Many years ago, just past my mid career, someone asked me, “When do you think was your best time in academia?” I replied in less than a second, “I think, my best is yet to come”. We talked further on this. The belief behind her question was that in any creative person’s life there is a relatively short period of very high creativity or valuable output. It might be just a stroke of luck or perhaps that much creativity cannot be sustained lifelong. There are many examples of this in the history of science as well as arts, she said.
I do not know whether this is generally true or not, but if I ask the same question to myself, my answer would still be the same even after retirement. My best is yet to come. What I mean “best” here is in terms of understanding, creativity, disruptive thinking, innovativeness, curiosity and productivity in science. I can actually feel it growing rapidly after retirement, despite many limitations such as no funding, few students around to work with, some inevitable loneliness in work and so on. Perhaps even more serious limitation, in the view of those who believe in it, would be that I won’t be able to publish anymore in journals having unreasonable author charges as I have no money to pay.
What is getting better and why? First of all, any academic rituals such as PhD no more interfere in my research. The invisible peer pressure which restricts your direction of thinking is no more felt. No career worries exist for me or for any one working with me. After being free of academia, my output actually increased instead of decreasing. Not only in terms of the number of papers but also the diversity of problems addressed, the depth of work (if not the volume), the challenges posed to prevalent beliefs, the cleanliness of arguments and so on. Out of my lifetime work, if I rank the quality of my own papers, many of the topmost came during the last five years after having quit academia. So at least in my experience, academia created more hurdles in my path than helping out. The only true help of academia was of course the salary received. It was so much in excess of my needs that it let me save and invest in such a way that now I can continue to work without any salary. At times even support a needy student from my pocket.
My perspective of science is encompassing new dimensions that we never learnt as students and ignored as researchers. Science is not only about questions, hypotheses, experiments, data, analyses, inferences and all. It is fundamentally a highly complex and continually evolving behavioral and social process that cannot be separated from the core principles of science. In fact visualizing the principles of science independent of the behavioral and social dynamics is in itself incomplete and flawed. Even in behavioral sciences training this is seldom discussed. Academia is the biggest challenge to behavioral science. This thought is not entirely new. Behavioral scientists have looked at and continue to study the knowledge process. But the angles covered so far are too few and narrow. Much of the complexity remains unexplored. I think I can visualize some of these unexplored angles better now and will keep on studying those in depth.
There are so many missing elements in the methods of science as well. People continue to work with several flaws in experimental designs and the flaws are never pointed out. The logic behind establishing a cause effect relationship is still too primitive and has many unexplored principles. At times the principles have been stated somewhere sometime but most experimenters are unaware of them. As I realize more and more of this, my understanding of science gets deeper and I wonder why nobody taught us these things in science curricula or during the research training?
I am also realizing how history, not only of science but that of economics and politics as well affects the research approach and methodologies. Science historians have not used the present enough to study history. History of the present is a big and unexplored field that reveals so much of the subtle social behavioral processes in research. Again owing to historical and ideological reasons meta-science or the science of science has locked itself in a narrow vision that it is missing a lot. I think I can see at least some of the missing stuff clearly.
I never saw the field of science with as much clarity as I have now and it is only increasing day by day, going much beyond what we were made to believe, revealing the naked realties. This should result into visualizing better design for academia. I know that nobody will listen to me, and I also know who will resist any change in academia and why. But human behavior compatible sound systems of knowledge generation and education need to be designed and only someone thinking about behavior needs to take the initiative. Everyone knows that the growing research misconduct, data fabrication, paper mills, biased peer reviews, extorting system of science publication, unscientific selection and evaluation systems all arise from bad design of academic structure. You cannot blame someone, punish someone and expect that it will stop. The academic systems need a complete revamp. But how the structure should ideally (not ideologically) be, no one is even talking about. This is the question which has become a priority investigation for me.
I do not know whether anything I study and write will be of any use to the world, but I am sure my science vision will get deeper, clearer and more useful at least to me day by day. In this sense my best is indeed yet to come!!
My science, My way 