Academia Obscura Read online

  Acknowledgements

  I. WHAT’S ALL THIS NONSENSE THEN?

  II. PUBLISH OR PERISH

  What’s in a name?

  Authors

  Co-authoring: Because writing is hard

  Abstracts

  Footnotes

  A picture paints a thousand words

  Oops

  Obscure interlude: Academic whimsy

  III. ACADEMIC PUBLISHING

  Money for nothing

  The rebellion

  Recommended journals

  Dodgy open access

  Peer review

  Interview: The semi-professional ranter

  Retractions

  Interview: The garbage collector of science

  The hoaxes with the mostest

  Interview: Male, mad and muddle-headed – academics in kids’ books

  Obscure interlude: Beards

  IV. WRITING

  A passage regarding succinctness and the exigencies of proactively counteracting sesquipedalianism in academic composition

  *An unreasonably long footnote

  Writing is diffic

  Tripe

  Tropes

  Mind your language

  Some Examples of Wistful Acronyms in Scientific Papers (SEXWASP)

  Academic Translator

  Obscure interlude: The ‘scientific’ method

  V. TEACHING

  Fail everyone

  Pass everyone

  Par for the course

  Read the syllabus

  Making the grade

  Rate My Professors

  Let the Games Begin

  Obscure interlude: Food, glorious food

  VI. IMPACT & OUTREACH

  Erdős

  K-Index

  Alternate Science Metrics

  Self-citation

  In a JIF

  Obscure interlude: Spooky science

  VII. TWITTER

  Nein

  Shit Academics Say

  Interview: the academic Twitter superhero

  The dark side of academic Twitter

  #Hashtags

  Overheard on Twitter

  Obscure interlude: Love and romance

  VIII. CONFERENCES

  Shoddy conferences

  Kimposium

  Conference etiquette

  Bingo!

  Obscure interlude: Campus hijinks

  IX. ACADEMIC ANIMALS

  Cats

  Playing fowl

  (Homosexual necrophiliac) Ducks

  Rats

  Penguins

  Obscure interlude: Miscellany

  X. CONCLUSION

  Irrelevant bibliography

  Peer review report

  Annex I: Selected figures

  Annex II: Bucket list

  TABLE OF FIGURES

  Figure 1: The underpant worn by the rat

  Figure 2: Well-prepared cat

  Figure 3: The stool collection process

  Figure 4: Possible taphonomic scenario resulting in the accumulation of giant panda bones in the lower chamber

  Figure 5: Pressures produced when Penguins poo

  Figure 6: Cover of the first issue of Philosophical Transactions

  Figure 7: Strategically titled journals

  Figure 8: Your manuscript on peer review

  Figure 9: My reviews

  Figure 10: Get me off your fucking mailing list

  Figure 11: The Professor’s Lecture

  Figure 12: Chickens exposed to natural hair beard on mannequin

  Figure 13: The writing process

  Figure 14: The Isolator

  Figure 15: Academic Halloween costumes

  Figure 16: Academic Valentine

  Figure 17: Paw prints on medieval manuscript

  Figure 18: Playful, experimenter-administered, manual, somatosensory stimulation of Rattus norvegicus

  Figure 19: Feynman diagram of bottom quark decay and 2-dimensional formula of 3,4,4,5-tetramethylcyclohexa-2,5-dien-1-one

  TABLE OF TABLES

  Table 1: Frequency of clichés used in medical article titles (1971–2010)

  Table 2: Miscellaneous papers with silly titles

  Table 3: More hyper-specific gaps in the literature

  Table 4: Selected p-value workarounds

  Table 5: Underwater basket-weaving and other Mickey Mouse classes

  Table 6: Cats and dogs with academic qualifications

  TABLE OF INSTITUTIONALISED SEXISM♀

  Assuming scientists are male

  Your mother in a leopard-skin G-string

  Hello Dolly

  Coconut woman

  There were apparently no famous women in the 1600s

  Please include a male co-author

  Discrimination is child’s play

  It sucks to be female on the internet

  Rate My Professors’s fashion sense

  The Bechdel Test

  Female faculty

  Papers should be like a woman’s skirt

  All male panels

  Play it SAFE

  Glen Wright is an academic. Sort of. Actually, he started his PhD in 2012 and is yet to finish. In the meantime, he started Academia Obscura, a blog about the lighter side of academic life. Born in the Black Country, Glen now lives in Paris, where he works for a non-governmental organisation trying to save the ocean. Neither is as glamorous as it sounds. Glen finds writing about himself in the third person extremely uncomfortable, but is equally uncomfortable breaking with accepted convention in his first book.

  To my late PhD

  With special thanks to

  Mice Chancellor Palimpsest Parnassus

  Dear Reader,

  The book you are holding came about in a rather different way to most others. It was funded directly by readers through a new website: Unbound. Unbound is the creation of three writers. We started the company because we believed there had to be a better deal for both writers and readers. On the Unbound website, authors share the ideas for the books they want to write directly with readers. If enough of you support the book by pledging for it in advance, we produce a beautifully bound special subscribers’ edition and distribute a regular edition and ebook wherever books are sold, in shops and online.

  This new way of publishing is actually a very old idea (Samuel Johnson funded his dictionary this way). We’re just using the internet to build each writer a network of patrons. At the back of this book, you’ll find the names of all the people who made it happen.

  Publishing in this way means readers are no longer just passive consumers of the books they buy, and authors are free to write the books they really want. They get a much fairer return too – half the profits their books generate, rather than a tiny percentage of the cover price.

  If you’re not yet a subscriber, we hope that you’ll want to join our publishing revolution and have your name listed in one of our books in the future. To get you started, here is a £5 discount on your first pledge. Just visit unbound.com, make your pledge and type academia5 in the promo code box when you check out.

  Thank you for your support,

  Dan, Justin and John

  Founders, Unbound

  I would like to thank the wonderful people who provided love, support, inspiration, and proofreading. Without them, I’d probably never have started writing this book, much less finish it.

  • Bart Wasiak, for the bet that led to this book, the support and encouragement during its development, and for going above and beyond with a last-minute edit.

  • Emily Gong♥ for giving me unfettered access to her apparently bottomless well of love and support, and for putting up with far more of my nonsense than most.

  • Jill Cooper, the biggest individual donor to the crowdfunding
effort. Thanks Mom!

  • Haydn Griffith-Jones for being a great friend, even if he never did get around to reading my drafts (see page 100, mate).

  • Johannes Krebs, fellow PhDiva and the best writing buddy one could ask for.

  • Julien Rochette, a fantastic boss and mentor. Merci chef pour m’avoir appris comment faire mousser, jouer du pipeau, et danser la gigoulette.

  • Harriet Harden-Davies, whose fascinating science history lessons, boundless enthusiasm, and love of the ocean and strong dark beer, have unwittingly plunged her into my inner circle.

  The following people have talked me down from various stages of deadline-induced panic and impostor syndrome, and done a whole heap of proofing and editing:

  • Josh Bernoff (withoutbullshit.com), author of the excellent Writing Without Bullshit, who helped clean up my rambling and made me realise how much passive voice was being used.

  • Katrin Boniface, for the grammar pointers.

  • Stevyn Colgan, for reassurance, support, and last-minute proofreading.

  • Gemma Derrick, for her insights on impact.

  • Amy Eckert, for her positivity and encouragement.

  • Charlotte Fleming (ireadyourwriting.co.uk), for her helpful and amusing editorial comments.

  • Nathan Hall, for his academic humour and for the crowdfunding boost.

  • Jason McDermott for the amazing RedPen BlackPen comics illustrating the book.

  • Grainne Kirwan, for giving me my first opportunity to give a silly lecture at a real university.

  • Ivan Oransky, for the support and the great work at Retraction Watch.

  • Raul Pacheco-Vega, for his invaluable contribution to the academic community, and for taking the time to send me some kind words at the perfect moment.

  • Jens Persson, Pontus Böckman, and all at the Skåne branch of the Swedish Skeptics Society, for pledging to have me to speak at their monthly meeting.

  • Julia Pierce and the team at Scrivener (literatureandlatte.com), for their incredibly generous contribution to the crowdfunding effort, and for developing the excellent software that I used to organise my scatterbrain into a book.

  • Kat Peake, for her keen eye, writing companionship, and dislike of overenthusiastic italicisation.

  • Graham Steel, for the encouragement and good humour.

  Convention obliges me to self-effacingly declare that any errors or omissions are my own. They are not. If you spot any, please alert me immediately so I can work out who is to blame.

  People are important, but so are places (especially as lately I seem to spend more time in cafes and libraries than in the office). I therefore wish to acknowledge: the Anticafé in Paris, where I started the weekly Shut Up and Write session, and where the blog and book started to take shape; the coffee shops of Brno, Czech Republic, where I did a substantial chunk of the initial drafting in one intensive week alongside my good friend Johannes; and the coffeeshops of Amsterdam, where Emily kindly paid for me to accompany her on a work trip, during which I hashed out the final draft.

  Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, the following people thought I wasn’t completely off my trolley and generously contributed a significant amount of money to the crowdfunding effort that made this book possible: Mark Archibald, Chris Ashford, Dawn Bazely, Ondrej Cernotik, Rebecca Dunn, Simon Haslam, Elyse Ireland, Andy Franklyn-Miller, David Graham, Paul Miller, Neville Morley, Jussi Paasio, Debi Roberts, Deborah Roberts, and Bradley Turner.

  I am incredibly grateful to you all. May your papers be published, may your students read the syllabus, and may your editors leave your Oxford commas unmolested.

  AN ACADEMIC BLESSING

  May the tenure track rise up to meet you.

  May your deadlines always be extended.

  May your teaching load be lightened,

  the reviewers fall soft upon your papers,

  and until we meet again

  (Wednesday at the interminable weekly faculty meeting),

  may the Dean hold you

  in the palm of His hand.

  Contemporary academia could be seen as a hothouse

  for functional stupidity.

  Alverson and Spicer, 20121

  Academia. Stuffy middle-aged men sporting elbow patches. Greying mad scientists, slightly muddle-headed and socially incompetent. Grand buildings with dusty halls and libraries, sinking beneath the weight of arcane books.* Elderly professors skateboarding around campus, cats publishing physics papers in French, and conference presentations consisting entirely of the word ‘chicken’ repeated over and over.

  If academia is a world apart, the unusual aspects of it that I am about to show you take place in an altogether different dimension. I drifted into this strange place by accident. The first day I sat down in my PhD office, ready for three years† of hard research and writing (not to mention social isolation and financial instability), I hadn’t a clue what I was supposed to be doing. I wasted much of the first week watching cat videos on the internet and playing inane games on my phone.*

  I started researching in earnest around week three. Ten or so pages into the search results for ‘marine energy’† I came across a completely irrelevant (for the purposes of my dissertation) paper entitled ‘Energy Saving Through Trail Following in a Marine Snail’.2 Naturally, I was intrigued. I proceeded to read the article in its entirety, learning that the marine intertidal snail (Littorina littorea) can achieve an energy saving of approximately 75% by following the trail previously laid by a fellow snail. I also learned, albeit indirectly, that academics are researching the most random of subjects.

  I created a folder entitled ‘Obscure’ alongside all the serious stuff and stashed away the snail paper. I frequently added further fodder to the folder.‡ Not only was it a fun way to procrastinate, but occasionally dipping into the entertaining tit-bits I had collected kept me grounded, reminding me of the (in)significance of my actual research.

  It wasn’t until much later that this minor folly turned into something approaching an obsession. One evening in Paris, in conversation with my good friend Bart, I remarked that I would eventually write a book about the bizarre side of academia. He told me that nobody would read it, so we made a wager. The fact that you are reading this attests to the failure of his hypothesis (thank you).

  Before that fateful conversation, social media had always brought out my inner Luddite, but I swallowed my pride and created a blog and accompanying Twitter account. Academia Obscura was born (and a significant portion of my free time was lost forever).

  Academics were evidently in need of comic relief because the project proved popular in a way that I hadn’t expected. This probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Academic work can at times be unexciting and isolating – we need a collective outlet for our frustrations, and humour has often played this role. As James McConnell (founder of the Worm Runner’s Digest, one of the first academic parody publications) put it:3

  Humour in a scientist, a sort of controlled lunacy, serves as a safety valve that ensures that he remain intellectually open.♀

  The relationship between humour and academia is nonetheless fraught. There are, broadly, two camps: those who think that jokes and humour have no place in science and academic inquiry; and those who think that we should all just lighten up a bit.* I am predictably (and staunchly) in the latter category. One academic, of the former disposition, responded to one of my crowdfunding emails: ‘Dear Glen, Strangely enough, I’m not keen to fund a book that rubbishes my job in such a one-sided way.’4

  It is true that misguided attempts at humour occasionally backfire. The French scientists deliberately naming various genetics processes so as to spell out ‘Ta mère en string panthère’ † come off as humourless at best (and as middle-aged white guys making cringeworthy and immature sexist jokes at worst).♀5 This book is about the stuff that’s not just puerile, but actually amusing.

  Academic humour assumes many forms: hoaxes, spoofs, satir
ical journals, silly science experiments, etc.‡ I’ve also found, and will share with you, sham ‘scientific’ journals that are so outlandish they seem satirical, inadvertently amusing errors and faux pas, plain bad manners, and excessive eccentricity from those who should know better.

  The Ig Nobel Prizes, the awards that celebrate creative research that ‘first makes you laugh, then makes you think’, are undoubtedly one of the most recognisable outlets for academic humour. The Igs, organised by Marc Abrahams under the umbrella of the Annals of Improbable Research, are almost as popular as the real Nobels – around 9,000 nominations are sent in each year. The Annals itself follows in a long line of parody publications, dating back to the late 1950s when a number of such periodicals first began poking fun at the peculiarities of the academy (including The Journal of Irreproducible Results and the Worm Runner’s Digest).

  There are also more muted attempts to inject humour into the academic enterprise, like the jokes and jibes that academics slip into their otherwise serious peer-reviewed papers when they think nobody’s looking. Authors citing porn stars and football teams as sources of inspiration, listing Muammar Gaddafi as their co-author, or including this illustration of a rat in pants:*

  Figure 1: The underpant worn by the rat

  Most of the examples in this book are unique and absurd one-offs that are unlikely to be repeated. But I have been driven to wonder how many isolated instances one needs to observe before concluding that a significant portion of the academic community is, in fact, slightly unhinged.

  The internet has allowed these oddities to garner a greater share of eyeballs than previously possible, precipitating a bold new era of academic humour. Jokes once buried deep in papers only to be uncovered by a handful of curious researchers are now liable to be spotted and spread rapidly, while school scandals and dodgy dealings are exposed in a heartbeat. At the same time, ticked-off professors and PhD students can now find a global community with whom they can vent their frustrations and share stories. Social media accounts like Shit Academics Say reach an audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands, spreading their unique brands of scholarly sarcasm and snark far and wide.