Proving ourselves: the

strange academic

world of 'impact'

 

Chris Holligan

 

Imagine being involved in a normal conversation and after it you are approached and asked to explain your impact. Imagine also that your response is perceived to be weak and you're then asked to justify why you believe you actually had an impact. Please bear with me as I request that you imagine yet another time that, despite your second justification being plausible, this rather Stalinist questioner is now demanding proof of impact in the form of objective evidence.
     You remember back to your time studying the philosophy of Hume at Christ Church College, Oxford (an academic lifeline you mistakenly thought) and in a seminar the infamous Freddie Ayer, author of 'Language, Truth and Logic', a best-seller in its day, explained Hume's thesis that knowledge equals justified true belief and yet, despite adopting that premise, your interrogator is still dissatisfied with your answers.
     Your perceptions are implicitly deemed untrustworthy, although that personal assessment is never spoken, but it exists in the luminal space of this, now unpleasant 'dialogue' of surveillance. You are not trusted, you quietly infer through the use of syllogistic reasoning nurtured by your Oxbridge teachers, that a type of legalistic trust is permitted, and strongly expected, as you are given the freedom, so it would seem, to track down presumably external evidence of your impact.
     By this time you and your close friends and family are beginning to feel anxious. You went home to see if others could make sense of this encounter. You feel there is a hidden agenda. Your teenage child, never strong on social skills at the best of times, starts to put into the conversation themes from Franz Kafka's book 'The Trial'. It suddenly strikes you that your child is after all highly intelligent and you listen attentively to the processes described in that sinister tale about the human condition. In your eyes your child, call her Emily, suddenly leaps to your defence and without more ado gathers evidence of impact. Her English teacher at school has clearly had his impact as she fears that, if not your life, then your actual livelihood, including her own wellbeing is at real risk.
     What's more, Emily is aware that time is running out, as told by Kafka and emphasised by her impactful teacher, and a finite timescale must be followed within which the evidence must be turned over for it to be considered valid. Emily is only 14 and reveals again her relative lack of social intelligence as she suddenly bursts out what happened to intellectuals during the Russian revolution, a topic she hopes to pursue in more depth in her Highers.
     She tells you how, and by this time you are shaking visibly. Lesley Chamberlain's book 'The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia' describes how scholars were thrown out of their homeland, becoming permanent exiles in Berlin, Prague and Paris. Lenin's list of 22. which he personally drew up included some 220 'undesirable' intellectuals to be deported from the country so that the creation of the Soviet Union would not be contaminated. Many of those people as émigrés went on to make unique contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of the 20th century. Most of what you've just heard was narrated to me with a passion by my daughter whose shoulder I was now leaning on without knowing it.

 

     While those émigrés never did get the chance to prove their impact for the good, their later lives demonstrated that impact, which the progressively less kind auditor introduced at the start of my story could not foresee. The audit culture which he symbolises revolves around a cynicism about human beings who cannot ever be trusted to tell the truth. And in view of a compromise being required for things to tick over, for academia to evolve and be perpetuated, he provisionally accepts your willingness to rush frantically about to find truth of the impact of your efforts.
     It is this emotional coercion which drives his commitment, rather than any true desire to discover whether your research does or does not have impact. It keeps you on your toes and pulls you up from entering an ivory tower where, given time, you might in fact discover stuff which is equal in impact to the greatest achievements of humankind.
     But as you share these emerging ruminations with your daughter, who has now turned 19, and is thoroughly enjoying her history lectures at Cambridge, you find her insights into Kafka's threatening universe, afforded initially by her English school teacher, have progressed. As if you needed to know, she shares with you on King's College quad the reason why it is that those calming pills are now a part of your own life. Your daughter admitted that a history don helped her to see yet deeper into the meaning of Kafka before explaining that a condition of perpetual mental paralysis and neediness is the darkest of the themes he explores as he investigates the strange machinations of state power and its impact which, for Emily's academic mum, was not something she had to be reminded.
     Her teachers at school and at university never published anything in print form and in the case of the Cambridge fellow this was allowed to pass as he was getting on. Like his professional colleague in school, Emily's English teacher, he had a profound and moving impact upon his student through both an authentic engagement with literature and how he conveyed that to his students. As she found at Cambridge, it was the don who took a real interest in teaching his students which meant knowing them as individuals, rather than pursue an obsession with publishing academic papers, who mattered to her and who she will never forget as long as she lives. Her mum, of course, regrets his impact.
     Real evidence of impact endures and does not need to be measured and judged through strange rituals of bureaucratic audit. If we continue in that vein we risk undermining the very values upon which our lives are made worth living.

 

Chris Holligan is an academic, and formally an English school teacher. He writes here in a personal capacity