Di professori e di sgherri: scienza (aperta) e amministrazione universitaria

Of professors and goons: Open science and university administration Abstract The question "What are universities for?" is the subject of a recurring debate for at least two reasons: (1) because the interest in utility cannot prevail over the search for truth without delegitimizing both the profit-serving university and its clients or masters; (2) because utility and its science, economics, can only reign in conditions of scarcity - in which it is possible to evade the philosophical question proposed by Keynes: what is economics for? More specifically, what is the use of economics in modern science, which deals not only with ideas whose use is neither exclusive nor rival, but which is public and no longer secret? The neoliberal university avoids this question - which is a philosophical question about freedom - by means of bureaucracy. Its quantitative evaluation of research imposes on researchers what Keynes would have called relative needs. Under such a constraint, they spend their time on mostly quantitative tasks and rituals that have very little to do with the quality of scholarship and are more akin to the bullshit jobs theorized by David Graber. An example of this is the administrative implementation of open science: the infrastructure to facilitate it - web, open archives and scientific communities - was already in place in the 90s of the last century. However, the most widespread choice today is to chain it to the oligopolies of commercial scientific publishing, with expensive contracts called "transformative", so that the journal-based and citation-based quantitative evaluation of research can be preserved. The literature on the damage done to research and teaching by university bureaucracy is both endless and useless, partly because attempts to reform it are more than timid. David Graeber, on the other hand, can help us to suspect that this damage is not an "undesirable effect" but a key feature. Indeed, this kind of managerial feudalism is highly effective in preventing university professors from making public use of reason, while allowing them to wear their gowns for ceremonial and marketing purpose. After all, to quote Stafford Beer, "the purpose of a system is what it does".