Reactions to Our Research
The Good Oil
At archsoc.com, we pride ourselves on publishing all comments from the academic critics on our site.
As an act of simple fairness, we always expect that our critics would reciprocate by publishing our original commentary on their site. You might be amazed to hear that not a single critic has been prepared to do that. Funny that.
Contents
- Dr Tom Loveday of the University of New South Wales Faculty of the Built Environment writes
-
Mr Brent Allpress of RMIT University writes
- Are we conflating multidisciplinary schools, to the disadvantage of RMIT?
- No, RMIT, we are not
- Mr Allpress calls for a more accurate methodology. We agree and have a whinge back
- Ok, got it. Mr Allpress provides the correct address. We thank him.
- Dr Ted Landsmark of the Boston Architectural College writes
- Marcus Lafond claims we cost him $US 16,000
UNSW's Dr Tom Loveday writes
UNSW's Dr Tom Loveday writes a cogent critique of our rankings of the English-speaking world's architecture academics. We hope to have a formal response out by June 2008.
RMIT University's Mr Brent Allpress writes
Mr Brent Allpress
Mr Brent Allpress of the RMIT university architecture program in Australia sent us this email in which he raised many important points about our rankings. We discuss them below, point by point.
Are we conflating multidisciplinary schools, to the disadvantage of RMIT?
Mr Allpress wrote:
‘a key point that your survey overlooks however is that you are conflating multi-discipline schools with single discipline architecture schools which are increasingly a rarity. a great many architecture departments and schools in australia have been subsumed within larger multi-discipline structures.
‘the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT is not a “School of Architecture.”
‘the equivalent disciplinary unit to a School of Architecture at RMIT is the RMIT Architecture Program.
Fine. Whatever. Sounds like a classic academic quibble to us. We used the 'school' terminology for simplicity and lucidity. We are not entirely sure that our readers are that interested in academic niceties, so we did not burden them with hair-splitting.
He continues:
‘if you were to break down your survey to focus on architecture discipline units and not multi-discipline units your comparisons would have far greater relevance. as it stands your survey title: "rating australia's architecture schools" is a misnomer.
‘it would be more accurate and useful to retitle the survey: "rating australia's architecture schools and programs," and undertake a more selective audit accordingly. ’
No, RMIT, we are not
We agree with his criticism, and indeed this has been an essential part of our methodology from the beginning. Mr Allpress must have missed a few key statements in our 2005 report. We hope it answers his questions:
‘We took each site at face value. We used the smallest administrative unit possible [italics ours], preferably a department of architecture. Several sites could not be bothered to distinguish those teaching architecture from those teaching, say, toilet hydrodynamics. In such cases we used all those listed.’
That is, we did not measure the very multidisciplinary units that Mr Allpress takes us to task for including. We did our best to narrow our measured individuals to those teaching architecture.
We'd also like to point out that since our indicators use very specific data from architecture libraries, including a multitude of non-architecturally focussed staff {faculty} from multidisciplinary units would decrease the unit's research intensity , not increase it.
A more accurate methodology: we whinge back
Mr Allpress makes a clarion call:
‘your criteria remain interesting, but your survey would greatly benefit from a more accurate, selective and careful methodology that identifies [sic] the primary architecture discipline unit and doesn't [sic] compare apples with fruit salads.
We whinge back
Alas, we do not have the luxury of a fat research grant, tenure at a university and a stack of free time. We actually having to work for a living. We suggest to the RMIT University school—sorry, program—of architecture that instead of whingeing and whining about our study, that it complete a comparable one of its own: using over 3,000 academics from more than 150 universities, as we did. To have our whinge and whine back, we made this table for your delectation:
| Mr Allpress… | Dr Garry… |
| …works for a university, an institution funded specifically to conduct research. | …works in the private sector for people who have no intention of paying for his research. |
| …is paid by the Australian taxpayer and sundry students, in either fat research grants or a generous long-term salary and superannuation {pension} package | …does not receive one cent of taxpayer or student money, from any nation in the world |
| …conducts research on time paid by these taxpayers and students, published in places that demand a fee | …conducts research in his own free time, and published on this site absolutely gratis and for free (even!) |
| …is an employee of the state who is expected to conduct research as part of his job | …is a private individual who can conduct research or just play Sopranos Trivia, as he pleases |
| …has six months a year free of teaching, and only a few hours of face-to-face time each week during term | …works more hours a day than the typical Aussie academic is required to work in a week |
We challenge RMIT university to put its large but ill-informed mouth where its millions of Australian taxpayer dollars are. You don't like our results, do your own study—and on exactly the same budget we had: nothing. Not one paid staff hour, not one single cent of the tax-payer's dollar, not one single second of some poor student's time. And in the same time we took to do ours: four months. We shall publish RMIT University's response to our challenge here, but we suspect they are much too comfy to do any actual work.
Ok, got it
Mr Allpress writes:
‘the home page for the discipline of architecture is not: http://www.rmit.edu.au/tce/ad
‘it is: http://www.rmit.edu.au/tce/ad/arch’
Very true. We thank him for the pointer. We used it to compile our rankings for RMIT (thanks Marytn, Leon, Richard, Sand, Shane, Mauro, Richard, Nigel, Graham, Pia, Doug, Stuart, Paul, Vivoian, Fiona, Diego, Simon and Helene). But that damn ‘/arch’ at the end gets us every time. No doubt the reason that Google had brought up RMIT as a bunch of hillbilly halfwits when we revisited it in our audit. As Mr Allpress said:
‘the critique of the website, which is controlled by the School still largely holds. we are working on it.’
Boston Architectural College's Dr Landsmark Writes
In a bit of a dither about the BAC's ranking on our research intensity index, Dr Ted Landsmark sent this email to the inestimable journal Archvoices. We couldn't agree more with what he says: every damn point, and we have made appropriate edits to our site to reinforce our views where we feel Dr Landsmark made good points. We just wonder why his email seemed rather breathless.
Marcus Lafond writes
According to his email, Mr ‘Marcus Lafond’ decided to attend the school of architecture at Northeastern University entirely on the basis of our research rankings (and thereby lost $16,000). Even we wouldn't do that, and we made the ratings! We were discombulated by Mr Lafond's remarks and returned to our original statements. Did we mislead him? We hoped not. Here are the paragraphs that Mr Lafond took to heart, and transformed into a positive directive:
…The survey does not claim to be a guide to those keen to become working architects. Our rankings won't help someone out of high school looking to maximize their future prospects and income.
… We have attempted to measure the architecture schools and their academics {professors} in terms of their research output. We make no statement of their quality of teaching. Our only claim that is that postgrads looking to complete higher studies, or undergrads looking for an intellectual challenge, should cast a glance over our ratings.
How anyone could transform those remarks into a God-given recommendation eludes us.
All that aside, Mr Lafond makes some very serious complaints about Northeastern University. We have no idea if they are valid, but at the very least Northeastern should be investigating.
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