The 2nd Beijing Graduate Student Academic Forum on the History and Philosophy of Science was finally wrapped up last weekend~ After the forum, I caught up on sleep + spent two days tinkering with the blog as a change of pace, and only now have I begun to write the summary.
I was the main person in charge of organizing this forum, and my chief work was contacting students from various schools, calling for paper submissions, and moderating the review process, and so on. At the beginning, everyone’s enthusiasm was not high; it was not until the last moment that submissions started flooding in, which in the final half-month almost drove me mad……
Of course, Wu Ningning and Liu Ping were a huge help in the later stages. Wu Ningning was responsible for purchasing conference gifts and printing materials, while Liu Ping handled all the miscellaneous logistical chores and, in the end, called together and led the entire master’s student team. Without the two of them, relying only on my own working ability, this conference definitely would not have gotten off the ground. In particular, during the final week I was so exhausted that I basically threw everything to them to decide. In addition, Zhang Shen was responsible for technical support, mainly the layout of the conference handbook and taking photos at the venue. There were some mishaps with the layout work, but after all it was a fairly laborious task, and it also took a good bit of the burden off my shoulders. That said, I was actually quite willing to do the layout myself; I had some experience laying out class journals in high school and laying out *Gongqing Yuan* in college. If I had done the layout, it would probably have been more elaborate, with a small amount of illustration and more flexible use of fonts (for example, the Founder font library: Qigong, Huangcao, Songti, Heiti, as well as the general use of Microsoft YaHei).
Actually, compared with them, my workload was not all that heavy, but it was indeed very draining mentally, because during that period I had to use my cellphone, email, and QQ every day to stay in touch with students from all sides. At first I sent mass emails and text messages; later I would call people one by one from time to time to communicate. Even when I was not taking the initiative to contact others, I had to stay on guard against incoming calls at any time. It made me tense and anxious; I often could not sleep, especially in the daytime. After finally managing to catch a bit of sleep, I could be jolted awake at any moment. For someone like me, who has never liked making phone calls, it really was a painful experience……
At the beginning, the contact work was mainly about soliciting papers and publicity. We provided posters and flyers to the various universities. For the schools farther away, Wu Ningning sent them by courier; for the ones along Zhongguancun Street and Xueyuan Road, I made a circuit on my bike. Among them, the liaison at Beijing Institute of Technology was the least reliable, standing me up for an hour and throwing my plan into disarray. He took the most flyers, yet the paper-submission and registration work was also the slowest and least efficient.
At first there were very few responses to the call for papers, which made me worry for a time that the forum would not be able to take place. In the end, though, submissions came pouring in during the last half-month, reaching more than eighty papers, which gave me another headache.
But the online submission model I designed was not widely accepted; the vast majority of submissions were sent to me through school liaisons or by email, and very few people submitted directly online. Besides, the lateness of the submission period also meant there simply was not enough time for close reading and exchange.
I also designed an online model for the review process: first, several reviewers would be selected from each school and given permission to view the papers that had not been made public; the reviewers could reply online, so that each reviewer and author could carry out a round of internal exchange. In this way, submitters and reviewers could get to know each other in advance on the website. Reviewers would first offer comments and questions through the site, and submitters could respond and improve their work. In this sense, on the one hand, the review group would deepen its understanding of the submitters (not only the articles themselves, but also their ability to explain, answer, and debate); on the other hand, submitters could use this stage of online exchange to polish their articles. In addition to revising and improving the articles themselves according to the reviewers’ comments, they might also gain a better understanding of other readers’ confusion, demands, and interests, and thus present their reports in a more targeted way. This process is similar to what Teacher Liu Xiaoli described as the talent-show selection process: the students ultimately selected are all polished through refinement, and those who are ultimately not selected have also engaged in beneficial exchange with friends from other universities online. If one wished, the author could further open permissions in moderation, allowing students other than the reviewers to participate in preconference and postconference exchange.
But clearly, this design did not receive broad support. Very few students were willing to post directly themselves, and even fewer were willing to open permissions in moderation. What exactly were they afraid of? Some lacked confidence in their papers and did not want them to receive public commentary. That feeling is understandable; however, the academic stage ought to be a place of contest and striving. Being modest and cautious is one thing; not daring to face debate and challenge is another. Others place great importance on their so-called copyright, saying that because the article has not yet been published it is inconvenient to make it public, but even if these articles were published, no one would read them. What does it matter to show them to others now? Besides, the articles in our submission area were visible only to registered users and would generally not be indexed by search engines. Even stranger, these two situations often overlapped. That is to say, on the one hand they were unwilling to face criticism, while on the other hand they attached great importance to copyright, as if these shabby articles in which they themselves lacked confidence were somehow something to be fought over for priority? In fact, when they fought for publication, it was not at all in order to fight for priority, but simply for publication itself. What they were concerned about was not that novel ideas might be plagiarized before publication, but that they would later be pursued by the journal and therefore could not be published.
Why, in the end, do we publish articles? As things stand, the main purpose of publication seems to be merely to establish academic standing, and this academic standing is chiefly determined by the number of articles and the number of citations. If there is any purpose to publishing a paper besides publication itself, then it is to be read and cited by others. Isn’t that so? But the meaning of academic journals was originally not like this. A journal is different from a monograph; it was originally a platform for exchange. News magazines arose out of the conversational atmosphere of cafés, and academic journals, besides cafés, are also an extension of the traditions of learned societies and private correspondence, originating in society newsletters and public mailboxes. The rise of academic journals made what had originally been local and private exchange public. Of course, the opening of a new public sphere should be traced back to the emergence of the printed book, and the rise of the journal marked the maturity of this emerging public sphere. From then on, the new stage opened by print was largely complete, and the academic world finally fully adapted to the environment of print, until the emergence of the internal combustion engine (convenient transportation) and electronic technology once again provided academia with new spaces for exchange.
That is to say, the journal was originally one link in the exchange space of print-era scholarship, and its meaning was inseparable from the traditions of learned societies and correspondence. We can see that even when Darwin and Wallace were competing for priority, what played the decisive role was still correspondence and oral presentation. The purpose of publishing articles in journals was to attract the attention of the academic community; ultimately, it should still lead to discussion and correspondence. Then, traces of this tradition still remain in today’s academic journals. We see that in journals, after the author’s name, it is often necessary to print the author’s mailing address and postal code. This seems to be preserved as a kind of ritual, but why print the address? If it is only so that the journal editors can contact the author, then clearly there is no need to print the mailing address. If it is only to introduce the author’s origin or institution, then there is no need to print the postal code. So then, does the purpose implied by this ritual not precisely mean that one of the purposes of publishing an article was originally to expect direct feedback from readers? But if that is the case, then why not print the email address? Since nowadays people mostly communicate by email and other electronic media, why do papers still print, and only print, the postal code? Is it just to locate the institution precisely and avoid ambiguity?
The birth of academic journals did not replace the letter-writing tradition of modern scholars. We can see that even into the twentieth century, those famous scientists, thinkers, politicians, artists, and so on would leave behind a thick stack of “collections of letters” for later scholars and textual critics to sort through, and many original ideas first flashed forth in letters. But what about us now? Whether we are scholars or not, we simply do not write letters anymore. It is not that journals have replaced letters, but that the internet has replaced letters. If we now want to seek guidance from a scholar thousands of miles away, we can immediately send an email, which they can receive right away; it is far more efficient than mailing a letter. Yet the academic world, especially the Chinese academic world, has not timely allowed the internet to replace letters in status. Email’s speed seems to make it feel less solemn, let alone BBS forums, blogs, QQ, and other more fashionable tools. In the eyes of great scholars, these clever tricks and gimmicks seem unworthy of the cultured and refined, though more and more scholars are now publishing their email addresses and even setting up personal blogs. But even they rarely take these media seriously; rarely do they seriously engage in academic exchange with others via email, BBS, or blogs. But are they still clinging to tradition and insisting on letter exchange? I’m afraid not. They have abandoned the traditional way of communication and also reject newer ways of communication. So how do scholars communicate? Running around all day attending those laborious, wasteful, and useless meetings? Giving a symbolic five-minute or ten-minute report at the meeting, then stuffing themselves and drinking their fill, and that counts as academic exchange?
The academic world must acknowledge this fact: scholarship has not yet mastered the internet. The ways of communication in the internet age have broken the traditional mode of exchange based on written texts, but the academic world has not yet adapted to these new conditions. The current situation in academia is rather like the scholastic tradition of the Middle Ages facing paper and the printing press: the old academic model is bound to be broken. A scholastic philosopher might perhaps think (he certainly could hardly imagine such a scene) that widely duplicating one’s own writings for the public, or even hawking one’s work in the marketplace, was simply an absurd act of boastfulness, vanity, and contempt for knowledge; yet this is exactly what scholars in the age of print did. And now the great professors often cannot imagine a fully networked academic model, or they imagine such a possibility as nothing but the noise and impatience of the age.
Indeed, the spirit of scholarship is to a large extent conservative and cannot be trendy, but what exactly are we conserving? When people no longer actually use postal communication, does retaining postal codes in journals count as conservatism? That is only preserving without truly conserving; it is not at all able to conserve the tradition of academic communication under the impact of the new wave. What we must conserve is the spirit of the tradition, not the ritual of the tradition. Conservatism itself is a kind of innovation: only innovation makes conservation possible under changing historical conditions. Let me repeat once more what I said when founding keshizhe.net:
The networking of scholarship is the general trend, but exactly how it should be networked will depend on what our generation does. Judging from the present situation, academia is still almost completely passive in the face of the internet tide, at most using the internet merely as a neutral tool—for example, using the internet to search for journal articles is nothing more than being a little faster than running to the library to search, while journals themselves continue to be produced in the same old way; for another example, academic conferences use the internet to release information and contact people, which is only somewhat more efficient than sending letters, but the conference itself continues to be organized in the same old way. We may treat technology as a neutral tool, but in fact it is not. New technologies are fundamentally reshaping our way of life, and they will eventually reshape the way academic activity is conducted as well. Willfully ignoring technology’s power to shape us cannot allow us to preserve tradition; on the contrary, it may mean that we lose ourselves in the face of technology and become slaves to the logic of efficiency. Only when we regard technology merely as a neutral tool does technology appear as nothing more than the “logic of efficiency.”
What I have been striving for is to take the initiative and ride the wave of the internet. This does not mean that I unconditionally regard the internet as something good; on the contrary, the internet has taken away many traditional things, and we must win back from it the things we have lost. I do not regard the internet as a neutral medium for information dissemination, but rather hope to see it as a brand-new cultural environment, in which we will see the formation of a public platform, something akin to the ancient Greek agora, the modern café, or the “public sphere” Arendt spoke of.
Of course, my persistence is hard to win broad support. The traffic to keshizhe.net only experienced a brief spike when the conference handbook was released; as soon as the forum ended, the site immediately returned to silence. One can foresee that it will be very difficult for it to become lively…… But since I have already infused my ideas into the organizing work, that is satisfying enough. This job was not a burdensome chore forced upon me, though I really do not want to organize another conference……
This forum received praise from many teachers and students, but the most crucial thing was nothing more than the luxurious venue at the Yingjie Center. As for the quality of the papers, it remained rather worrying. Selecting report papers is a very difficult task: although the total number of submissions is large, there are in fact very few that can really be brought out into the light. Moreover, when making selections one also has to balance the enthusiasm of the various universities. Renmin University had the lowest level of participation among the major doctoral-program institutions this time: only one teacher came, very few students came, and there were even fewer submissions. Their main people had their own reasons for being unable to attend. During the review stage, the Renmin students also did nothing to help; they only “reviewed” their own submissions, and moreover hoped that all of their pitifully few submissions would be selected, while also raising all kinds of objections. Since you knew full well that your main force was absent, and that among the other schools with such high participation, even those that helped me so much could at most get two articles selected, on what grounds did you hope that all three of yours would make it? Still, the annoyance caused by the Renmin students indirectly led me to draft a new conference plan, namely the final plan of 10 major reports + 12 minor reports, which would take care of all doctoral programs and most master’s programs. My initial explanation for this design was:
In view of the forum’s purpose of prioritizing exchange while putting scholarship in a secondary position, and in order to allow students to gather together as much as possible while increasing the forum’s richness and the breadth of participation, we have set up two formats: major reports and minor reports. A major report takes half an hour per paper, consisting of 15 minutes of student presentation, 5 minutes of student commentary, 5 minutes of teacher commentary, and 5 minutes of open discussion; a minor report consists of four papers in half an hour, with four students each giving a 5-minute presentation, followed by 10 minutes of open discussion. In selecting papers, both scholarship and the diversity of institutions were taken into account, so that most co-organizing units would have the opportunity to present and exchange.
However, Teacher Wu felt that “the forum’s purpose of prioritizing exchange while putting scholarship in a secondary position” was not quite appropriate, so it was removed in later versions. Still, I want to say that whatever the wording, this “purpose” is, in my view, entirely apt. Our forum was indeed centered on exchange, rather than on academic discussion or so-called “academic exchange.” As mentioned earlier, I hope that genuine academic exchange will unfold on the online platform, while this conference itself is only the occasion for exchange. If one speaks in terms of advancing specialized research, this conference in itself contained very little academic content or significance; only in the long run might the platform and model of exchange established by this forum promote academic development. Yet at present, this exchange has not yet become an intrinsic part of scholarship. It is like how letters originally served only as general contact and social intercourse, and only later, in the era of published letter collections, did letters become a model of “academic exchange.” Journals at the beginning likewise had only publicity value: they merely disseminated news of the academic world and themselves had only a popularizing significance, not the meaning of direct academic accumulation, and only later did journals become an indispensable part of “academic exchange.” And now, what I truly hope to promote is precisely such a networked form of exchange. This form, at present, has not yet been regarded as bona fide “academic exchange.” I hope to actively bring scholarship into the already fashionable networked exchange, to let scholarship adapt to the internet and let the internet change scholarship. That is why I also do not say “scholarship first, exchange second,” because exchange here is not merely an auxiliary tool, but my goal. Although the ultimate goal is to create a new academic environment, before this new scholarship has yet taken shape, what we call “scholarship” in its existing forms is, paradoxically, only an intermediary tool. We are not using exchange to talk about scholarship; rather, we are using scholarship to build exchange. Scholarship is the background or the occasion, while exchange is the purpose and the harvest. This is the open strategy hidden beneath my slogan, “exchange as the main thing, scholarship as secondary.”
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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