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Saturday, April 24, 2004 |
Last night, my wife Ana was browsing John McWorther's Power of Babel, which I had bought to read at some point. She was a bit unhappy about his discussion of Portuguese, and particular about the following claim [...] is derived from menino, the world for "child" now used in Brazil, having been replaced by criança in Portugal itself.She argued that menino/a/os/as is still very common in Portugal, in fact more common than criança/as. I wasn't sure. After some arguing, she called upon Google. A little bit of advanced search was needed for our researches. First Portugal:
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Tomorrow, April 25th, is the 30th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew 48 years of fascist dictatorship in Portugal under Salazar and his minions. I was in college studying mathematics then, about to graduate and most likely to be drafted into the army fighting losing wars against the insurgencies in the then Portuguese colonies of Angola, Moçambique, and Guiné-Bissau. The captains who led the coup had experienced first-hand the horror, misery, and waste of those wars. They had the extraordinary courage of taking on a regime that seemed at the time in total control of everyone's thoughts and actions. They had the extraordinary wisdom of stepping aside for a civilian parliamentary democracy. I feel still the thrill and hope of those days, and how much I and everyone I grew up with owe to the captains of April.
Soon after April 74, quite a few Portuguese scientists and scholars returned who had fled political persecution, the draft, or simply lack of support for the pursuits of the mind. There was a hope that Portugal would in time become an equal participant with other European countries in science, technology, and culture. When I left in 1977 for graduate school in Edinburgh, I did not imagine that I would not return. However, the many hassles with Portuguese officialdom I had to fight then showed that the authoritarian bureaucratic fungus still thrived behind the new democratic facade. By the time I completed my PhD in 1982, my choices were to return to an uncertain future while waiting for the bureaucracy to open up a faculty position in Portugal, or to choose among several immediately available research positions in the UK and the US.
A few days ago, the Portuguese minister of Science announced a program to attract outstanding Portuguese researchers back to Portugal, offering some still unspecified amount of research support over two years, renewable. In inimitable Portuguese bureaucratic style, she provided quantitative criteria for excellence: either 100 articles published in journals indexed by ISI, or 50 articles and 10 supervised PhDs. As justification, she claims this is "the American model of excellence" ("o modelo Americano de excelência"). Curiously, having sat in NSF panels, academic review and promotion committees for Penn and other major schools, and having written and read many letters of external review for appointments and promotions at all levels for the top research universities in the US and Canada, I had never heard of that criterion. Everyone involved in those evaluations appreciates that publication rates, venues, and publication culture vary among disciplines and within each discipline over time. Counting papers is no substitute for a careful evaluation of scholarship and impact. Sure, that is hard and fallible, as is all peer review. But we still have no better method, as we have no better method for governing modern societies than representative democracy with all of its failures and annoyances.
Once again, the Portuguese bureaucracy combines obtuse literalism with provincialism (as Eça de Queiroz so wonderfully satirized over 100 years ago) to justify its failure to foster a real culture of excellence since April 74. The poverty of science, technology, and culture in Portugal is not going to be solved with ridiculous bureaucratic gestures. It needs courage in defining national education and research priorities; gutting the spineless central bureaucracy; steady multi-year funding; decentralized efficient approaches to hiring, promotion, and compensation; understanding that rigorous evaluation and trust in people to do the right thing are not incompatible; and flexibility and speed matching changes in subject matter. None of this is rocket science, but Portugal's inability to get it even half-right goes a long way to explaining why it has fallen further and further behind Spain and Greece, whose emergence from dictatorship had drawn at least some inspiration from what the captains of April started.
I admit, I don't have 100 articles listed in ISI. Better get back to real work, or I will never be able to collect the minister's bureaucratic prize. 4:55:09 PM ![]() |