The arteries of science

Since I got to Taiwan I’ve wondered why my new NCTU colleagues are so much more interesting than almost all academics I knew in London (or in Sweden for that matter). Then it suddenly struck me: they are almost all my own age — between 40 and 50, let’s say … For better or worse, they are just a lot more me.

The reason is surely that European universities expanded their social science departments in the 1960s and 70s whereas Taiwanese universities expanded theirs in the 1990s. In the 60s and 70s it was statistical studies and rational choice that was the big thing. That’s what PhD students studied and that’s what they continued to teach once they got tenured jobs. Since there were lots and lots of these people they soon occupied all positions in academia all over Europe, clogging the arteries of science like a big lump of tosh.

By contrast people of my generation who got their PhDs in the 1990s — at least the cool ones among us — were all doing versions of Foucault and post-modernism. That’s where the action was; that’s what made your name, got you high, got you laid. OK, much of the intellectual excitement may have evaporated since then but in a pair-wise comparison the ex-Foucaultian will always be far more interesting than the still practicing rational choice theorist. Here in Taiwan it is we who clog up the arteries of science.