The pursuit of excellence: a commentary

This paper shares a profound conclusion with us, namely that we’re fucked. We are drowning in trivia, smothered by jargon, we write for no reason other than to boost our CVs, we avoid important issues, we only read papers when we need a citation for our own work, and even then we mostly just read the abstract and conclusion. This, you understand, is a best case scenario. Plenty of times we just cut and paste references without even looking at the source material. I strongly suspect that many people who cite Foucault haven’t gotten beyond the entry for his name in Wikipedia. But does this bleak analysis hold up?