[cont'd from here]

Paul Erdős sent somebody who sent somebody who sent somebody who sent me

In April of 2004 I “sold my Erdős Number” on eBay. My number is a 4, because I published a measurably unimportant paper with my then-office mate Mark Newman, who has a 3.

You can read some things about it in Science News, or the Chronicle of Higher Education [annoying login], or the Ann Arbor Observer [not online?!]. When I get around to un-mothballing and integrating old archived posts from the previous incarnation of this blog, you’ll be able to read it here.

The basic facts are simple: I offered 80 hours of my time, to be spent collaborating on a research paper with the auction winner in a discipline of their choice, after which we would submit a manuscript for peer-reviewed publication by the traditional routes. If the manuscript was published, the auction winner (and any other coauthors) could claim an Erdős number of 5. The most common possible non-infinite value, as it happens.

I started the auction as a joke at the expense of the inbred world of scientific peer-reviewed publications (I was not an academic at the time, but was reviewing papers for several journals and conferences in my specialty). And a jab at the perceived importance of citation impact studies (Erdős number 5! linked by an insignificant note to Mental! Giants!). And the prevalent myth that publication implies quality, or that authority and usefulness are interchangeable, or that peer reviewers are impartial (Cf. “reviewing papers” above). And also as a real, though informal, experiment in social networks and public perception of computational research.

As it turned out, I never wrote another paper with anybody.

Dr. José Burillo, a Spanish mathematician who was affronted by my [admittedly] insulting attitude towards the hallowed academic character, sniped the sale with (as I recall) a $1,000,000 bid—some big silly number. And then immediately crowed in comments at danah boyd’s Apophenia blog that he had blocked my insulting denigration of academia.

I have won the auction. Not because I intend to pay or to collaborate with the seller –my Erdos number is already 3– but to stop the mockery this person is doing of the paper/journal system, and also to stop some poor soul who may be in need of a joint paper for his tenure case to spend his money in this travesty…

An outcome, I should point out, that really iced the cake for my making-fun-of-academics goal. If had sat down and tried to delineate an Archie Bunker of academic pride, and sent José word-for-word script and instructions, he couldn’t have played the part better: moral outrage, unreflective prejudice, xenophobia, and even in the end a snatch at self-respect by claiming to “play a joke also”. Our private emails to one another (set aside for my estate) are priceless indeed.

But it was the end of the joke. While the second-in-line bidder was serious and interested in working, he was an entrepreneur in a UK educational startup and time pressures filled his calendar. Nothing, to date, came of it all. Except I can tell a good story in the right crowd over beer, and now and then at a conference somebody says, “Oh, right! That was you?”. It’s always been an amusing result for me, this sort of petering out, this going silently into the dark night.

Now, I’ve learned through the years that many folks build very poor mental models of me. So in this very important case I feel obliged to make this explicit: amusement and serious concern are not mutually exclusive.

I am amused; I am also deadly serious. Sometimes a joke is better than a scream. The joke ended there. The serious part stays with me.

See, something else happened: During the sale dozens of people contacted me by email and telephone. They weren’t seeing it as a joke. They were anxious to bid. They regretted being unable to participate. The wanted to work with me on research, or with anybody on research, or have a chance to carry forward research they had started but lost….

They wanted to collaborate.

They were graduate students, and laymen, and people with Ph.D.s and M.S. and other advanced degrees in mathematics and science and engineering and humanities and social sciences and art. And they were busy, and focused, and full of ideas… and every one felt disenfranchised.

For one reason or another they felt unable to collaborate in serious research, to follow ideas through to completion with colleagues. They were stymied by sexism (MIT-trained female math Ph.D., forced into industry by uncollaborative peers), by the burden of diligence (graduate and undergraduate students, or industrial researchers ordered to focus and pay attention on their immediate work), by the walls of the many-siloed Ivory Tower itself. Or they were smart academics in the right position, who had nobody willing to collaborate with them in a culture that over-values competition and secrecy and primary authorship. Some were full professors, fully-credentialled but held back by service or administrative obligations, or funding hardships, or some other oft-voiced complaint. Some were in small ivy-covered undergraduate teaching institutions, or community colleges, and just out of luck for chances to do some work.

Nobody seemed dumb. Nobody sounded like they were trying to scam a lightened workload by foisting the hard part of their project over to me. Nobody was trying to cheat on their homework or thesis. Nobody was a creationist, nobody was astroturfing. They all made it sound as if finding a colleague was the best thing they could imagine.

I make it out to be very general, very broad, almost ubiquitous. There was diversity in the character of response, but I’m not exaggerating: nearly two dozen people contacted me. This expression of disenfranchisement was a shared trait of a stream of email correspondents, and people who called me directly on my business line. They didn’t really care how good or bad I was, and maybe didn’t care too much about my credentials. The fact that I seemed capable, and serious, and willing to give my time and energy to thinking and talking with them about something they were interested in… that was enough.

Once I was a dotcom guy. Almost. For a while. (And we’ll come back to that later this week.) A realistic sense of marketing sticks with you when you’re out in the world, and taints and undermines your academic life. Knowing anything at all, you’re forced to ask in seminars and lab meetings and reviewing papers Why does anybody want this? What customer pain does it address?.

But that is Not a Question We Take Seriously in the Life of the Mind. At best, it’s something we ask after we’ve decided what we want to do. We do not have “customers”, we have patrons.

These people calling me had real pain. Not so much “pain” in terms of psychic or physical anguish. But “pain” in the marketers’ sense of potential customers’ pain: frustration, desire, unfulfilled need for improvements, a sense of useless striving, of waiting for better to come along. And sometimes, yes, also real pain: regret, long-suffered anxiety, interminable frustration balancing worklife, real life, and a denied life of the mind. You can’t have a family and a career; all the best mathematicians have done their work by 25; women can’t be professors in “our” discipline; if you can’t play the game yourself, why then you’ll have to make do reading popularizations; pregnancy, divorce, death in the family, illness, political involvement, voting, hobbies, interdisciplinarity are all distractions from your immediate work.

I’m not telling you that’s the life of every ex-academic. I am telling you it’s the anecdote of every one of those people who wrote to me. And one or two reporters who interviewed me.

So the joke ended with José, who stepped into the role of Mocked as if he were in on the joke. The serious part stays with me. Scroll back through what I’ve been writing for the past three years, what I’ve been reading and bookmarking, what I’ve been hinting at. It’s there in plain sight.

Consider that there might have been 7000 people paying attention to my little esoteric joke. A nice audience for that science-bloggy kind of thing, but not a big fraction of the world in any sense. But of those thousands, dozens expressed heartfelt desire to step into the life of the mind, to have an excuse to explore basic science or engineering or model social systems or write simulation code or do something to contribute to the ongoing conversation that is scholarship.

Scale that up. This is a pain served at present (I am about to be harsh, so Chronicle of Higher Ed readers may avert their eyes) by an exclusionary, pretentious, self-confident monopoly: the Academy.

It’s OK. I’m one of us. I can say that.

These people are not the Academy’s customers. The academy doesn’t have customers, it has patrons.

So whose customers might they be? Who can give them what they want? And what do they want?

To answer that, I’ll repeat myself, since it’s been a few months since I banged this drum: Scholarship is conversation. No scholarly paper, no presentation, no book has any value whatsoever except measured by the responses it generates and the answers it receives. Citations, and quotes, and reviews and recommendations—they are all that matters, and they are acts of conversation. Dialog.

That dialog, decorated with a few hackneyed rituals and ethnographic quirks, is the Scholarly Community. Interestingly, Academia is not about conversation; conversation is the last thing on most poor professors’ agendas. Academia is about being academic. Scholarship, that eternal searching conversation, is no longer the same thing.

The most brilliant monograph, sitting unread in a library stack, is a waste of paper. The “best” journal article in the world, elegant and succinct and capable of changing the world… if unremarked, uncited, uninfluential is no better than the worst article in the world. And is in good company, with many companions.

And also: the most trivial, derivative, incremental, hesitant “…: Towards a…” paper, if widely read and discussed can become a world-spanning nexus in the growing network of academic thought, a new center of dialog, a crux of oft-cited importance. Attention trumps the mythic “inherent quality”. One needn’t be beautiful to launch a thousand ideas. One need simply be discussed.

But that’s neither here nor there. My correspondents, my supposed disenfranchised watchers? They wanted a chance to carry forward their share of the conversation. They wanted an excuse to be scholarly.

So. Even before the end of the joke, before the end of the auction, I had added a serious note in big type to the eBay listing. Something had to be done; I didn’t know what. I promised that the funds raised by the sale would be used to create an online community to foster scientific collaboration. There’s an irony, eh? All those funds I garnered with my mockery of the paper/journal system, given to foster more mockeries.

But I jab when I should stroke. I hope we can someday thank José for the clarity and moral fire he imparted to me. He was such a good example. Nothing fosters innovative problem-solving like deep-seated personal issues.

And soon it came to be the Summer of 2004, and I was starting (ironically, as the Chronicle reporter pointed out) graduate school again after several years in the real world. I’d keep those disenfranchised folks in mind. I’d help start something like Science Commons, or some matching service, or some marketplace of ideas. Something to help them… online maybe? And I’d work to open up the University from my position as a student and maybe eventual faculty member and maybe eventual administrator: try to fix the meat grinder from the inside, as Thom LaBean once described it.

So in August I started school, thinking I’d have time enough to work things out. Might make a good thesis project, or a sideline.

And then my wife’s father started to die, and a close friend died horribly, and late one night my mother-in-law came down with cancer.

And that right there, as they say, is a distraction from one’s immediate work. I had a lot of support from my department (this time around), and they were understanding and acted like adults. But the institution is not fully determined by the behavior of its participants: You lose your nimbleness in that meat grinder, no matter how experienced a repairman you make yourself out to be, no matter how many helping hands reach out to steady you… you’re gonna lose some pieces pretty quick.

There is a reason young academics make the best stars. It’s not the vivid recklessness of youth. It’s simply that they have not yet been driven by the exigencies of real life to perspective.

[cont'd soon]