Why professors are writing crap that nobody reads
This is simply an instance of Goodhart&#x27;s Law, that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. Universities (and the social structures that provide money to them for them to pay faculty) want to pay professors for doing worthwhile research and advancing the state of human knowledge. They&#x27;ve settled on publications as a measure for that goal - and the measure has become a target.<p>However, I&#x27;m not sure I agree with the followup claim of this article: &quot;<i>One unfortunate effect of this specialization is that the subject matter of most articles make them inaccessible to the public, and even to the overwhelming majority of professors. ... increased specialization has led to increased alienation between not only professors and the general public, but also between the professors themselves.</i>&quot;<p>The evidence given that the work of professors is inaccessible to the public and also to other professors is the fact that one journal has published articles with the following three titles: &quot;Dona Benta’s Rosary: Managing Ambiguity in a Brazilian Women’s Prayer Group&quot;, &quot;Death and Demonization of a Bodhisattva: Guanyin’s Reformulation within Chinese Religion&quot;, and &quot;Brides and Blemishes: Queering Women’s Disability in Rabbinic Marriage Law&quot;. The author thinks that it&#x27;s obvious that nobody cares about these articles and that they&#x27;re crap.<p>Here are the articles and parts of their abstracts:<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;jaar&#x2F;article-abstract&#x2F;84&#x2F;3&#x2F;776&#x2F;1751661" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;academic.oup.com&#x2F;jaar&#x2F;article-abstract&#x2F;84&#x2F;3&#x2F;776&#x2F;1751...</a> &quot;<i>This article describes the rituals and beliefs of an upper-class Catholic women&#x27;s prayer group in a small city in southeast Brazil. My interest centers on why there is so little friction within the group when it would seem to have several potentially significant internal and external tensions. There are stark doctrinal differences between members: some have very liberal and even syncretic beliefs while others express very conservative, exclusive Catholic beliefs. At the same time, the group—despite certain unorthodox beliefs and practices—maintains close relations with representatives of the local Catholic Church and prays jointly on occasion with an evangelical group....</i>&quot;<p>- <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.academia.edu&#x2F;download&#x2F;52637206&#x2F;Meulenbeld_Death_and_Demonization_690-726.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.academia.edu&#x2F;download&#x2F;52637206&#x2F;Meulenbeld_Death_a...</a> &quot;<i>The Chinese goddess known as Guanyin may commonly be referred to with the Buddhist epithet of &#x27;bodhisattva,&#x27; yet her many hagiographies contain only the most stereotypical references to anything that could be defined unambiguously as &#x27;Buddhist.&#x27; Instead, the narrative of Guanyin that gains greatest popularity between the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries is one that describes the bodhisattva&#x27;s last incarnation, as the unmarried Princess Miaoshan, within the parameters of indigenous Chinese religion—or, rather, its demonology. I argue that all of the many versions of Miaoshan&#x27;s legend represent her deification into Guanyin as a process necessary for solving her spirit&#x27;s demonical status that has arisen from the recurring violence done to her body by herself and her father....</i>&quot;<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.academia.edu&#x2F;download&#x2F;39308303&#x2F;2015_Brides_and_Blemishes-Queering_Womens_Disability_in_Rabbinic_Marriage_Law.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.academia.edu&#x2F;download&#x2F;39308303&#x2F;2015_Brides_and_B...</a> &quot;<i>... While analysis of disability in Jewish thought has primarily focused on the limits that disability places on men&#x27;s capacity to fulfill specific religious obligations, a feminist intersectional analysis of disability discourse in rabbinic marriage law illuminates the deeply gendered nature of disability. While notions of male disability focus particularly on the occupational stench of low-class work, rabbinic texts conceptualize women&#x27;s disability in primarily visual terms. ...</i>&quot;<p>All seem pretty interesting to me, and all seem very personally relevant to vast swaths of the general public - Catholics and more generally Christians who worship alongside people of varying levels of orthodoxy, Chinese Buddhists, and Jewish people who care about rabbinic marriage law, respectively. All seem like pretty easily accessible topics to anyone in the general public with an interest in religion.<p>I wonder to what extent the problem is that none of these three are interesting <i>to the author</i>, a former senior fellow at a Koch-affiliated think tank who received his doctorate in systematic theology at a Catholic university. Perhaps, to him, discussions about productive communities inviting syncretic variants of Catholicism are not worth being covered in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, let alone discussions of Buddhism or Judaism, let alone anything with the word &quot;queering&quot;.