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As the
year is drawing to a close, it
is time to pause. Time to look back and to be grateful for the
good, and to come to terms with the not so good. Most of the
things
I have reasons to be grateful for, or to come to terms with,
are of a private nature though, and I will keep them private.
I'll
limit myself here to a brief glance back of a
more academic nature, concerning a
peculiar way of rating the year that many academics appear to
have internalized and from which I want to emancipate
myself (or better, I am just learning to free myself from it);
I mean counting the number
of publications that the year has added to one's list.
As
usual, I have once again been studying and writing a lot this past
year; yet I suddenly realize I have published considerably less
than in previous years. I like to share my ideas with others
and doing so has brought me many valuable contacts and exchanges;
but not everything I wrote or drafted in the past months looked
to me as if I needed to publish it so urgently, if at all. So
I didn't. Who cares anyway? Quite right: nobody. In today's
academic world, most of us suffer from having to read too much,
so we should actually be grateful to those few colleagues who
limit their amount of publishing to small, digestible doses!
Dated
as the thought may appear in an epoch that ties university financing
to quantitative measures of publication output per faculty and
similarly self-defeating criteria of (supposed) academic achievement
– do we really need to rush and publish everything we write
as soon as we manage to, for the mere sake of seeing it published?
True, I am sufficiently independent now (not everybody is) to
admit it to myself and publicly that
quantity is irrelevant
in assessing academic work. I can
only wonder why this truism is not expressed more often, and
more loudly, by tenured academics as well as by university and
financing authorities. Do university people and financing authorities
no longer dare to state such basic and essential truths, or
have they perhaps really forgotten by now?
What
kind of a world would it need to be in which policy makers would
avow that quantity of output (numbers of publications, students,
research projects, and so on)
is an inadequate measure of the quality of teaching and research,
and would accordingly stop financing academic institutions
on the basis of such measures? Isn't it clear to them that it is not just pointless but really
harmful
to use quantitative measures of success except when we can be certain
that they measure exactly what we want to get and nothing else? Obviously, if
the evaluation standards used for financing universities tend
to measure
something other than true academic achievement, we will also
reward and thus promote something other than true academic achievement
(i.e., high quality teaching and research, in case anyone should
have forgotten).
That
is what's actually happening. We reward and thus encourage a
rising number of publications. As if we suffered from a lack
of academic publications! Who cares about their content? Who even cares to read them all?
(Clearly not the policy makers.)
Isn't the problem
that there are too many publications that nobody would
miss if they hadn't been published, so the financing
mechanisms should actually discourage rather than promote
the mass publishing of all
the stuff
that is being published for apparently no other reason than
its "counting" as output, given that mediocre
content is apparently no obstacle to such "counting"?
The
triumph of the countable
But
of course, I got it all wrong. Measurable quantity of output
is obviously
what policy makers do want, even if it comes at the expense
of (immeasurable) quality; otherwise they would not use such
measures. It would be impolite
(if not naive) to assume they don't know what they are doing. They must
understand that if they tie financing mechanisms to quantitative
measures of output, what they get is ... yes, exactly,
quantities of output. Countable results is indeed what counts,
for
policy makers no less than for those depending on them, as it
is the only kind of results (I was tempted to write: the only
kind of responsibility) that can be planned and secured bureaucratically. We've
got the numbers right, it's what counts and nobody can blame
us for that. So it
can't exactly be a surprise that mediocrity triumphs in the
end, can it?
The only other (but as I said, impolite) explanation
would be that those who prescribe and use such standards don't
know where they want to go. If you don't know where you want
to go, you shouldn't be surprised it you arrive somewhere else.
Or worse, that they are cynical about what they are doing, by saying
something else than what they know and think. But that comes
down to the same thing: if you say something else than what you
mean (and accordingly measure something else than what you want),
you can hardly be surprised if in the end you get something
else. Q.e.d.
Arriving
at year's end: four last songs Happily,
my
year wasn't subject to quantitative measurements and bureaucratic
imperatives. So I have arrived
where I hoped I would. I have had a good year full of meaningful
projects and
am reasonably content with what I have managed to do (one may
always imagine better). The word "content" is fitting
indeed: I am content with the content and intensity
of my work, with the efforts I made to advance my own thinking
though not to publish. Who cares about the sheer number of my publications?
Exactly: nobody.
As
it looks, the year will end for me as it has been all along: keeping me busy
with ongoing projects. So, for once, this last Bimonthly
of 2010 is rather brief. Just a short stop along the way. I've
chosen as my topic some of the most beautiful, most relaxing,
most inspiring music I know. Quite fittingly, it comes in very small
doses and there is preciously little of it altogether. I
mean the Four Last Songs of the German Romantic composer
and song writer Richard Strauss (not to be confused with the
Austrian "king of waltzes," Johann Strauss). Richard
Strauss composed his four last songs in 1948, aged 84, after
he and his wife had been able to emigrate from war-demolished
Germany to Switzerland and had found their peace here. Strauss must
have felt that these songs were the last compositions he should
complete. They radiate such an incredible sense of calm, completion,
and rest! In these four songs, at least for me his work found
its absolute culmination. The lyrics he used are equally beautiful
and were in fact very dear to him; the authors are Joseph von Eichendorff
and Hermann Hesse.
Winter
Alpenglow, or: it is
time to rest and see the year fall silent
There are many different recordings of the Four Last
Songs and I appreciate most of those I have heard, but the most special one to me is
the 1965 recording with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf as soprano and
George Szell directing the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Berlin.
I cannot reproduce the music here for you, just encourage you
to try and hear it for yourself if you get a chance, in case
you do not already know it. (Be sure though you have a quiet
and relaxed moment, it's not the kind of music you want to hear
during breakfast, before running to catch your train.) I can
only reproduce part of the lyrics here. I'll limit myself to
the fourth and last of the four songs. It's titled Im Abendrot,
which means as much as "in the evening glow" or
"in the last glow of the sunset"; my translation
is At Glowing, as it reminds
me of the "Alpenglow" on a clear and cold winter evening
in the Alps, shortly after sunset. The title is more usually
translated as "At sunset"
or nicer "At gloaming," but these titles lack some clout, I think. In
any case, it is also for copyright reasons that below, I offer
my own translation of the original German lyrics rather than,
for example,
the translation that comes with the Szell/
Schwarzkopf
recording.
Im
Abendrot to me is the most beautiful of the four songs,
both for its music and for its lyrics. In addition, its theme
of letting things end in peace is most meaningful as the year
draws to a close. And finally, it inspired me to take the photograph
that I reproduce below. It has become one of my favorite winter
photographs, as it reminds me of this wonderful music and of
the peace it radiates.
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For a hyperlinked overview of all issues
of "Ulrich's Bimonthly" and the previous "Picture of the
Month" series,
see the site map
PDF file
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