UNVEILING DEPTH
CHALLENGING PERCEPTION
A diagnostic of the institution that has confused its own continuation with the pursuit of knowledge. On peer review, captured research, the pretension of the academy, and the man still inside the building after fifteen years.
There is a man in a building. He has been in the building for a long time. He entered it at twenty-two, having been told by those who sent him there that the building contained knowledge, and that the acquisition of this knowledge would permit him to become something the world required. He has now been inside the building for fifteen years. He has published, in this time, four papers. He is preparing a fifth. Each paper has been read by a handful of people whose own papers he has been required to read in return, and this mutual reading constitutes, in its totality, the conversation to which he has dedicated his adult life.
The building, meanwhile, is funded by the state, administered by bureaucracies that have not changed their essential character in a century, and governed by a prestige economy so self-enclosed that the outside world not only fails to penetrate it but has largely ceased to notice that it exists.
This man is the academic, and what I wish to examine is not his intelligence, which is often considerable, but the structure that contains him, which is something else entirely.
Academia presents itself to the world as the custodian of serious thought, the institutional home of inquiry, the space in which the civilizations' most rigorous minds are permitted to operate without the distorting pressures of the commercial world. This is the self-presentation. It is one of the more successful fictions that the modern world maintains about itself, because it is defended by the very people who have most to lose from its exposure, and because the credential economy it has generated has made even the sceptics dependent on its continued legitimacy in order to function within the structures it governs.
To question academia is, in most professional contexts, to disqualify yourself from the conversation it controls. The arrangement is elegant in the manner of all well-designed traps. You cannot critique it credibly without the credentials it issues, and the credentials it issues require that you do not critique it.
Let us look at the basic unit of academic production, which is the paper, and let us look at it without the reverence it has been trained to demand. A researcher identifies a subject. He conducts his investigation over a period that may run from several months to several years, depending on the discipline and the specific demands of the methodology.
He then writes the paper, which must conform to the formal requirements of whatever journal he intends to submit it to, which means it must adopt the correct structure, the correct citation format, the correct register of language, the correct presentation of methodology, and the correct relationship between its claims and the existing literature, which is to say the existing papers produced by the same closed community to which he is appealing for admission. The paper is then submitted. The journal's editor decides, without compensation, whether it merits sending to reviewers.
The reviewers, also without compensation, read the paper, assess it, and return their verdict, which may take anywhere from six weeks to eighteen months depending on the field and the availability of the unpaid experts being asked to adjudicate. The paper may then be rejected outright, rejected with an invitation to revise and resubmit, or accepted. If it is accepted, it may wait a further three to twelve months before appearing in print.
The total time from the completion of the research to its appearance in the literature runs, in many fields, to two or three years. In the humanities and social sciences, where the first response from a journal alone can take sixteen to eighteen weeks, the process is even slower, and the research it eventually delivers to the public is research whose questions were formulated, in many cases, half a decade before they receive an answer.
This machinery is presented as the guarantee of quality. The peer review process, its defenders insist, is what separates serious knowledge from noise, what ensures that only the properly vetted, properly tested, properly situated claim enters the permanent record of the discipline.
What the machinery actually does, in very large part, is this: it ensures that the claim is properly situated within the existing literature, which is not the same thing as ensuring that it is true, important, or useful. A study published in Nature surveyed more than seventy percent of medical and biological researchers who reported having failed to reproduce results published in peer-reviewed papers.
The reproducibility crisis, which has by now rattled every empirical discipline from psychology to cancer biology, is not a crisis external to the peer review system. It is a product of the peer review system, because peer review assesses whether a paper was conducted according to accepted methodology and articulated in acceptable language, not whether its conclusions will survive contact with the reality outside the building.
One must at some point reckon with the financial structure of this enterprise, because the financial structure reveals something about the nature of the institution that no amount of rhetorical self-description can conceal. The government funds the research. This is not a minor contribution. It provides the salaries of the researchers, the running costs of the laboratories, the institutional infrastructure, the grants that permit the work to proceed.
The researchers then conduct the work, write the papers, and submit them to journals, whose editorial boards are staffed by other researchers who perform their evaluative labour without payment, drawing their salaries from the same public institutions that funded the original work.
The journal then publishes the paper, charges the institution a subscription fee to access what its own employees produced, and in many cases charges the researchers an additional publication fee for the privilege of making their publicly funded work available to the public. Elsevier, the largest academic publisher, recorded a profit of approximately 3.6 billion dollars in 2023.
Its profit margin approaches forty percent, a figure higher than Microsoft, Google, and Apple, achieved through a business model in which the raw material is provided free of charge by the people whose work it packages and the institutions that funded that work. Deutsche Bank, not an organization given to radical critique, identified this arrangement in a 2005 report as a triple payment system. The government pays for the research.
The government pays the reviewers' salaries. The government then purchases the published product from the private company that charged nothing for its production. This is not a feature of an institution dedicated to the free exchange of knowledge. This is rent extraction disguised as quality control, and it has been operating at this scale for decades while the academic community has continued to affirm its necessity.
Five publishing houses, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor and Francis, and SAGE, now control more than half of all academic output in the world. This concentration has been achieved not through the production of superior knowledge but through the acquisition of prestige, specifically the prestige of journals whose reputations were built by the academic communities that staffed them before the commercialization of the sector, and whose continued prestige now serves as the mechanism by which researchers are compelled to pay fees of three thousand dollars or more to publish in them. The publish or perish culture ensures compliance.
A researcher who refuses to engage with the commercial publishing apparatus on ethical grounds is a researcher whose career is shortened. The trap is complete. The knowledge is captured. The state pays to produce it, a private company takes custody of it, and the public that funded its production is charged again to see it.
There is a particular quality of self-regard that the academic carries with him into every room he enters, and this quality deserves its own examination, not because it is unique to the academic, but because the academic has constructed around it an institutional apparatus that legitimizes it in ways not available to any other professional class. The academic believes, or has been trained to perform the belief, that the work he is doing inside the building is more serious, more consequential, and more demanding of social deference than the work conducted outside it.
This belief is expressed not primarily through what he says but through the entire grammar of his self-presentation, the vocabulary he has acquired and deploys as both a technical instrument and a social weapon, the citation practices that demonstrate how deep his familiarity with the existing literature runs, the elaborate hierarchy of contempt by which the most prestigious journals look down upon the less prestigious journals, which look down upon the conference papers, which look down upon the trade publications, which look down upon the books written for a general audience, which are regarded with barely concealed suspicion as a species of self-prostitution.
To write for people who have not been trained to read your writing is, in the academic register, to have abandoned the standards by which serious work is measured. The inaccessibility of the work is not a regrettable feature of its complexity, it is a marker of its rigour.
Or so the system has decided.
The vocabulary is the most immediate expression of this. Academic prose, in the humanities and social sciences in particular, has developed not toward greater precision and clarity but toward greater opacity, and the opacity functions as a credential in itself. To write in a way that can be read without training is to announce that your ideas do not require the protected space of the discipline to survive scrutiny.
The introduction of Continental philosophical vocabulary into disciplines that had no particular need for it, the proliferation of technical terminology whose function is less the precise designation of a concept than the demonstration of the writer's position inside the discourse, the extraordinary length and complexity of sentences that, once untangled, reveal a proposition of very modest substance, all of this is not the price of serious thought. It is the costume of serious thought, worn in place of the thing itself, and it has been maintained for so long that the distinction between the costume and the substance has become invisible to most of its practitioners.
Kierkegaard wrote against the Hegelian system with the contempt of a man watching a philosopher build an elaborate palace of thought and then live in a hovel. The academic system has constructed its own version of this architecture, a vast and internally coherent structure of citation, methodology, and disciplinary convention, and it houses, within this structure, questions whose importance to the world beyond the building is not self-evident and whose answers, when they arrive after years of processing, are returned to a community so small and so specialised that the question of their wider consequence is rarely posed.
This is not a critique of the questions themselves. It is a critique of the institutional narcissism that treats the asking and answering of these questions as a self-justifying activity requiring no further reckoning with the world that funds it.
None of this constitutes a dismissal of the disciplines that have genuinely extended what is known about the physical world. The neurochemist working on the mechanisms of synaptic transmission, the structural biologist mapping protein folding, the epidemiologist tracking the spread of disease through populations, the materials scientist developing the compounds through which the next generation of medical and energy technology will be built, these people are doing something that deserves the name of serious inquiry, because their questions have answers that can be tested against a reality outside the building, and their answers, when they are correct, change something in the world that cannot be argued away.
The sciences that operate through controlled experiment, reproducible methodology, and falsifiable prediction have earned, through the long accumulation of demonstrated results, a seriousness the humanities have not earned and have largely stopped trying to earn. Neuroscience is serious. Molecular biology is serious.
The discovery of effective pharmacological interventions for conditions that were previously untreatable is serious. These achievements are genuine, and the people who produced them have spent decades in genuine difficulty, confronting reality with instruments that required years to master, and the reality pushed back.
But the academic system does not primarily serve these disciplines. It serves itself, and in doing so it subjects even the serious sciences to the same publish or perish machinery, the same commercial publishing apparatus, the same prestige economy, and the same incentive structure that has produced in the humanities and social sciences a literature so vast, so internally self-referential, and so systematically disconnected from any external standard of consequence that its volume functions as evidence of its uselessness rather than its importance.
The National Institutes of Health, which is the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, distributes billions of dollars annually, much of which finds its way, through the publication fees of the researchers it funds, into the profit margins of private publishing companies whose contribution to the knowledge they are selling was the act of receiving it. This is the structure. It is not hidden. It is simply rarely examined by the people whose professional existence depends on continuing to operate within it.
The academic's confinement is not primarily a financial one, although the financial dimension is real and the dependence on institutional approval that follows from it is corrosive. The confinement is epistemological. The structure in which he operates has trained him, over years of formation that begin in the undergraduate classroom and do not end until tenure, to evaluate the significance of a question by reference to the existing literature rather than by reference to the world, to measure the value of an answer by whether it advances the internal conversation of the discipline rather than whether it changes anything beyond it, and to experience the approval of the peer review process as the primary form of validation available to his intellectual work.
The result is a man, and it is most often a man, whose idea of serious thought is determined in every particular by a system that has an institutional interest in maintaining the boundaries within which that thought occurs. He is not free. He has been constructed to experience his confinement as rigour, and the walls of the building as the natural boundaries of the serious mind.
This construction is reinforced from the first day of graduate school. The graduate student is taught to read the literature, which means to absorb the existing conversation of the discipline in such depth and detail that he is capable of positioning his own contribution correctly within it. He is taught to write in the register the discipline employs. He is taught to cite the figures whose work his own work must acknowledge, extend, or dispute in order to be legible to the gatekeepers whose approval he requires.
He is not taught, because the system has no mechanism for teaching it, to ask whether the conversation he is being trained to enter is worth having, whether the questions the discipline has decided to pursue are the most important questions available, or whether the methods the discipline has developed are adequate to the phenomena they are meant to illuminate. These are questions that the building does not permit, because the building is the conversation, and the building must continue.
There is a certain kind of genuine intellectual labor that is possible inside this system, and it would be dishonest to deny it. The historian who has spent thirty years mastering the archives of a particular period and produces from that mastery a reading of the past that genuinely illuminates the present is doing something real, however confined the audience for that work may be. The philosopher whose engagement with a problem is sustained enough and exacting enough to clarify something about the structure of thought that was previously obscure is doing something real.
The linguist who maps the structure of a language that would otherwise die unrecorded is doing something real. These things exist inside the building and are worth acknowledging.
But they exist despite the system, not because of it. They are produced by individuals whose relationship to their subject has survived the institutional formation that was designed to produce something more manageable, which is the competent functionary of the discipline, the reviewer, the journal subscriber, the committee member, the reliable producer of adequately positioned papers in the agreed-upon register. The genuinely serious thinker inside the academy is the exception that the system tolerates because it cannot entirely prevent him, not the product the system is designed to generate.
The system is designed to generate papers. Papers generate citations. Citations generate impact factors. Impact factors generate prestige. Prestige generates funding. Funding generates more papers. The loop is closed, and inside it the genuine questions of how we live, what we are, and what we might become have been converted into the raw material of a credentialing apparatus whose primary function is its own perpetuation.
The building continues. The man inside it continues. He is preparing his fifth paper. The peer review will take a year. The journal will take its fee. The publishing house will record its margin. And the knowledge, if it is knowledge, will wait inside a paywall for the colleagues who funded its production to pay again to read it. This is the serious pursuit of truth as the modern world has arranged it. The arrangement tells us something about the modern world that the papers produced within it are not, for the most part, designed to say.
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Written by Bailey Booth