Tag: Academia
Ghost Authoring: How Professors Steal the Work of Their Students
I know several PhD researchers at prestigious universities who keep getting asked to “co-author” a research paper. Typically a senior academic will approach them with an idea and ask to “collaborate.” By collaborate, they mean that the student will do all of the work and the professor will get half of the credit. Sometimes they ...
5 Faults of Modern Universities
Some thoughts on this late at night: 1. The Referencing System: Arguably the most pernicious aspect of modern universities is the referencing system. A system that was not used in any of the major humanities books that are still widely read in university departments worldwide. The fault in the system is two fold. On the ...
Expert culture has killed the innovator in workplaces
Over the last few decades, the Western world has had an increasingly specialised workforce, with workers trained in narrow skills, for increasingly narrow positions. However, the more narrow our jobs have become, the less capable we have become in inventing new technologies, products and ideas. Innovative ideas tend to come, not from specialised experts, but ...
Degrees of separation: companies shed degree requirements to promote merit over qualifications
At the end of 2016, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) revealed that close to two-thirds of all Australians had completed a degree or apprenticeship. The growth in the number of people attending a university or TAFE has risen out of a cyclical demand-driven system called “academic inflation”. Think supply and demand. If an employer ...
