Peer Review, Amis Style

I have read for pleasure for as long as I remember, some books haunting me for years after I finish them, others drawing me in only while they last. But two authors had a particularly formative influence on me in my late teens, in very different ways. Richard Dawkins caused me to reassess my position in the world. And Martin Amis showed me that so-called literary novels could also be pretty good fun. In the couple of decades since, my tastes have changed. Amis’s early novels, which made such an impression, were written while he was much younger than I am now. They are probably best left to sixth formers and twentysomethings. And as for Dawkins, well, I was convinced early on, argumentitatively so for a while; but the need to fight those fights left me as I drifted into the happy state of live and let live that Ben Goldacre wonderfully characterises as ‘apatheism’: "I'm an apatheist. It's not that i don't believe, it's more that I find all discussion of the issue shit-boring". Dawkins, of course, is still fighting; and Amis is still writing. Indeed, superficially the two seem to have followed similar trajectories from exclusive schools through Oxbridge and early brilliance and into… well, if satirist Craig Brown’s name hadn’t appeared at the bottom of this set of (supposed) Dawkins tweets would you have known they were in Private Eye? And his second volume of memoirs was greeted in Nature thus: “Brief Candle is about as edgy as Sir Mick and the Rolling Stones cranking out the 3,578th rendition of 'Brown Sugar' — a treat for fans, but reinscribing boundaries rather than crossing them”. Amis is also an easy target for ridicule, expressing with apparent seriousness not enormously sophisticated opinions on grown-up issues, like (according to the magnificent Chris Morris) 'a senile 12-year-old'. Nearly time (he's 66) for him to consider his own advice:

“Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour. They come good at thirty, they peak at fifty… at seventy, novelists are ready to be kicked upstairs.”

As with so many things I got up to when I was young, then, reading Dawkins and Amis is probably best remembered fondly than attempting again now.

And yet.

I just read a Martin Amis book. True, it was not a novel, rather a book of his literary criticism and journalism (The War Against Cliche - just the kind of ‘bits and pieces’ book I enjoy). But it was good fun, and reminded me of Amis’s twin saving graces. First, he can really write. It’s partly the technical stuff - elsewhere, he writes that you should never start successive paragraphs with the same word, unless for effect, in which case do three in a row. Impossible to unread that command and I’ve obeyed it ever since. Whether or not it makes a difference stylistically, it makes you think about your writing in useful ways. More generally I just derive great pleasure from reading a sentence like:

“Excluding a few dry-outs, in hospitals and prisons, and the very occasional self-imposed prohibition, Malcolm Lowry was shitfaced for thirty-five years”

or:

“The book bristles with beauties, charm, sublime comedies; it is also, for long stretches (approaching about 75% of the whole), inhumanly dull… The question ‘What happens next’ has no meaning, because there is no next in Don Quixote’s world: there is only more.”

The second reason to re-try Amis is that he’s funny.

For instance, he decides to review Desmond Morris’s The Soccer Tribe by writing six pages of anecdote about the travails of being an intellectual football fan (note for younger readers: in the 1980s football fans were a trainspottery bunch, before Sky required us to profess to enjoy the lucrative game), not mentioning the book until the final sentence, whereupon:

“I have only time to add that Morris’s book is handsomely packaged, that the pictures are great, magic, brill, etc., and that the text is an austere, an unfaltering distillation of the obvious and the obviously false.”

For instance, on Norman Mailer:

“He isn’t frightened of sounding outrageous; he isn’t frightened of making a fool of himself; and, above all, he isn’t frightened of being boring. Well, fear has its uses.”

For instance, the new monster in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World

“…shows promise. It is a carnotaurus, a light-heavyweight with horns… ‘Diet: Meat’, as my dinosaur encyclopaedia bluntly assures us. This is good. In the Jurassic era, as in our own, vegetarians are a drag.”

So he can write, he can amuse, and he can, of course, be cruel. (On Crichton again: “Animals — especially, if not quite exclusively, velociraptors — are what his is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose.”) But Amis’s reviews are also, in aggregate, much nicer than I had expected. He states as much himself: as a critic,

“[y]ou hope to get more relaxed and confident over time; and you should certainly get (or seem to get) kinder… Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realise how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember… ”

This surprising (and admittedly somewhat self-interested - note the ‘how long they remember’…) sensitivity to the efforts of others - no matter how substandard - is echoed in his review of a volume of John Updike’s collected journalism:

“Kind to stragglers and also-rans, to well-meaning duds and worthies, and correspondingly cautious in his praise of acknowledged stars and masters, Updike’s view of twentieth-century literature is a levelling one. Talent, like life, should be available to all.”

Think on this, then, before you set upon the next unfortunate manuscript to land in your inbox. And try always to get kinder.

Piloting the Imperial Shuttle

At staff meetings and the like, I often find myself channelling Princess Leia. The HoD, faculty head, or whoever will be outlining some pioneering new initiative, but what I’ll hear is General Madine announcing the theft of an Imperial shuttle to the assembled rebels in Return of the Jedi: “Disguised as a cargo ship, and using a secret Imperial code, a strike team will land on the moon and deactivate the shield generator.” To which I incredulously respond (usually - I hope! - to myself), “Who have they found to pull that off?!”

Well, finally - finally! - I get to be General Solo, and my strike team is assembled.

The hazardous, desperate, hare-brained, potentially glorious mission in question? Establishing an interdisciplinary curriculum to deliver to 5000+ second year undergraduate students here at the University of Sheffield. Specifically, I have taken on a part time secondment as an Academic Lead within our new cross-faculty programme, Achieve More, which aims to offer all of our undergraduates the chance to work collaboratively, across disciplines, to better understand some of the major challenges facing society - and how research can help to address these.

Various things attracted me to this post - and one should not underestimate the influence that turning 40 can have on major life decisions - but essentially, I applied because I think it is time to walk the walk of interdisciplinarity. Back in 2007, when I participated in NESTA’s Crucible programme (about which I have written before), I was already pretty sold on the idea the tools required to address global challenges would need to be draw from a range of different disciplines. At a Crucible reception, we heard the head of HEFCE commit to this interdisciplinary agenda, and subsequent funding initiatives in the environmental sector (e.g. Valuing Nature) have backed up this commitment to a certain extent.

But something else they got us to do on Crucible was to design the ‘University of Utopia’ - given a blank slate, how would we go about designing a university? Our plans differed in details - things such as establishing fast lanes so that academics can walk briskly between buildings unimpeded by loitering students, as I recall - but one common thread was that none of us went for a departmental structure. Put simply, if you start from the perspective of questions or challenges - ‘food security’ would be a good example - then it makes little sense to sit all the plant scientists in one building, apart from all the political scientists, historians, chemists, and so on.

And yet, universities are the way they are - to some extent, the way they have always been - and departments are not going away. Initiatives like Achieve More, then, are intended to bring us that bit closer to Utopia. It is no surprise that we are not alone in thinking this way - indeed, I would suggest there is a general trend across the UK higher education sector to offer students broader opportunities, in addition to the depth of disciplinary knowledge that has always HE’s primary selling point. Both Exeter and UCL, to pick a couple of examples, have programmes allowing students to engage with research with a focus on major societal challenges.

In part this is a recruitment tool, sold on employability. For instance, I recently heard digital health entrepreneur Kieran Daly say that businesses such as those he supports are looking to hire T-shaped people - graduates with a breadth of knowledge across disciplines, as well as a depth of knowledge within their core subject. How widely-held this preference is among employers remains to be seen, but certainly some of the key qualities we are seeking to instil - effective teamwork, good communication skills, a range of critical thinking skills, and so on - ought to look good on any CV.

More generally, however, this shift towards a more holistic view of what higher education should deliver can be thought of as an attempt to re-establish the idea of ‘scholarship’ in a 21^st Century context. Some existing programmes seem focused much more on enriching the undergraduate experience than on ticking ‘employability’ boxes - see the Broad Vision programme at the University of Westminster, for example, which gets artists and scientists involved in creative conversations and collaborative projects. This chimes really well with my own experiences on Crucible and elsewhere: above all, working outside the comfort zone of your own discipline - especially when you are given the freedom to fail, to talk and collaborate and create but ultimately to come up with nothing functional - ought to be fun.

All very well in theory, then; but the devil, of course, is in the logistics. What separates Achieve More from programmes at other institutions is the scale of its ambition - we want all our students want to participate, not just a highly motivated, self-selected few. Which means that conversations with colleagues typically start with ‘That’s a great idea BUT…’ Better, of course, than ‘That’s a terrible idea AND…’ But the ‘BUT’ is big. And addressing that is what will be keeping me busy for a while.

So if you’ll excuse me, people are relying on me to get that shield down. I just need more time…

Science, Gender, and the Social Network

Some while ago, preparing a piece for the British Ecological Society’s Bulletin on the general scarcity of female ecology professors, we had the pleasure of interviewing Professor Anne Glover. (Shortly afterwards Anne went on to become EU Chief Scientist. Coincidence? You decide…) One of the things that Anne talked to us about was the importance of informal social networks in career progression within science. Business conducted after hours, over drinks. Basically Bigwig A asking Bigwig B if he (inevitably) could think of anyone suitable for this new high level committee, or that new editorial board; Bigwig B responding that he knew just the chap. That kind of thing. In some ways this is one of the less tractable parts of the whole gender in science thing. Much harder to confront, in many ways, than the outright and unashamed misogyny of the likes of Tim Hunt, simply because it is so much harder to pin down. We know that all male panels in conferences, for instance, are rarely the result of conscious discrimination, more often stemming from thoughtlessness, laziness, or more implicit bias.

With something as public as a conference, of course, then we can easily point out such imbalances, and smart conference organisers can take steps to avoid them. (My strategy, by the way, is to identify the top names in your field, and invite members of their research groups. Has worked wonders for workshops I have run.) But how to get more diversity out of those those agreements made over a pint (or post-pint, at the urinals)?

One way is to take steps to help a wide range of early career scientists to raise their profile. Be nice to them online, invite them to give talks, promote their papers, and so on. But another way into prominence is through publishing. Not your own papers (though that helps, of course); but the process of publishing others. Get a reputation for reviewing manuscripts well, and invitations onto editorial boards will follow. From their, editorial board meetings and socials, and your name starts to gain currency among influential people.

All of which is fine, but peer review is an invitation-only club. If you’re not invited, you’re not coming in.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I’m on a couple of editorial boards - Journal of Animal Ecology and Biology Letters. As a handling editor, I am responsible, among other things, for inviting referees to review manuscripts. And when I do this, you can bet your life that I will be calling on those potential reviewers nominated by the authors. Not exclusively, but certainly they will figure.

And I started to wonder what kind of gender balance there might be among these suggestions. 34 papers in, here’s your answer. (I should stress that the identity of the journals has no bearing on the following, all statistics are purely the result of choices made by submitting authors.) Over 40% of submitting authors did not suggest any female referees, with female suggested referees exceeding males on only 2 occasions, and a median proportion of 15% female suggestions. The number of suggested female referees does not increase with the total number of referees suggested, neither is there any relationship between the proportion of female authors (median in this sample of 1/3) and proportion of female suggested referees (correlation of 0.05, if you want numbers). Here’s a couple of figures:

What’s the message here? Maybe we need to start thinking more carefully about lists of names we come up with, not just when these choices will be public - speakers at a conference for example; but also - perhaps especially - when they will not. And not just because of benefits that reviewers may or may not eventually receive in terms of board membership and so on. We get quickly jaded about the whole process of reviewing manuscripts, and forget too soon what a confidence boost it can be to be asked.

And just a coda: I’ve been thinking about this blog post for some time, a year at least. What is depressing is the number of occasions over that year - Hunt’s ridiculous outburst merely the most recent - when I have thought ‘I must get that post written, it’s so topical right now.’ How many years since Anne Glover outlined all these issues to us? (Eight, and counting.) How much has actually changed?

Well, one thing has, at least - the rise of new social networks, the online community that can be cruel but can also be incredibly supportive, providing a voice for those whom certain public figures would prefer to remain mute. These networks are open, no longer dependent - thank goodness - on 1950s values, beer-fuelled patronage, and old school ties.