Epic poets adopting, stitching, recycling, riffing, borrowing from other sources is appropriate for the medium of and vocation of poetry. It's appropriate for an oral tradition in oral societies.
Universities are not institutions of oral societies. The scientific method is not an institution of oral societies. Reproducibility and falsification of claims would not be possible.
The idea that a research university president should be held to the standards of ancient poets rather than the standards of a research university is silly. Citation of the provenance of one's claims, ideas, facts, data, and methods is central to what makes a university and university and what makes the production of knowledge using the scientific method a success.
If Dr Gay wishes to take the works of others, remix them, put her own spin on their work, integrate them into her framework, then she should go into the arts and become a poet or lyricist.
Different fields have different concepts of what kinds of things should be attributed and how. In some disciplines it's the new scholarship that matters while a "current state of the field review" section isn't considered "work" that gets footnoted.
Personally I think the real shift is that novelty is now presumed to be monetizable and there for must be monetizable -- either directly (sell recordings of songs) or indirectly (get tenure, and thus a paycheck). And then once that's the case, people kind of assume that it happens, so a scientist studying insect embryology may not get paid much either (or both) because it's not considered "worthwhile" ("who'd pay for that? Invent a new semiconductor!") or because the institution thinks all the professors are also getting money from their ideas.
Coming from an open source background (and as someone who has refused to get patents) this all sounds super bizarre to me.
> If Dr Gay wishes to take the works of others, remix them, put her own spin on their work, integrate them into her framework
Without knowing anything about what Dr Gay did exactly, scientists do this all the time. Almost every single survey paper does this. Plenty of non-survey papers do this. Only requirement is you rephrase the words in the original paper slightly.
I think he could be arguing that universities should stop trying to be research universities using the scientific method, because they've shown that they can't actually do it, and recategorize themselves as something different. But of course no university would be able to make money by doing that, because it would destroy their branding.
Hmm. It seems to me that "scientific" is losing some of the cachet it once had. Universities may eventually need to rebrand, or face a loss of relevance.
That's a dangerous business, with high odds of loss of mindshare, but if I'm right, doing nothing leads to the inevitable loss of mindshare. But they'll probably still choose to do nothing, because that loss of mindshare happens more slowly.
> It seems to me that "scientific" is losing some of the cachet it once had.
I would say that term is being used to label things that it shouldn't be used to label. We still have scientific models that have very accurate predictive power. But many things that are labeled as "scientific" aren't in that category.
I think that's right. "Scientific" has prestige, so people who want prestige label stuff as "scientific", even though it doesn't fit. As a result, "scientific" starts losing prestige because the label is applied to all this stuff, much of it bogus.
"People have a weird habit of acting as if the university is an institution of the Enlightenment, dedicated to the free enquiry of the individual intellect. It’s not! The university, alongside the capitalist mode of production, is one of the only major institutions that come to us out of the Middle Ages. It belongs to the age of repetition: the era of Dede Korkut."
The fact that some universities, such as Oxford, were founded in the Middle Ages does not mean that universities, today, as institutions, should be judged by the standards of the Middle Ages. Universities claim to be institutions of the Enlightenment (and Harvard was not founded in the Middle Ages anyway). They should be held to the standards they claim to be following.
Universities of today have very little relation to the universities of the Middle Ages, other than occupying the same real estate and using the same name.
This is precisely the category error the author is making: because the Middle Ages were an era of epic poetry, therefore all the descendant institutions from the Middle Ages belong to the methods/standards of epic poetry. It's nonsense on stilts.
Forcing Pindar's odes, Homer's epics, Njal's Saga, Dede Korkut, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Arthurian legends to follow the rules of the scientific method, and citation, and falsifiability, and judging them as stylistically and culturally deficient because they didn't sufficiently cite their influences would be bonkers. They would be ruined as pieces of art.
The reverse—allowing an R1 university to produce scientific knowledge using the rules of High Middle Ages poetry—is similarly ludicrous and ruinous.
Epic poets adopting, stitching, recycling, riffing, borrowing from other sources is appropriate for the medium of and vocation of poetry. It's appropriate for an oral tradition in oral societies.
Universities are not institutions of oral societies. The scientific method is not an institution of oral societies. Reproducibility and falsification of claims would not be possible.
The idea that a research university president should be held to the standards of ancient poets rather than the standards of a research university is silly. Citation of the provenance of one's claims, ideas, facts, data, and methods is central to what makes a university and university and what makes the production of knowledge using the scientific method a success.
If Dr Gay wishes to take the works of others, remix them, put her own spin on their work, integrate them into her framework, then she should go into the arts and become a poet or lyricist.