Extras: Phil Magness on Academic Integrity

November 27, 2022

J.J. Grandville illustration from Swift's Gulliver's Travels

Bad practices and bad practitioners give academia and academics a bad name. It's an old problem, perhaps impossible to solve. But, we can do better. The results, when we don't, are horrible. 
In a recent Great Antidote podcast, Phil Magness on Academic Integrity: Public Choice Edition, host Juliette Sellgren and guest Phil Magness talk about what happens when scholars get something really, really wrong and other problems in academia. The replication crisis and problems with too lenient publication processes are discussed but Magness also focuses on ideology within the professoriate. Here’s Magness: 
You see a lot of claims coming out of the academy that are put forth on the authority of supposed expertise, but turn out to be based on political ideology or just really bad understandings of the subject areas. I guess another way of saying this is that I would urge everyone in your cohort and your age to be skeptical and stoically humble about the way that they approach what they're seeing and hearing in the classroom.
Colleges and universities are not perfect institutions and the individuals in them - including faculty - are also imperfect. As someone who has been close to academia most of my adult life, I often wonder what an impartial spectator would think of some of the truly weird things that happen there. As the assistant editor of AdamSmithWorks, I wonder about Smith’s career trajectory which includes being a public lecturer, academia, being a private tutor, a writer with a pension, and later in life a Commissioner of Customs in Edinburgh. Smith left academia and never went back although it seems likely he probably could have. Is there an implied criticism in that?  

Criticisms of academia are nothing new. They have likely been around as long as academia has been. One of my favorite criticisms is delightful illustrated in one of Smith’s favorite novels: Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (more popularly known as Gulliver’s Travels). 

If you only know the Gulliver’s Travels of Jack Black or Ted Danson, with scrambling Lilliputians you are missing a lot. Even published versions of the text often edit out large sections. But my favorite section of the book is the very weird Part 3, “A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib and Japan.” Here I’ll focus on Lemuel Gulliver’s travels to Balnibarbi but I hope you’ll read the whole thing yourself someday (if you haven’t already). It contains a story that some think is the first example of science fiction as well as a magician's dwelling containing the ghosts of Julius Caesar, René Descartes, and others. 

But back to Balnibarbi. Here, Gulliver is given a tour of the lands by a great lord, Munodi. Here is what he sees: 
The next morning after [Gulliver’s] arrival, [Munodi] took me in his chariot to see the town, which is about half the bigness of London; but the houses very strangely built, and most of them out of repair. The people in the streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags. We passed through one of the town gates, and went about three miles into the country, where I saw many labourers working with several sorts of tools in the ground, but was not able to conjecture what they were about; neither did I observe any expectation either of corn or grass, although the soil appeared to be excellent. 
This sounds pretty awful. But the journey continues. 
But, in three hours travelling, the scene was wholly altered; we came into a most beautiful country; farmers’ houses, at small distances, neatly built; the fields enclosed, containing vineyards, corn-grounds, and meadows. Neither do I remember to have seen a more delightful prospect. His excellency observed my countenance to clear up; he told me, with a sigh, “that there his estate began, and would continue the same, till we should come to his house: that his countrymen ridiculed and despised him, for managing his affairs no better, and for setting so ill an example to the kingdom; which, however, was followed by very few, such as were old, and wilful, and weak like himself.

We came at length to the house, which was indeed a noble structure, built according to the best rules of ancient architecture. The fountains, gardens, walks, avenues, and groves, were all disposed with exact judgment and taste. I gave due praises to every thing I saw, whereof his excellency took not the least notice till after supper; when, there being no third companion, he told me with a very melancholy air “that he doubted he must throw down his houses in town and country, to rebuild them after the present mode; destroy all his plantations, and cast others into such a form as modern usage required, and give the same directions to all his tenants, unless he would submit to incur the censure of pride, singularity, affectation, ignorance, caprice, and perhaps increase his majesty’s displeasure; 
What?!? Asks the reader along with Gulliver. Munodi explains: 
That about forty years ago, certain persons went up to Laputa, either upon business or diversion, and, after five months continuance, came back with a very little smattering in mathematics, but full of volatile spirits acquired in that airy region: that these persons, upon their return, began to dislike the management of every thing below, and fell into schemes of putting all arts, sciences, languages, and mechanics, upon a new foot. To this end, they procured a royal patent for erecting an academy of projectors in Lagado; and the humour prevailed so strongly among the people, that there is not a town of any consequence in the kingdom without such an academy. In these colleges the professors contrive new rules and methods of agriculture and building, and new instruments, and tools for all trades and manufactures; whereby, as they undertake, one man shall do the work of ten; a palace may be built in a week, of materials so durable as to last for ever without repairing. All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase a hundred fold more than they do at present; with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection; and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes. By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth’s men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.
This sets the reader up quite nicely for the following chapter where Gulliver is permitted to see the grand academy of Lagado where sooty-faced, ragged men beg for money to continue their project to extract sunlight from cucumbers and blind men are attempting to train other blind men to identify paint colors by feeling and smelling. There are also poop experiments which would not be surprising this far into the work to readers who began at the beginning but it might be unexpected if you’re reading it excerpted. 

Munodi’s introduction to the academy is not as entertaining as the tour of it but it’s the point where readers get to see the devastation that comes from people trying to impose bad ideas and the consequences of those decisions for people living under them, “The people in the streets walked fast, looked wild, their eyes fixed, and were generally in rags.”

Swift is showing his readers what happens when good in theory becomes VERY bad in practice, a lesson good economists often shout as well. 


Want to Read More? 
Shannon Chamberlain’s Gulliver's Travels: Adam Smith's Favorite Novel
https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/gulliver-s-travels-adam-smith-s-favorite-novel

Alice Temnick’s On Gulliver, Swift, and Adam Smith
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