RESEARCHING

[摘要] The private reasons for "researching" are . . . plain: it is the shortest path to promotion and prestige; it frees the able young from drudgery and often entails paid travel. For an organization man to be "put on research" is the same as for a horse to be put out to grass-no stated hours or set duties. The very essence of research is that no precise result can be specified. The sense of privilege and of exceptional status that comes with research also obtains in the academic world to which it is native. It explains the popularity of honors work in colleges. It is a cause of the flight from teaching in universities-and of the many other flights to meetings and conferences across the world. The motive is not laziness or cynicism, any more than it is a passion for knowledge. Rather, it is a desire to escape the boredom of ordinary non-work. The flight is not so much from classroom study or from teaching as such, or from executive responsibility in a business or government office; it is from an excess of people, paper, confusion, conferring, and frustration.Research affords the further pleasure of any specialism, that is, a comfortable monopoly, the emotional protection of "my subject": an adroit researcher manages to have a field as nearly as possible to himself. Society favoring an infinite division of labor, it is the mark of the second-rate to generalize, as it is of the depraved to popularize. But specialism need not mean solitary confinement.

[学科分类] 儿科学