Intrinsic motivation, said Trevor.

Naïve idealism tinged with narcissism, said Barry.

Curiosity, said Peter.

The pleasure of being paid for a job you love doing, said Jian, the pleasure of contributing to your institutional prestige.

Promotion, said Hammadi.

The last one is interesting. I wonder if the points the others made – the one-liners presented above are brutal summarisations of pithy but well-reasoned arguments, please note – are not prettier versions of the simpler truth Hammadi captured.

Honestly, do we undertake research for others? Or do we do it for ourselves?

I am pretty certain I began mine for my own wicked self. What got me studying war journalism was my sense of inadequacy as a correspondent – essentially, it was a move to stand out amongst a fiercely competitive crowd of peers as a better-educated, more productive proposition who just might know what he is writing about. I continue with it primarily because I am convinced that if I marry my professional and academic sides, I would get the best of both worlds, enabling me not only to stand out in the said crowd, but do so with a smug ha-I-got-something-you-don’t-have smile on my face.

I guess this is primary narcissism, part of a quest for self-preservation, which Barry acknowledged in his presentation. I have a feeling, however, that there is more than a “grain” of self-love involved in the exercise. Most of us do what we do with far less altruistic motives than we care to acknowledge. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves a different set of questions:

How many of us would continue with research if there was no research remission?

How many, if it wasn’t linked to career preservation?

I am sure there are worthy souls out there, and more worthy reasons for why we do research, but I get the feeling that for many of us it is narcissism tinged with idealism rather than idealism tinged with narcissism as Barry suggested.

Aw, ignore me. It just might be that I suffer from NPD and think too much of my own argument.

Also read: Re-search? Pardon my French

Image: courtesy http://copyservices.tamu.edu/clipart/clip21/fsl1026.gif

That is only slightly better than asking, “Haven’t you finished yet?”

THIS is about a 24-year-old girl who wanted to do a master’s in England with all her heart.

Late in the summer of 2005 she boarded a bus from a town on the edge of Russia, clutching a first-class undergraduate degree, £110 in borrowings, and a handful of English words she had picked up at school. Three days later she arrived in Bournemouth.

Over the next year she got herself a waitressing job and saved pennies. She learnt English.

Last October she visited the Bournemouth University main campus for an open day. Staff there enthusiastically tried to sell her postgraduate enrolments, pointing out the wonderful opportunities BU offered.

She knew which MA she wanted, she told them. But she wouldn’t have the whole course fee — as she was foreign, it was double what a European Union student paid, £8,000 — by February. Could she pay half the fees then and the rest six months later?

Oh yes, she was told. BU was always glad to help.

This meant she had to raise nearly £3,000 in the next four months somehow, but she went home happy. She was going to the university finally.

She renegotiated a deal for her matchbox accommodation. Got herself a tougher but better-paying job. Budgeted brutally. Begged extra shifts and killed herself working in the holidays. Borrowed. She also managed to pass the IELTS.

In December she got an unconditional offer from the university. By mid-January she had the money. She got together her certificates and application and went to enroll — and was told she would need to pay the rest of her fees not six months into the course, but a month later.

Sorry, they said. And now that you mention you don’t have enough money, we are not sure we can offer you this seat. We need to think about it.

She spent four days agonising as they thought. Then she was called for a second interview.

She said she had been assured on two separate occasions — explicitly — that she could pay her second half of the fees after summer. She pointed out the first installment was a fortune to her — enough to buy a small house back home — and she could not afford to lose it, so she would definitely, definitely not run away.

I earn £620 a month, she said, and I live on £300, so I save £320. That and the extra money I earn during the summer holidays will add up. Please don’t withdraw the offer.

Can’t wait six months, they said. But maybe we can treat you as a special case. You pay the first £4,000 now, then make monthly payments towards the other half. You say you save £320? Excellent, if you sign an undertaking to pay that every month till October, and £1,400 in August — you said you would earn more in the holidays, didn’t you, and you might be able to borrow some money? — then we can let you enroll. We don’t normally do this for anyone, mind.

She signed on the dotted line.

That week she put in an application for an international student scholarship. By the time her course started, she got a response: she had been awarded £1,000 in fee-waiver.

That was a big relief. And now that her ‘debt’ was reduced, perhaps they would adjust her monthly payments proportionately? She wrote in with a request: £50 less — £270 per month instead of £320 — would make all the difference to her, she said, and the university would still get its money by October as agreed.

Sorry, they said. Now that your situation has improved, we would like you to finish paying early. The original installment had stretched us well beyond what’s acceptable, so we will stick to it.

Two months have passed, with two touch-and-go payments. In the meantime, her first piece of course work — in a language alien to her just two years ago — was graded a first class and presented to her peers as a model essay. She’s pleased, she said, but very tense when it rains and her shifts are cancelled (she works at a restaurant on the beach) and customers leave miserly tips. What if she doesn’t make enough to cover payment? They were about to send her away once because she didn’t have the full amount.

It’s more worrying now than ever before, she said. When I came here, I didn’t have anything to lose. Now I do.

Sometimes in this era of commercialised education, in this era when a university degree is a product sold over the counter to those willing to pay, we forget how difficult it can be for someone like this girl.

We forget there’s something shylockian about squeezing the last drop of blood out of someone.

Sad.

TWAT.

You will understand why I find this of particular interest when I say it is part of the academic lingo — at least over here in sunny Bournemouth.

TWAT stands for Three Week Assessment Turnaround (elsewhere it also stands for The War Against Terror, but that’s not surprising if you consider who’s behind it). Goodness knows what the powers-be were thinking when they came up with this particular construction and not, say, Assessment Turnaround in Three Weeks, or Three Week Turnaround for Assessments.

Considering many lecturers welcomed the idea very, um, warmly, I look forward to the next staff meeting when the issue is bound to come up. Imagine solemnly sitting among venerable colleagues discussing Important issues, and someone says with a straight face: “Look, this TWAT is not working.”

Oh Lordy.

Suddenly the corridors are not empty, the forecourt is not deserted, the library is populated, the cafeterias are open, and my colleagues are back from Spain (and China). There’s talk, activity, excitement. Everywhere.

The main reason for my partiality, though, is the freshers. They simply wash across the campus, their faces open and eager (alas, it’s only a matter of weeks before that innocence sets into the grim expression of the hardened student). I love watching them, in a rather nostalgic way. The period allows me to mingle with students incognito — a task made easy by my youthful looks and innocent face, I would like to believe — with the explicit purpose of eavesdropping. On one occasion I sat down with them and waited for the lecturer — myself. It was great fun, quite insightful. I strongly recommend it to all staff.
CHRISTCHURCH House. First floor.

1st girl: “…and I really don’t know why they said that.”

2nd girl: “They want to keep you quiet, that’s why.”

3rd girl: “But you haven’t even gone to a lecture!”

2nd girl: “I tell you, they want to keep her quiet.”

1st girl: “But–”

2nd girl: “Honey, this is Bournemouth University!”

Much intrigued. Anyone know what that was all about?
IN Waterstone’s, on campus. Girl waving copy of Public Relations Theory: “This one, y’think? She said this one’s good!”

2nd girl: “So take it.”

3rd girl: “They can say what they like, but they ain’t getting me to buy books.”

2nd girl: “Me neither.”
WATERSTONE’S again.

Girl 1: “…and the first thing I will do after I clear my overdraft is get myself a jumper. Not books. A jumper.”

GYM. Noon.

Baggy-Trousered, Tousle-Haired Fresher 1, heading straight for the chest-press machine: “This is the best one. I luvv it!”

B-T T-H F 2: “Yeah?”

B-T T-H F 1: “Yeah! This works your chest. You gotta get some chest, mate — chicks go for chest.”

SEMINAR room. Break-time.

Girl: “…like, one of the guys can’t cook? At all? And he actually came to ask me how to boil an egg? All he can do is pasta and ketchup and he has had it every single day!?”
EAVESDROPPED by my good friend Lakshmi. Third floor, Weymouth House.

Boy: “…nobody has talked to me like that before! She talked to me like an adult! It’s great, I love her!”

Rachel Dungar, take a bow.

CHRISTCHURCH House again. First floor.

Girl 1: “I love my housemates! They are so lovely, we get along so well!”

Girl 2: “One of my housemates is quitting because she says our place isn’t clean.”

Girl 1: “Then she should come to our place. It is a mess! And my housemates are lovely. The guys do the washing up! One day we sat around talking till 7 am and the guys did the washing up!”
GYM. Ground-floor.

Big guy to small guy, peering in at open door: “Let’s see what they’ve got here… Uh-huh, it is the aerobics room!”

Small guy: “Uh, the girlie room. Naff.”

My initial view was that it was because the process somewhere involved searching anew. Some clever person had, before us, come up with something clever – and we, in our quest for cleverness, were investigating it afresh in the hope of:

• proving the said clever person wrong
• scrounging for something the said clever person had overlooked so we could present it as our own
• adapting the said clever person’s work to suit new demands

That all sounded very nice and strong and I was quite pleased with the reasoning for some time. Especially since dictionaries broke the word down as re + search, the former a prefix found in loanwords from Latin meaning ‘again’ and the latter meaning, well, ’search’.

Trouble was, did this not imply research was re search? Did it not suggest everything we do today is treading the trodden path, ergo, unoriginal?

Surely, there’s enough original work?

Surely, there are searches going on?

While Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and the ever-dependable Wikipedia defined research as what we commonly take it to mean (“a course of critical or scientific inquiry”, “careful or diligent search”, “active, diligent, and systematic process of inquiry aimed at discovering, interpreting, and revising facts”, in that order), they were content to leave where the re bit fit in unexplained. So I turned to the net, and here are three academic definitions, shamelessly lifted from Introduction to Social Work Research, a presentation by Dr Osei Dwarka of the University of Illinois:

• …careful and systematic study in some field of knowledge, undertaken to establish facts or principles (Grinnell, 1997)
• …a systematic way of asking questions (Drew, 1980)
• …the scientific examination (reexamination) of emphirical data collected by someone first hand, concerning the social and psychological forces operating in a situation (Monette et al, 1994).

Um, interesting. But not particularly illiminating in this instance – for, none of the definitions takes us any closer to the elusive re. This is when I came across Klaus Krippendorff’s definition, in Content analysis: an introduction to its methodology (2004, p81): …a repeated search within data for apparent patterns.

Certainly more insightful, it offers an explanation for the prefix. But it also makes me ask why. Why is it a repeated search? Why is it not just a search?

A quick look at etymology (courtesy Oxford Online, Merriam-Webster), and I get the impression – and mind, this is only the impression of someone unschooled in matters such – that it was first used by the French to probably mean what it actually means: search afresh. The Middle French word recherché, which, Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia assure me fathered our modern-day research is a compound of our old pal re and cherché (French for ‘search’, I am told). And the French, in light of the existence of an already cute word for search would not have started calling it recherché just for the heck of it. So in all likelihood, it had popped out, complete with the prefix, to mean what it means literally.

Once in vogue – I am hypothesizing here, of course – it crossed the English channel without much ado. Perhaps it was initially used in English too to mean what it means (spelt differently though, by the look of it: as first researche and later reserch). Perhaps not. What is certain is that through the 15, 16 and 1700s, the word began to acquire the meaning ’search’ and ’search thoroughly’.

Thus, we had – oh, what would I have done without Oxford Online? – quotes such as I carefully avoided the habitation … lest it should … furnish a clue to the researches of my pursuers and Our most profound researches are frequently nothing better than guessing at the causes of the phenomena. And by the time Jane Eyre came along with Currer Bell and Charlotte Bronte on her arm in 1847, the re had become just an appendage: She had left Thornfield Hall in the night; every research after her course had been vain.

We seem to have forgotten about that poor prefix today; most often, the word is used to mean a search for something specific.

Question now is, are people like moi – pardon my French – re-searchers?

Or are we plain searchers?