An alternative system against publish or perish: the (still free) applied sciences in Germany

Laura is a motivated PhD student from Italy. Remembering the non-existent good old days and sipping a bit of prosecco, she told me recently about a weird first day at the university in Milan. “Imagine this”, she said.

With a rather stiff upper lip and a well-defined rhythm in his steps, the professor in charge of the PhD workshop where Laura was nervously sitting spoke,

- If you are to remember ONE thing, remember this -and he showed them a slide while going back and forth on his very academic toe stand.

Laura will never forget it, not even the dark green background and those thorny white letters. But she is in the system and does not think she will escape it anymore; “I want to become a professor, so what should I do”. The simple yet somewhat pugnacious message read “publish or perish”.

- Well, Laura -I said, not sipping a prosecco but a questionable coffee of nasty acid nature- you can always publish and perish.

Laura is not her real name, neither is Milan the right city, because revealing the right name might indeed lead to perishing in the very mysterious culture that we have built and fostered as academics.

A rather famous professor recently asked himself (and his online crowd) why it is normal to end up writing hundreds of pages to a journal reviewer, hoping to publish an article in a top-tier journal. Some -also renowned academics- ended up saying something like “how far have we come”, “why do we accept this”, but the thing that everyone knows is that if you don’t play by the rules, you will not enter the realm of acclaimed and highly cited intellectuals (what a goal). While I see many of my fellow friends and colleagues (especially in the US, Italian and some Latin American systems) work themselves to something similar to despair in order to fill their yearly article quotas, I have my hopes due to a rather different system that has not yet been contaminated entirely by the horrible publish or perish culture. I am talking about a potential hero in our story, but let us linger on the villain for a moment.

Publishing ends up becoming far more important in the current system, because it is seen as the pure output of scientific thought. All the hours put into great teaching, interminable student advisories to guide students in difficult moments or alluring forks-in-the-road, that lies below the dust of history’s silence, i.e. existential ingratitude, as a fellow character in my stories would say. Among the other million of issues that pervade academia, one thing stands out for me: what about caring for students and their issues? Is that not part of the essence of pedagogy and education?

Enter the modest hero. I am talking about the system of Applied Sciences in Germany. I happen to know this mysterious one given the luck I have had to explore it in practice. In Germany, there are, among others, two branches in the system of higher education, i.e. the universities (the big public ones that you surely have heard of: LMU München, TU Berlin, Humboldt Universität, etc) and the universities of applied sciences, which we call Fachhochschulen in German. Let us stick to one among the many differences: the UoAS focus on practical matters, on bringing down theory from, i.a. ivory towers and beautiful abstractions to typical interactions and situations of our everyday lives. Some have trodden the path of publish and perish unfortunately, but not all. Yes, in this system there are rigorous methods involved, and theory does play a role, but in the world of Fachhochschulen, even if full professors tend to teach more hours and are all required to have a PhD, some universities have still not fallen in the craze of shooting out publications like good old Ford’s T-Model, en masse.

Nassim Taleb, one of those authors I like reading even if I know him to be skeptical of university (of applied sciences) people like me, makes a powerful point: there is noise and there is signal. You can bombard the world with millions of articles (noise), or you can bring out things, after having seen them mature, that are actual signals.

Science, Taleb says, is not about competition and rankings. Yet in our human nature, these two issues seem sadly inevitable. Yet, and here is my hope, another inevitability of some humans is to oppose mainstream pressures and try to pull out from the stream of haste. The system of the Applied Sciences and also the separation of universities and technical institutes would benefit countries, especially those in the developing world that has preferred innovating in the letter and not in down-to-earth problem solving.

In the current “publish or perish culture”, the implicit absurdity and horribly wrong incentive is that teaching does not make your career and life advance, but I am convinced that it does. Generating the right incentives for this, and welcoming publications whenever there actually is something to write and enrich our surroundings with, is in fact possible.

If you are curious and want to know more about our system of applied sciences in Germany, this may be a nice place to start: https://www.mygermanuniversity.com/articles/university-of-applied-sciences-in-germany-uas

Source: made using Midjourney