Sausages of research

Wider context: It is a well known fact about the institution of academic scientific research that, for decades now, there has been much well-placed concern over the increasing pressure to publish at the cost of depth and quality of said research. It’s commonly held that this is largely driven by a restriction of public funding relative to the number of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs all queueing within the academic pipeline.

So, I was reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien last week and came upon a passage that made me smile. It refers to Tolkien’s retirement speech at Merton college, Oxford.

*“In his Valedictory address… He directed some barbed remarks towards the increasing emphasis on postgraduate research, which he described as ’the degeneration of real curiosity and enthusiasm into a “planned economy”, under which so much research time is stuffed into more or less standard skins and turned out in sausages of a size and shape approved by our own little printed cookery book.'”

For context, Tolkien was a philologist and not a physicist, so I don’t pretend that his comments have any bearing beyond his own narrow experience. He was also known to be an exceptional procrastinator (or perhaps perfectionist, with the same result), and so it’s natural that he would reject any temporal constraints on his work or standardisation thereof.

That being said, I’m confident that the concept of ‘research sausages’ is going to stay with me.