I had no idea — until I got one
Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people. [Attributed to Socrates]
“Nice work…” said my mentor Andrew Frank after I proudly showed him my achievements during the first few months of doctoral studies, “…but now you need an idea!”. What?? I had diligently collected and surveyed piles of literature, extracting everything that may possibly be relevant to my topic, and neatly organizing it all into some sort of a mind map to guide my research. I felt frustrated by that request for something else, but what really upset and scared me was that I had no idea how to get an idea. Yet, in his unique generosity with ideas, Andrew offered me one. While I had to swallow the pill of not having thought of it myself, how could I not accept it, having just documented my own lack of ideas? At least I was able to grasp how compelling his idea was, exploiting bitmapped screens to enable GIS data capture by sketching. This was in the summer of 1984, the Macintosh had just come out, one was standing on Andrew’s desk, and we all were playing around with it (including Andrew’s two-year-old daughter who requested one for herself). I felt fired up to do the research, started working out how to make the idea work, and ETH ended up giving me a doctoral degree — though rumor has it that this was more for the many illustrations in my dissertation than for its idea or its contributions to engineering. Nevertheless, I had clearly sinned (albeit naively) against the first commandment of academic work: You shall have ideas and test them methodically.
If Sidney Harris’ cartoon applies to my original research plan, the good news is that miracles can and do occur. In my case, Andrew magically pulled an idea out of the advisor hat (that he didn’t formally wear) and turned my dull research plan into an exciting challenge I could immediately start working on. And once I understood how vital ideas are to focus one’s research, I started looking for and finding them everywhere. My sources of inspiration were still the same as before — walks, readings, conversations, stories, dreams — but now with my attention turned to generating testable ideas. This works for everybody, just like one can train as an ornithologist and then hear or see birds everywhere, after hardly noticing, let alone identifying them before.
But why are ideas so crucial for research? Until about a year ago, I thought that should be obvious to anyone in academia. But then, a rather successful and highly pragmatic mid-career scientist took issue with my claim that every publication should discuss an idea (not necessarily one’s own, or even a novel one). One can of course cite a plethora of counter-examples, the so-called “war stories” that only report work done, but not an idea that was tested. So why all this fuss about ideas? At the risk of belaboring the obvious, here are some reasons.
First, the publish-or-perish mantra may have let us forget that the primary goal of research is not to publish, but to understand, in order to deal with observed problems. This is rather obvious if one agrees with Jon Agar (Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond) that good science addresses problems of “working worlds”. All understanding begins with a question and a hypothesis, which is simply an idea of how to answer it. In the sciences, why-questions are the norm (e.g., Why do palm trees grow on Scotland’s west coast?), in engineering, it is how-questions (e.g., How could plastic recycling become economical?).
Second, and as a logical consequence of the first point, academia’s core business is to grow knowledge — and not, as some university administrators might have you believe, to generate overhead funds. The knowledge that academics produce comes in two main forms: the understanding and skills that graduates possess, and the advancement of understanding through publications. That knowledge business is a social enterprise, not a lonely struggle, driven by generating, sharing, and growing ideas, not by keeping them (or their lack) to oneself. But also not by maximizing the number of publications, citations, and grants. If the bean counters among us need their Minimal Publishable Unit (MPU), may it at least be a clear and previously untested idea for solving a problem?
Third and most crucially, a good idea lights the fire in us and keeps it burning, so that we can carry on when the going gets tough (which it always does at some point). What would have been the chances for me carrying out my dull research plan without the inspiration and challenge of an idea? Nil. Ideas are the only sustainable motivation for a researcher, beating rewards like money, fame, and power. Yet, the success criteria and reward schemes in today’s academia are of the latter kind, progressively externalizing our motivation and diminishing the value of ideas.
Fourth and finally, ideas (especially courageous and disruptive ones) are an indispensable motor for progress and innovation in society. However, a recent study of 45 million papers and 3.9 million patents demonstrated that the share of disruptive ideas in published research has been declining for decades. Thus, “papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions”. Whatever the exact reasons for this decline may be, it seems likely that they have something to do with the dominance of quantitative measures of success and the associated downplaying of the role of ideas.
An effect of the “numbers game” that academics are forced to play characterized my last years as a faculty at UCSB’s geography department. The merit review each of us was subject to every couple of years was “optimized” at that time, changing it from a thorough and often fascinating engagement with the work and ideas of a colleague to the discussion of a single slide of numbers (publications, h-index, grants, graduates etc.). The change was praised by many for the meeting time it saved us (who wouldn’t like that), but it was harmful to the department’s spirit and cohesion. As a result, I knew my colleagues considerably less well in my last years there than in my first years. At the same time, faculty were hired without discussing or even noticing the key ideas they pursued and how these would fit into the bigger intellectual and interdisciplinary context of the department. The term Quantitative Geography had suddenly acquired a whole new meaning at the department that has rightly been so proud about it.
So how did we get there? Many factors and forces are at work, but as I am no historian of science, I shall stick to my personal experiences. They suggest that emphasizing ideas has flipped from academic orthodoxy to almost being a sin, or at least a distraction (from cranking out publications) and inconvenience (to bean counting). An early watershed moment for me was a proposal-writing course back in 1989, my first year as a postdoc at NCGIA (the U.S. National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis). It was taught by David Simonett, the founding father of UCSB Geography and the first director of NCGIA — something like the pope of our academic congregation at the time. Obviously, he knew what he was talking about. To get us going, he asked what the most important thing is in a proposal. When somebody suggested “an idea”, Simonett’s Australian temperament burst out in “ideas, ideas — a dime a dozen”. Alright then, the value of ideas had just been recalibrated for me (in no uncertain terms, again), in time for the start of my academic career and that of my peers in the room. I can still hear that forceful proclamation, and its echoes are coming back whenever I walk against a wall.
In the end, each of us is free to make a choice of what we pursue and how. But is it possible to be good enough at the numbers game while growing and cultivating ideas that kindle the fire in us and in those working with us? I used to think so, and maybe it still is possible, but the extremes to which the number game has been pushed at some US universities makes it very hard. If I had any doubt before that we are on a path to publish and perish, a dean’s critique of an extremely productive colleague for reducing their number of journal articles from the twenties to the high teens per year confirmed it to me — and to that colleague, whose promotion to full professor didn’t go through in that round. Finishing on a more positive recollection, I treasure what Paul Feyerabend taught us (and actively lived) at ETH in the 1980’s: A professor’s job is to make themselves and the people they work with enjoy it — “a bisserl Freude machen”.
Werner Kuhn (Lisbon, February 20th, 2024)
