Institute for Wow

Hot on the heels of its new Division of Linear Algebra, Empire State’s President announced a new Institute for Wow. Unlike other centers and institutes on campus that were dedicated to basic research or innovation, this one would focus only on research that would grab attention. “Universities,” she said, “ have tried for centuries to inform and educate. We’ve learnt in the last decade from all the data collected that this just annoys the students, frustrates the professors and bores donors. Instead,” she continued, “we are going to entertain.” She went on to say that the institute would jettison traditional measures of impact and significance and focus on media mentions, `likes’ and `followers’. The president emphasized that this was in keeping with Empire State’s mission to be not just the best University in the world, but the best University for the world. “On the increasingly long road from birth to death we want to make sure that people are not bored,” she said.

The Institute for Wow will be directed by celebrity academic Isaac Bickerstaff one of the new breed of `click-bait’ style scholar that Empire hopes to attract. Bickerstaff first shot to fame with his `named cheese’ experiment. He took a large wheel of cheddar cheese and sliced it in two. One half he labeled `cheddar cheese’ and the other half he named `Partridge Farms cheddar cheese’. He then asked subjects to report their willingness to pay for each kind of cheese and discovered that on average they were willing to pay more for the `named’ cheddar. Grey hairs dismissed the work as not accounting for fixed cheddar cheese effects which so incensed Bickerstaff, that he went on to test his hypothesis on Red Leicester, Camembert, Wensleydale, Limburger and Stinking Bishop.

Bickerstaff subsequently went on to test the hypothesis on humans and discovered that papers written by `named’ professors were ranked more highly than the same paper written by a professor with no such honorific. On the strength of this Bickerstaff persuaded the dean of Empire State’s business school to raise money to endow a chair for every faculty member in the School. Within two years the publication output of the school had doubled and it had risen ten places in the rankings. The strategy was not without controversy. The University’s  academic senate thought this cheapened the idea of chaired professor. In a compromise, it was decided to call the new positions ottoman rather than chaired professorships.

Professor Bernard Drapier, well known faculty gadfly and guardian of traditions has railed against the Institute for Wow. He says it is yet another example of the University’s subjugation to the military-entertainment complex: “We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-entertainment complex. ”