Showing posts with label Irish academia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Irish academia. Show all posts

Saturday, March 21, 2015

21/3/15: Irish patents filings Q4 2014


Latest data on Irish patents, courtesy of NewMorningIP.com: chart below shows a decline in total patents filings in Q4 2014 compared to Q3 2014 with Q4 2014 patents counts at 699 down from Q3 2014 count of 786. Of these, Irish invention patents were down to 321 in Q4 2014 from 331 in Q3 2014, but up on 236 a year ago. In Q4 2014, Irish inventors accounted for 45.9% of total Irish patents filed, with Irish enterprises and individuals filing only 247 patents - the lowest for any quarter since Q1 2014, but ahead of the disastrously poor performance in Q4 2013 (188 Irish enterprises & individuals patents). Irish academia produced 74 patents in Q4 2014, the highest reading since Q3 2013, but still accounting for only 10.6% of total patents filed in Ireland.

Chart to illustrate:

Thursday, August 21, 2014

21/8/2014: Shanghai Academic Rankings 2014: Ireland


Earlier this week, I promised to update historical track record of Irish Universities performance in Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities. The latest (2014) results are here: http://www.shanghairanking.com/ARWU2014.html

Summary of all Irish Universities rankings by 'neighbourhood':

Top-ranked TCD:

Second best-ranked UCD:

Third best-ranked UCC:

Historical evolution of Irish rankings:

Draw your own conclusions...

Friday, January 31, 2014

31/1/2014: Economics Teaching in Ireland


A very interesting research via @stephenkinsella and @brianmlucey on what is going on in Irish economics: teaching and research-wise... http://brianmlucey.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/what-do-irish-economists-think-and-teach/

Caveat - low response rate to the survey can be taken as a warning to conclusions, but also a reminder of just how detached Irish economics profession might be.

Basic conclusions: economics is a stand-alone science which should not be polluted by applications to the 'real world' which is highly imperfect, but does correspond rather well to orthodox economic models. If only the Government gave more money to economics researchers, the world can be made a better place, despite the fact that very few researchers seem to teach in the areas in which they research... Oh, and final point: leave us (economists) alone, you pesky little people...

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Economics 6/11/10: Is Modern Academia Failing?

A very interesting paper titled "Withering Academia?" by Bruno S. Frey was published by CESIFO Working Paper 3209, October 2010 (download here).

From the abstract: "Strong forces lead to a withering of academia as it exists today. The major causal forces are:
  • the rankings mania,
  • increased division of labor in research,
  • intense publication pressure,
  • academic fraud,
  • dilution of the concept of “university,” and
  • inadequate organizational forms for modern research.
Academia, in a broader sense understood as “the locus of seeking truth and learning through methodological inquiry,” will subsist in different forms. The conclusion is therefore pessimistic with respect to the academic system as it presently exists but not to scholarly endeavour as such. However, the transformation predicted is expected to be fundamental."

This some pretty strong stuff.

"Today, in many disciplines, the importance of a scientific idea and the position of a scholar are defined by rankings. What matters nowadays is the recognition produced by a general rankings system, normally based only on the quantity of scientific output, irrespective of quality. If quality is considered, this is done by counting the number of citations. Rankings provide simple measures of relative position in science... Dependence on rankings has been substituted for consideration of content."

"The scientific production process has increasingly been divided into neatly separated steps. ...The division of labor has led to a more efficient and rapid output of scientific results but favors partial views and discourages comprehensive considerations." Interestingly, Frey refers here to the tendency to co-author papers, not to the more worrying (from my point of view) reduction in researchers' ability to think across disciplines and deeper into broader subjects.

"The incentives to publish are not necessarily the ideal ones to gain valuable new knowledge." The need to publish as much and as well as possible may influence the choice of:
  • Subjects studied
  • Methods used
  • Type of collaboration
  • Presentation of the results
  • "Extent scholars are ready to engage in “academic prostitution,” that is, to revise their paper according to the “suggestions” of the referees even if they know that they are questionable or even plainly wrong (see Frey 2003)."
"The stronger the publication pressure, the stronger are these deviations from how scholars
are ideally assumed to behave (Anderson et al. 2007). Overall, such practices undermine
the claim of academia to pursue true knowledge."

We've recently seen a massive scale exposure of these outcomes of research pressures in the case of environmental science publications. But Frey's arguments are much stronger than that - they are systemic in nature.

"It can be predicted that academic misconduct and fraud have increased over recent
decades. The major reason is not that scholars are less moral then they used to be. Instead, the incentives to cheat have greatly increased due to higher stress in academia." Frey offers an excellent, iconclastic outlook on the drivers and methods used in fradulent 'research' - well worth reading.

Frey also deals with the issue of grade inflation and courses overproliferation that can lead to reduced standards of teaching, research and general public good inquiry. "The high reputation of a university is a public good shared by all professors and students, but it is undermined by having too many students of lower quality."

In my view - this is an excellent paper that is worth reading for anyone concerned with the nature of learning and discovery as well as broader concept of academia in our modern society. It is strongly polemical, provocative and certainly deserves a deeper debate.

But let me add to Frey's concerns - based on personal experieince - modern academia, in pursuit of quantitive (teaching & research) targets has lost much of its real societal relevance. Vast majority of senior faculty members are withdrawn from broader social and scientific debate, residing in their own isolated towers of specialist knowledge. This problem is most acute in social sciences, where the unwritten and often unspoken rules for younger faculty are:
  • Don't engage in political, social and economic policy debates outside academic research,
  • Don't engage with broader community outside the walls of academia.
As a young academic, I was told on numerous occasions that writing in press is 'below academic standards', that speaking at non-academic conferences 'doesn't earn one any credit within the University walls', that 'peers don't look kindly on those who disagree with their philosophies in public', etc. The victim in all of this will be the entire academia, which is at a risk of ceasing to be “the locus of seeking truth" risks becoming a Faculty of Useless Knowledge, irrelevant to the society.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Economics 07/03/2010: Consensus governance and failures to compete

Yesterday I tweeted about the case of attempted suppression of academic freedom in France (see here). An interesting paper, published in February 2010 by the Department of Economics, Tilburg University, titled Academic Faculty Governance and Recruitment Decisions sheds some light on the potential impact of the practices of suppressing dissent within our Universities.

In this paper, the authors analyzed the implications of the governance structure in academic faculties for their recruitment decisions. It turns out that “the value to individual members through social interaction within the faculty depends on the average status of their fellow members.” Which, of course, can be interpreted in common English as ‘cronyism’ or ‘collusion’. “In recruitment decisions, existing [faculty] members trade off the effect of entry on average status of the faculty against alternative uses of the recruitment budget if no entry takes place [i.e. getting their own hands on the pot of cash].” The study shows that “the best candidates join the best faculties but that they receive lower wages than some lower-ranking candidates”. The main policy implication raised by the study authors is that “consensus-based faculties, such as many in Europe, could improve the well-being of their members if they liberalized their internal decision making processes.”


Now, I’ve said on many occasions that our consensus-driven model of academic staffing would have never allowed people like Friedrich Hayek, or for that matter Milton Friedman, to be given tenure in Ireland. This is true, because hiring decisions in Irish universities – and I am speaking here from evidence relayed to me over the years in a number of actual cases – are based on social cliques (often organized around political and internal agendas, with loose affiliation with certain political ideologies). Anyone falling outside consensus, or threatening to ‘rock intellectual boat’ of dogmatic thinking and vested interests would never be allowed anywhere near a permanent post.


Of course this does not mean that everyone hired through the consensus process is not up to their jobs. Certainly such an assertion would be wrong. But it does mean that Irish academia is missing on critical thinking - a key ingredient in knowledge creation.

Ditto for our public sector. One example comes to mind.


Last year, the Central Bank was hiring a very senior research director. Amongst the applicants, there was a certain senior employee of the US Fed who holds, in addition to his Fed role, several senior academic positions worldwide in the area of Central Banking-related research. This person already held an exactly comparable position in the Fed for over a decade. He also has a list of central banking-related publications that would exceed those of any other academic in Ireland. This person was not even short-listed for the CB position, which subsequently went through an internal promotion to someone who has no publications on the subject, never had academic or practical experience in the area at the same level, but is a life-timer of the Irish public sector.


Consensus-based hiring at work, folks…