Fashionable Despair: Observations on the Demise of Standards

Abstract

Abstract. Claims of cross-institutional declines in cannot be gainsaid. Fashionable Despair about such declines may have foundations in important challenges to public institutions other than those based on alleged disarticulation between values and criteria. The claims of declining may be better examined in context of interest conflicts. And interest conflicts may be at level of basic values, not merely criteria designed to represent them. This discussion raises questions about claim of falling and identifies some existing resources for thinking about it. Introduction Professor Benjamin Singer's apocalyptic analysis of demise of in professions, in leading institutions, and in public life paints worrisome picture of society whose values have been co-opted by forces of expediency, leaving culture deeply rudderless and ultimately on brink of barbarism. Incompetence marks ranks of physicians, scientists, educators, and accountants. Quality control has declined in both animate and inanimate, i.e., both in politicians and in Ford motor cars. A pervasive fin de siecle malaise replaces an earlier age of authenticity in times past when experience with essential things of our lives was most often individual and empirical as opposed to collective and external. Why is this so? Standards have become disarticulated from their underlying values and media of assessment and representation have come to occupy place where were once closely guarded. Professor Singer further argues that biased assessment criteria for identifying quality and performance actually replace meaningful with trivial measurements of convenience, and professional behaviour changes accordingly. Indeed, bad faith would appear to replace professional duty. Professors write banal papers with high probability of acceptance by refereed journals because numbers of publications outweigh their quality. Lawyers take only cases they can win, and surgeons decline hazardous operations. Not only this, but professionals are encouraged to falsify their credentials to take advantage of frailties of criterial systems, and so advance their careers, not through what Goffman called benign misrepresentation, but through outright deceit: scientific researchers publish fraudulent findings to make it through criterial systems for tenure and promotion. And what is solution? The solution is development of a new sociological paradigm of complex, new general social science of standards. Professor Singer acknowledges that such an enterprise would not turn its back on more common sociological territory -- marketplace dynamics, bureaucracies and professions -- though these are described as the other major forces that drive standards [emphasis added], as though criteria were an autonomous force of greater gravity than familiar sociological variables. What can be said of diagnosis and of solution? In my view, Benjamin Singer's paper mirrors, and indeed amplifies, crisis literature about which he writes. He exhibits healthy doubt about virtues of technological rationality, and like other humanists, seeks reintegration of reason and values. In this I subscribe to his enthusiastic views. However, in some respects, his arguments are prone to undercurrents of scholasticism and Platonism. In general, paper reflects fashionable despair of postmodern times. It sometimes conflates doubt and critique with caricature. Like many readers, I am skeptical of accuracy of his diagnosis of age of criteria, and doubtful about utility of his solution. Are Standards Falling? Social scientists are not unaccustomed to proclamations of immanent crisis. Popular support for social change and law reform has often been initiated by dire warnings of impending doom if steps are not taken to eliminate such intrusions into culture as narcotics, alcohol, white slavery, dangerous foreigners, sports hooligans, and, in age of Manning's Reform Party, secular humanism. …