There’s got to be something between academic strangulation (bow to the received wisdom or else! if you don’t get a job, you’re not 133t!) and Wikipedia free-for-all, where the published academic has exactly the same standing as the 17-year-old from Mumbai who can’t write grammatical English.

Yes.

I wonder if it would work to have a Virtual Academy, where you won admission to the discussion by passing a test of language competence (in the language of the academy) and general knowledge, and worked up through increasingly restricted circles….

I know a number of people who are thinking along these lines. Science Commons, among others, seems to have some sentiments like this. I’m personally thinking way farther out of the box; something very, well… retro. Hard to explain. More as it develops. Business plan first; funding and/or founding; and then I give my announcement….

It would have to be autonomous. No waving academic degrees to jump over levels. It would also have to issue no certificates and offer no rewards other than the pure joy of scholarship.

I have spent some time thinking about the “pure joy” of scholarship. A fair amount of my joy has come from conversations, and enlightening pointers provided by correspondents and collaborators. Less so from the act of doing work; more so from the knowledge that a road has been traveled before, or that somebody, somewhere thought my idea was good enough to follow up on — even decades before.

What I’ve wanted above all is to attend professional meetings all the time, hear others’ great results, get new ideas, pass them back to those others, and watch to see what they do with them. As with many (I suspect), I’d as soon read something in New Scientist as do the work myself. Screw the Nobel Prize: the whole world is a Wunderkamer.

I wonder if it would work to have a Virtual Academy, where you won admission to the discussion by passing a test of language competence (in the language of the academy) and general knowledge, and worked up through increasingly restricted circles.

I wonder if this could be mapped onto Wikipedia. I don’t think the folks who run WP understand that it is not just a resource for the readers, but for the participants, who learn from discussion and modeling of good research and writing. Well … sometimes.

It would have to be autonomous. No waving academic degrees to jump over levels. It would also have to issue no certificates and offer no rewards other than the pure joy of scholarship. That would shut out a fair number of academics, who are happy with their iron rice bowl.

Looks a little grumpy and sour-grape-ish, ne? Can’t be helped.

A merry Newtonmass to you and Barbara! May the blessings of the calculus be upon you, and the next year a dramatic improvement over this.