Free thinking is endangered
“From 1990 onward, I’ve worked fulltime at the VUB. I’ve been retired for a year now, but I’m still teaching part-tme. This week is very special to me. Wednesday night I’ll be giving my 700th lecture for an audience.
The most important evolution I’ve witnessed and that characterized my whole career, is the way research is done. Especially in my own discipline, which is philosophy. Igrew up with the generation of philosophers like Kruithof, Vermeersch and Böhm. And what did they do? They wrote books. Today it’s all about writing more and more publications.
The primary reason of this shift is the economy, which isn’t doing so well. Thus, we should economize for the sake of subsidies and the discussion rises about the distribution of the money amongst the universities. Internationally, the solution took the shape of a system that counts publications and an analysis of citations with which you can see how many times an article is cited. The big problem was and is that this analysis mainly focuses on natural sciences because that’s where you can find patents and spin-offs. In our circles, the humanities and social sciences, the question arose as to what we should do now. From that moment on it was ‘every publication is worth this much, every acquired project, patent, license this much, and citations will be worth this much’. The more, the better. You could feel the pressure rising to meet this profile. I myself was present at these meetings.
Free thinking is at the very least threatened by this. Meditating on a subject is no longer possible in the academic world. This can only happen during a doctorate. After that, it’s salami slicing. You’ve got a subject, and inevitably you’ve got to cut it in pieces. You never give out the whole sausage, but you offer it up in slices; a slice here and a slice there. Though the social engagement pays for this. I think this is a pity.”
On the occasion of the VUB’s 50th anniversary, prof. dr. Martina Temmerman asked the students in her introductory course on journalism genres to make portraits of people on the VUB campus. The ‘snapshots’ resulting from the project Humans of the VUB offer a lovely cross section of life on our university campus in 2019/20.