Hunger Games

So, it appears that the app for the AIA/SCS annual meeting – the terrifyingly enormous gathering of US classicists, ancient historians and archaeologists – has a facility for rating papers from 1* to 5*. In a sensible world, I could sum this up in three words, and leave it at that: Meow Meow Beanz.

Since this is manifestly not a sensible world, not only but including the fact that certain works of cultural genius are not as widely known as they should be, a little more explanation may be required. In an episode of the sitcom Community, a couple of app designers test their new rating app, Meow Meow Beanz, which allows everyone to rate everyone else.

Within roughly an hour, Greendale Community College has become a fiercely competitive, viciously hierarchical dystopia, in which Fives enjoy a life of decadent luxury and mysterious rituals while Ones and Twos are humiliated and exploited. We see the way that the most popular can manipulate and patronise – and the range of tricks they use to maintain their position, together with the near impossibility of anyone actually being able to rise through the ranks of society to challenge them. The strong do what they want, the weak endure what they must…

It perfectly illustrates the problem with this sort of rating system – even if it doesn’t turn out that the SIA/SCS app gives greater weight to the ratings of senior and prestigious academics. Of course in theory everyone will just rate papers on quality, but that immediately raises questions about how quality is perceived within academic structures, including the possibility of bias towards or against certain topics, approaches, identities, institutions etc. And of course people will tend to favour their friends (hence those with the best networks do well), and try to undermine their rivals, and suck up to some superiors and tear down others. And the more that ratings become a focus, the more effort will be put into gaming them.

So, I firmly expect that by the end of the first afternoon the SCS annual meeting will have become a deeply segregated and hierarchical society, with the privileged few staging cutthroat competition between the desperate masses for their own amusement, holding out the promise of a few more Meow Meow Beanz for the last one standing. The actual papers are merely a means to an end, the basis for judgement, as the basis for sorting and the distribution of privilege across the hierarchy.

Insert punchline here.

I feel a certain hesitation in doing this, as I’ve never actually been to the SCS – but one of the reasons I’ve never been is a sense that the punchline could all too easily be: would anyone notice the difference? “You don’t go for the papers”, several people have remarked to me. For the established scholar, they’re an excuse to use travel/research funds to meet up with old friends, extend scholarly networks etc.; for the postgraduate students and early career people, they’re a tool in the ever more desperate struggle to win a place in the higher ranks, and a kind of alibi – a means of pretending that it really is all about scholarly merit and ability and ideas rather than connections and patronage.

Let the hunger games begin!