ROBIN HANSON: Conquest and Liberation of Academia.
During my graduate studies (’93-97), I looked at the history of prizes in science. I learned that from ~1600-1800, prizes funded science lots, and much more than did grants. But ~1830, science elites controlling top scientific societies, in both Britain and France, defrauded donors to switch funding to grants, which were then selected by society insiders to be given mostly to insiders. Thereafter such societies insisted that donors must fund grants, not prizes, if they wanted their donations to gain their prestigious scientific society association.
Later, ~1900, tenure became common in academia. Then mid-20th century, peer review became common in grants and publications. Also about then, journalism switched from its usual mode of questioning and investigating claims made to it, to accepting whatever academics said and trying to “communicate” that to the public. In the 1980s, college rating systems became widely available to the US public, ratings which depended mainly how how elite academics rated those colleges.
All of these changes were ways in which academic elites wrested control of academia from outsiders who previously could impose some degree of incentives and accountability. The elites of most any profession would love to fully control it, grabbing resources to spend at their discretion, with little need to accommodate demands of customers or investors or regulators or anyone else. But academic managed to achieve this ideal far more than have most, due to their peak prestige. Via elite schools, academic control prestige in many other areas of life.
I review this history to make clear just what academic reformers are up against. It is far from sufficient to enumerate academic failures; you’ll have to develop concrete alternatives that can win prestige fights against the usual academics. History has been moving against you; you’ll have to somehow reverse that strong tide.
To be fair, academics themselves are doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to undermining their position in prestige fights.
