywhere.
Around that same time, I published in a practitioner journal. I felt weirdly liberated doing this meaningless activity. I felt like I was finally allowed to speak the truth without making it incomprehensible. By then, I knew I didn’t want to do “research” anymore.
My disillusionment with science was most distressing to myself. I am proud to think I am a progressive who embraces Enlightenment values. I would like public policy to follow science. My political identity is shaped by this belief… What now? “nothing is true, everything is permitted”?
I think we can hold our horses on nihilism for a bit longer; there is utilitarian value in research and science. I know first-hand that there is truth to be found outside. I experienced this when I was attached as a data scientist to an R&D team in chemical manufacturing. There was so little debate. What you did worked or not. Research either resulted in a working process, or not. It was refreshingly uncomplicated compared to my research career. We worked together to achieve some goal that could ultimately be measured as dollars/efficiency/cost reduction.
I believe some research still retains value, and science is valuable. I think the problem is the industrial scale of modern-day academia. There are material incentives tied to publishing research. “Publish or perish” has an outcome that is not caught in that simple dictum: “Publish, and perish the science you were conducting.” Pushing every professor to be a researcher has created a class of researchers who are detached from the discipline they are studying. You get IS professors who never worked in IT, studying technologies they can’t fully understand. My favorite example was the PhD student studying the social implications of quantum computing (six years on, we still don’t have a working quantum computer, but that kid was doing a PhD on it in an institution with no prior experience with quantum computing).
Not every discipline needs to be a scientific discipline. Engineering is applied science. Engineering publications are measured by their utility; there is little dispute on the value of the outcome. It works or not. Business school is also an applied discipline; we are not conducting pure research of the kind some natural scientists engage in. Pretending otherwise only turns our discipline into a cargo cult. I think the best scholarship in our fields already knew this. Harvard, a force in its own right, focuses on case studies. They publish those cases in HBR and don’t give a damn about advanced statistical models when they do. The value of the case is very practical as well; there isn’t room for academic posturing. Perhaps the way forward is to act with more humility and retreat from these ivory towers we imprisoned ourselves in.
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