Against Scientific Prizes
Academics like prizes. There are prizes for everything everywhere. At the highest level, there are of course the famous Fields Medal and the various Nobel prizes in several academic disciplines. In economics, we may also think of the John Bates Clark medal (for the “best” economist below 40). Philosophers also have theirs, especially the Berggruen Prize, sometimes presented as the “Nobel prize for philosophy”. At a more modest level, academic associations are also fond of prizes for the “best doctoral dissertation”, “outstanding young scholars”, the “best journal articles published in journal X”, the “best scholars”, and so on. Universities also are sometimes giving prizes, especially to young colleagues who demonstrate promising research activities.
There are obvious reasons why these prizes exist. They have symbolic value, they help to establish a discipline or a field in the academic landscape, and they help (young) scholars gain visibility and a boost for their careers. Nonetheless, I’m against scientific prizes. Here are a small bunch of reasons why:
1. Prizes conflates two meanings of the word “competition”. Academics are obviously in constant competition (“concurrence” in French): competition for jobs, competition for money, and maybe more fundamentally competition for attention. There is no doubt that prizes may help scholars to obtain all of these. But they do so by subverting what the scientific endeavor really is. Science is not a competition (“competition” in French), i.e., a tournament where an algorithm determines who the winner is. Science is about cooperation, diversity, pluralism, risk-taking, and failure. Viewing science as a competition undermines all of this.
2. Prizes are largely arbitrary and mostly reward one’s position in a network. There is no doubt that there is good, less good, and bad academic scholarship. Prizes are relatively good at discriminating against the latter. But after having eliminated the bad and even the less good, the pool remains fairly large and most of the time fairly diverse. The pieces of work or the careers that are compared are often all valuable and also hardly commensurable. The size and the weight of the network are ultimately what plays the role of the empire. This gives a significant advantage to scholars who belong to highly visible institutions and who have the right connections.
3. Prizes are a waste of resources. For prizes to be given, there must be some academics who do the (sometimes burdensome) job of comparative evaluation. There are two possibilities. They can do it as dilettantes; this strengthens point 2 by making prizes even more arbitrary. Or they can do it seriously. In a context where most academics already suffocate because of the many tasks, especially evaluative ones, that they have to carry on their shoulders, this is a big waste of resources. Time and energy could be allocated far more efficiently.
4. The signaling value of prizes is overestimated. It might be argued that prizes have a signaling value, especially for young scholars. But given points 2 and 3, this value is probably overestimated. When hiring someone, the value of a prize is at best low and it cannot be a substitute for looking seriously at the candidate’s work.
5. The symbolic value of prizes reflects a misplaced ceremonialism. The long-forgotten institutional economist Clarence Ayres used to oppose two kinds of institutions. Instrumental institutions serve a useful purpose in the perspective of improving the human condition. Ceremonial institutions have only for the purpose to honor outdated social norms that are unrelated to social value and human flourishing. Scientific prizes are essentially part of the latter. They have value as part of a form of life that give prominence to self-congratulation and social identity construction.
Do these reasons constitute a definitive case against scientific prizes? Maybe not. After all, the competition for jobs, attention, and money in academia suffers from the same defects of arbitrariness and waste. But you don’t remedy a build-in defect in a system by adding another one. It could also be noticed that the author of these lines is a hypocrite who in the recent past was the recipient of a monetary reward for his scholarship (not a prize though) and who has never received any prize of a sort (and so is presumably envious). Well, I may be slightly hypocritical, but against the current (in academia), I have no issue claiming that the monetary motivation is not more, and probably less, ethically condemnable that the pure search for ceremonial prestige!