Low-quality Scholarship

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Clarissa

October 26, 2025

I think I figured out why scholarship in the Humanities in the EU is so low-quality.

Scholars in the EU get much lower salaries than we do. But they get tons of funding. They pretty much exist on the funding and not on the salaries. To get the funding, they need to write proposals and couch them in a language that EU bureaucrats will understand. My funding, which is my salary, is guaranteed to me. I don’t have to convince anybody that my research is good to get the funding. In the EU, the endless striving for funding has people starting inane research projects that sound very childish to actual scholars.

The North American model is better and produces better results. We don’t have any bureaucrats standing between us and our research.

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5 responses to “Low-quality Scholarship”

Avi

October 26, 2025

Absolutely. And it starts at the PhD level already, with candidates vying with each other for the most demented and senseless themes and area projects.

What matters is that you have complied with the bureaucratic requirements, not that your academic project makes sense and is not a waste of taxpayers’ money.

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1. Clarissa
  
  October 26, 2025
  
  The projects I was forced to listen to this week in Spain include:
  
  Women are oppressed by the fact that women’s magazines publish articles about pregnancy
  Hashtag activism is great
  Fluid identities are wonderful and even Zygmunt Bauman agrees
  Beauty contests are not inclusive enough.
  
  I felt that all joy of life was being drained out of me as I listened to this palaver.
  
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  1. oldcowboy3
    
    October 26, 2025
    
    Well, Kid, this could help, or possibly make it worse:
    
    https://x.com/MarceloPLima/status/1979210258468798608
    
    But as a literary type, this may at least make you smile:
    
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cliff arroyo

October 26, 2025

“they need to write proposals and couch them in a language that EU bureaucrats will understand”

In Poland, the big thing a few years ago was ‘impact factor’ and there was heavy pressure to try to publish in English (even in fields and topics where that made little sense). A friend (social sciences) ended up publishing one article in English even though that meant it wouldn’t reach the target audience.

The grants available are more for international projects (usually web pages of dubious merit). There’s a whole class of probably otherwise unemployable young people (not at universities) who make a living doing two or three of these projects at a time, all the time, but who rope in University staff to give the project more prestige (I’ve taken part in two and told the colleague that dragged me in no to a third). The other stuff might be there but is not as obvious….

And in most fields in the US professors spend a lot of time doing grant proposals (when I worked in university bureaucracy one whole section employing about 20 people was looking over proposals before they were sent out).

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1. xykademiqz
  
  October 26, 2025
  
  “And in most fields in the US professors spend a lot of time doing grant proposals (when I worked in university bureaucracy one whole section employing about 20 people was looking over proposals before they were sent out).”
  
  I am in STEM in the US and grant writing is the bane of my existence. Without grants, we can’t pay graduate students, and in most STEM grad students are the ones doing the research, gathering and analyzing data. It’s not bureaucrats we have to convince but our peers, and there’s something to be said for distilling your ideas in a way that makes them exciting to someone who has no vested interest in supporting you. But the amount of time spent on writing grants is staggering since the funding rate is something like 10% across the board. I used to think I would never retire, would work till I die, but now I can’t wait to retire and it will mostly be to received the blessed respite from writing grant proposals.
  
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